Latino liftoff: Colorado companies targeting Hispanics aim to tap a booming consumer market.

• Author: Mast, Carlotta

Colorado's casinos generated double-digit revenue growth in the 1990s. But thanks to increased competition, annual revenue growth has dwindled to less than 5 percent. Hoping to buck this troubling trend, Riviera Black Hawk Casino decided to tap into a rapidly expanding and increasingly affluent consumer base: Colorado Hispanics.

With the help of Heinrich Hispanidad, a Denver-based agency specializing in Hispanic advertising and marketing, Riviera Casino launched in spring 2006 a direct-response advertising campaign aimed at increasing the number of Hispanic consumers enrolled in its Players Club and growing the profitability of its current Hispanic customer base.

"The gaming market is highly competitive," says Kelly Horton, director of marketing for Riviera Black Hawk Casino. "We saw this as an opportunity to get an edge over our competitors."

Within one month of launching the bilingual campaign, which was built around the slogan "Bueno Pa' Gozar" (roughly translated to "You're Going to Have a Good Time"), Riviera Casino increased new enrolls to its Players Club fourfold, Horton says. Within two months, the number of Hispanic surnames in the company's player database grew from 15 percent to 21 percent, and the money this consumer demographic spent with the casino grew 15 percent.

Molson Coors Brewing Co. is another Colorado company seeing dollar signs in the burgeoning Hispanic market. Earlier this year Coors rolled out a new Spanish-language marketing campaign for Coors Light that features the tagline "Refresca Tu Mundo" (Refreshes Your World) and is aimed at bilingual Hispanic males age 21 to 34.

"Hispanics comprise a significant percentage of the Coors Light target audience," says Paul Mendieta, director of Latin America and U.S. Multicultural Markets at Coors. "In the future, Hispanics will become even more important for Coors' success."

Welcome to the new face of marketing.

With Hispanics now making up almost 20 percent of Colorado's population and nearly 15 percent of the total U.S. population, Colorado companies of all shapes and sizes are reaching out to Latino consumers.

"Demographics are changing," says Mario Carrera, vice president and general manager for Entravision Colorado, which operates four Spanish-language radio stations and four Spanish-language television stations in the state. "If businesses and other organizations want to grow, they must address the Hispanic market."

But effectively targeting this growing and complex market takes more than just translating a commercial into Spanish or adding a Latina grandmother to a billboard. It requires understanding the various subsets of the Hispanic demographic and creating culturally relevant messages that will resonate with rather than alienate Hispanic consumers.

NOT TO BE IGNORED

Prior to the 2000 U.S. Census, which showed the Hispanic population had grown nearly 58 percent since 1990 to 35.3 million people, many businesses were blind to the market potential of this rapidly expanding demographic. But, as Laura Sonderup, director of Heinrich Hispanidad notes, "When those numbers came out, people were flabbergasted. All of a sudden, businesses began to see this enormous untapped opportunity."

U.S. Hispanics now total almost 43...