Bilingual brand communities? Strategies for targeting Hispanics on social media

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to explore different strategies used by brands to target the Hispanic market via social media from the lens of the Spanish language in a multicultural country like the USA. Design/methodology/approach This study uses a netnographic approach by drawing information from a study of the Facebook pages of 11 brands belonging to different industries. Findings Companies engage in four levels of cultural identity adaptation using different strategies based on ethnicity: language adaptation, identity elements, identity matching and Latino persona. The study also shows that merely translating Facebook pages do not generate high levels of communitarian interaction. Practical implications This study examines different strategies used by brands in the USA to target the Hispanic audience on social media to provide insights for brand managers to develop online engagement. Originality/value With the increase in cultural diversity in different countries and the rise of social media platforms, brand researchers need to better understand how cultural identity permeates marketing strategies in online spaces. Social media platforms such as Facebook offer flexible environments where strategies beyond product- and brand-related aspects can be used. This study extends the literature by showing the heterogeneity of cultural identity-based strategies used by companies to ensure customer engagement and brand loyalty and the impact of such strategies on users.

Thirty years of product and brand management research: a retrospective review of the Journal of Product and Brand Management using bibliometric analysis

“…One of the most cited articles in this cluster is “The measurement and dimensionality of brand associations” (TC = 471) authored by Low and Lamb (2000). More study is needed, according to the articles, on issues including the influence of fake news on brand equity (Flostrand et al , 2019; Mills and Robson, 2019), the management of brand communities using social media (Huang et al , 2021; Villegas and Marin, 2021), the effectiveness of luxury-branding strategy (Jelinek, 2018; Shin et al , 2021) and the transformation of brands through corporate social responsibility (Pratihari and Uzma, 2018; Muniz et al , 2019).…”

“…Most articles in this cluster have gone into great depth on how corporate brands have (or may) simplify their interactions and activities to provide the best customer experience possible both before and after the purchase (Siepmann et al , 2021; Yang and Mundel, 2021). Furthermore, other articles have highlighted how brand owners have (or may) use a range of various communication methods to nurture client connections, enhance customer happiness and actively retain a customer base (Areni, 2021; Jacobson, 2020; Villegas and Marin, 2021). Subsequently, this cluster emphasizes the need for more research on understudied topics in the current digital era, such as fake news (Vafeiadis et al , 2019), digital marketing (Wang and Chen, 2021), electronic word of mouth (eWOM; Stevens et al , 2021), user-based content (Areni, 2021), internal branding (Saleem and Hawkins, 2021) and brand hate (Osuna Ramírez et al , 2019), among others.…”