{"id":2087,"date":"2026-08-08T22:37:35","date_gmt":"2026-08-08T22:37:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/calexis.com\/?p=2087"},"modified":"2026-08-22T16:30:46","modified_gmt":"2026-08-22T16:30:46","slug":"how-i-met-spanish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calexis.com\/index.php\/2026\/08\/08\/how-i-met-spanish\/","title":{"rendered":"How I Met Your Spanish"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One of my earliest assignments in the 1970s was working in advertising in New York was on a company called Grocery Store Products Company. It was a company with a totally generic name that had just been purchased by Clorox.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The company was like many that started in the first half of the 20th century. It sold a range of seemingly disparate products: BinB canned mushrooms, Kitchen Bouquet (a product that seasoned and darkened gravy or soup), Cream of Rice hot breakfast cereal, some other minor products, and a new product to introduce called Prime Choice Steak Sauce. Clorox added a recently acquired dry salad dressing mix called Hidden Valley Ranch to the product line-up. Resources were limited and new management from Clorox was coming on board, most ex-Procter & Gamble marketing managers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of the work for the client was on the new steak sauce and BinB Mushrooms (BinB stood for Broiled in Butter). I was interested in Brand Development Indices which showed geographically where products sold best. While Cream of Rice was thought to be most appropriate for old people because it was easy to digest, I noticed that its highest sales tended to be in areas with a high incidence of Spanish speakers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I asked a co-worker, Carlos Acevedo who was Puerto Rican, what this could be. He told me that the product was well known as Crema de Arroz in Spanish and popular as a hot breakfast cereal with Puerto Ricans because oats and by association, oatmeal, was considered to be for horses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Y&R had just started a Spanish advertising group at the New York office so I went and talked to them. Based on this, they developed a small print ad for Hispanic press featuring Crema de Arroz. There was already a panel on the box that gave instructions in Spanish. I had no understanding of what the ad or the side panel said. Welcome to Market Segmentation. You are not often in the segment you want to market to.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Less than a year later, I was assigned to work on Tang Instant Breakfast drink. Tang was, by comparison, a huge brand with an eight-figure ad budget. The core advertising was directed at Mothers and featured women with PhDs in Life Sciences who used their knowledge of nutrition to help get their families the Vitamin C they needed. We also maintained our NASA relationship with secondary activities like sending posters of every space mission to schools across the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was the Junior Account Executive handling everything but the core advertising. I managed child directed commercials, flavour extensions, a major new packaging idea, and the peripheral programs of all sorts (we initiated sponsorship of bicycle races, for example).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had an assistant who was, like almost everyone in the office, looking to make his mark. I suggested he do some analysis in Market Segmentation. So we worked together to analyze Tang sales. We found two market segments that were of interest: African Americans who were strongly developed users of Grape Tang and Hispanics who were over developed in preference for Orange Tang.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This drove us to initiate and develop some print support for Grape Tang using Black focused print. There was less budget for Grape given its small percentage of total Tang sales. Some side research confirmed that for some reason, Grape was a very popular flavour in the African American market for many other products as well.<\/p>\n\n\n

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For the growing and sizeable Spanish market, we developed television executions following the core advertising direction. We found a Spanish speaking school teacher who we cast to star in a commercial patterned as a pool out of the regular Expert Mom campaign. She had social influence and leadership in her role.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There were few Spanish broadcast channels, mostly just regional ones; but the commercial went on the air.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Again, I got Spanish back translations of the copy, but I didn\u2019t really understand it. That was sad and a poor reflection on me. Growing up in Canada, I only had the choice of French or Latin in high school. We had few Spanish speakers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A year or so after Tang, I was working at introducing Mexican food<\/a> to much of the US in the form of taco kits, salsas and chiles. These foods were rapidly embraced by the general population.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And why not? The US has the second largest population of Spanish speakers in the world, after only Mexico. More Spanish speakers than Colombia, more than Spain, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru. The US has twice as many Spanish speakers as Venezuela where I would spend three and a half years beginning a few years after my Mexican food experiences. Once there I did learn Spanish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The US Spanish speaking population has been the result of territorial expansion by the US into Spanish speaking regions, as well as immigration. The US mentality is to blame immigration; but in many regions of the US south, southwest and California, the US English speakers are the immigrants; the Spanish speakers were already there. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The huge US Spanish market should be obvious when looking at market segmentation. Back then, it was invisible and wasn’t always seen as an opportunity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you liked this, read more at Calexis.com<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of my earliest assignments in the 1970s was working in advertising in New York was on a company called Grocery Store Products Company. It was a company with a totally generic name that had just been purchased by Clorox. 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