Concept Screening Among U.S. Hispanics: Overcoming Benchmarking Challenges

For some time now, consumer goods manufacturers have cast their eye on the U.S. Hispanic market because of its high volume potential and long-term growth opportunity. U.S. Hispanics are not only the largest minority group in the U.S. -- and the youngest and fastest-growing segment of the population -- they have also been proven to spend significantly more than average per household on consumer packaged goods and to demonstrate strong brand loyalty.¹

Conducting marketing research among U.S. Hispanics, specifically unacculturated U.S. Hispanics, presents challenges -- with language being one of the easier obstacles to overcome.² More difficult challenges are cultural differences that affect scale responses and, consequently, benchmarking of concept screening results.

Unacculturated U.S. Hispanics tend to show low scale variability compared to fully acculturated Americans -- in other words, these U.S. Hispanics tend to use fewer points on a response scale. Reasons for this may be that Latin cultures (and, theoretically, unacculturated U.S. Hispanic segments) are more likely than other population segments in the U.S. to exhibit power distance and uncertainty avoidance.³

• Power distance is the degree to which people in a country accept a hierarchical or unequal distribution of power in organizations. Latin cultures tend to experience higher levels of power distance than the American culture; in other words, Latin cultures tend to be more authoritarian and thus expect conformity. This leads to a stronger acquiescent response style, meaning that respondents are likely to agree with a question regardless of content.
• Uncertainty avoidance is the degree to which people prefer structured versus unstructured situations. Compared to the mainstream American culture, Latin cultures tend to exhibit higher levels of uncertainty avoidance. They prefer unambiguous situations and are therefore more likely to use the endpoints of the response scale as opposed to the middle. This results in respondents answering surveys using an extreme response style.

The relatively acquiescent and extreme styles of U.S. Hispanics results in more positive, favorable concept ratings, which prohibits comparisons to benchmarks or databases based to the general population.

How can this benchmarking obstacle be overcome so that the results of U.S. Hispanic concept screening become meaningful and actionable? Based on the hypothesis that the scale response tendencies of unacculturated U.S. Hispanics are patterned after those of their cultural origin - and leveraging the unique aspects of Ipsos Marketing's InnoScreen174 global concept screening system - we formulated a solution whereby U.S. Hispanic concept screening results are accurately benchmarked.

First, using actual concept screening results, we confirmed that the scale response tendencies from unacculturated U.S. Hispanics were indeed almost identical to those from the country of origin.

The logical next step would then be to compare U.S. Hispanic concept screening results to norms established in the country of origin. However, comparing results from one country to another presents another obstacle: category penetration may differ by country.

Why does that matter? Because norms are directly related to the penetration of a category. A category with an 80% penetration will always yield higher purchase intent scores than a category with 20% penetration when looking at a general population sample since there is a larger pool of category buyers predisposed to high purchase interest.

We were able to overcome differences in category penetration between the U.S. and non-U.S. countries by leveraging our InnoScreen concept screening system. Unlike other concept screening systems that compare test concept results to a normative database, InnoScreen compares results to market leaders as standards for success. Our method looks within category buyers (and non-category buyers) to understand how the concept is perceived. R&D conducted by Ipsos confirms that when you examine within category buyers, differences between categories disappear.

By having this understanding along with a robust database of market leaders, we are able to leverage InnoScreen to effectively control for the category size effect that arises when comparing U.S. Hispanic concept screening results to country of origin benchmarks. This unique aspect of InnoScreen makes it a powerful tool for overcoming the new product benchmarking challenges inherent to the U.S. Hispanic consumer segment. This same approach can also be leveraged with Ipsos Marketing's Designor® STM forecasting system, which is the basis for the InnoScreen model and also compares results to market leaders as standards for success.

¹ Hispanic Consumers: Capturing CPG Market Potential, IRI Times & Trends, April 2008 and English Versus Spanish Speaking Hispanics: Differences Across the Board, A White Paper from the Ipsos Group, March 2004 ² Unacculturated U.S. Hispanics refer to U.S. residents of Mexican, Caribbean or Central/American origin or descent, who speak Spanish and watch Spanish TV channels 'only,' 'mostly' or 'equally' with English ³ Based upon Geert Hofstede's Model of Five Cultural Dimensions (Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Individualism, Masculinity, Long Term Orientation)