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By
Anthony Schneider The next Internet killer app has arrived, and Microsoft doesn't own it. The Spanish language promises to be a significant driver in Internet community and commerce in the coming years. The Internet and the Spanish language will become a strong virtual alliance, with mutually beneficial ramifications: while the Internet provides cohesion and a common platform for Spanish speakers worldwide, that audience will prove a valuable demographic for marketers and businesses online.
The Internet makes molehills out of geographical mountains and fosters virtual communities of far-flung users. This is good news for Spanish speakers and should be a wake up call to anyone trying to attract this large consumer group. Already, Spanish speakers comprise of the third largest segment of Internet users, accounting for 9.2% of the Internet pie. This vital online segment is tripling annually; the 8.5 million Spanish speakers now online will mushroom to 34 million over the next two years. As the Internet user base grows and digital technologies improve, the Net will become an important engine of growth not only fostering communication and community among Spanish speakers but opening significant markets for smart online marketers and sellers.
The Internet helps build virtual communities around common interests. For the first time in the history of the language, Spanish speakers from Madrid to Equatorial Guinea already have the capability to communicate and interact — namely a computer and Internet connection. As Langdon Morris of The Knowledge Channel says, "New communities that take advantage of this capability are emerging-virtual communities-that are held together by shared interests which transcend distances and political boundaries." Spanish speakers can interact online even if they're in different continents. For people in communities where there are few other Spanish speakers, the Internet, along with television and the telephone, is a vital communications medium. But where television and other mass media divide the world, new media unites. As John Browning and Spencer Reiss write in Wired, "New media enables even the smallest, most scattered electronic communities to share — or sell — what they know, like, and do. What broadcasting atomized, new media brings back together." The potential community among Spanish speakers is not news to StarMedia, which aims to be the "central plaza" for Spanish speakers online. StarMedia producer, Jesse Hertzberg, explains how a unified online presence can help Internet users in Latin America: "We try to address the challenge that there's no one serving the Latino community as a whole. Our goal is to create a pan-regional plaza where the Latino community can communicate on both local and international levels. For example, someone in Mexico City may want to sell something locally, while someone else in Buenos Aires may be looking for information about moving to the States." Language is the bridge, and StarMedia hopes to capitalize on this unifying element by offering a variety of communications, retail services and entertainment programming. Many Spanish and Latin American companies have Web sites, and some U.S. companies have already launched Spanish language versions of their sites and are beginning to market in Spanish. Compaq's homepage, for example, allows users to select by country from a list that includes Venezuela and Uruguay, and The Money Garden has Spanish, Chinese and Russian versions of its core Web site. Merck is one of thousands of companies currently developing Spanish language sites for their overseas divisions. With cost-effective translation and deployment available, companies need not specialize in Spanish speaking markets to use the language to create a niche market online. As marketing gurus Peppers and Rogers point out, "Producing a niche product is really just a way for a mass marketer to refine and narrow his market so that he can capture a higher share of it." Spanish language hub sites, bulletin boards, chat rooms and other community building vehicles are also beginning to show up across the Internet. StarMedia plans to roll out a Spanish language search engine in partnership with Excite, and many other major sites are in the pipeline. To expedite the evolution, Spanish speakers can play a role in the next phase of community development by helping to enable and enlarge virtual communities around language and shared interests. Hosts and providers will be happy to accommodate language extensions or complements if it means additional visitors. By all measures, the time is now. The market is attractive and available, and infrastructure is in place or very close: the Latin America information technology market is expected to average 18.2% growth until the year 2000, compared with just 10.9% worldwide.
Now that the Web has achieved "mass" status with over 50 million users and has proved a valuable communications vehicle, marketers the world over are trying to go digital. The Web offers marketers several tools unavailable in other media, the most important of which is the ability to narrowcast. Whereas TV and radio are broadcast media, reaching a wide spectrum of people, the Web allows marketers to target fairly specifically by demographic, technographic, psychographic, time of day, geography, interest and, of course, language. TV advertising must cast a wide net to reach Spanish speakers worldwide. A Web banner ad, on the other hand, can target that same audience at a fraction of the cost, without wasting precious marketing dollars on anyone other than the intended audience. And that's not all. Spanish speakers online happen to be a valuable demographic, because they're educated and affluent, prized attributes for most marketers. According to a 1997 Nazca survey by Saatchi & Saatchi, 90% of Internet users in Latin America have significant purchasing power. But sellers beware: if you think you can reach this market through today's predominantly English Internet offerings, you may be misguided. Only 10% of Latin Americans report proficiency in English. The good news is that the reach of marketers will increase as the number of Spanish language Internet site grows. Banner advertisements and sponsorships will be able to target by language, group and geography. For example, a banner ad could be shown only to professionals located in a Spanish speaking country or accessing a Spanish site. The Internet also provides new marketing power. Online marketing is about relationships with customers, not the distances between them; Web marketers interact with and get to know people online. So they not only target Spanish speakers and reach them with cost-effective, measurable messages, they also have a dialogue with them and tailor their communications and products accordingly. New marketing is about the consumer, not the product or seller. Customized media and production, individually addressable media, fractionalization of mass media all point to increased effectiveness of language specific marketing online. Marketers in America are historically myopic. Women, for example, constitute 43% of Americans with assets over $500,000, yet are overlooked by most media planners. Similarly, the 25 million Spanish speaking Americans represent a largely untapped market. Because Internet advertising can be targeted and sites divided by language, different messages and online modules can be created for different language groups without diminishing brand equity or muddying messages.
As more and more companies around the world set up digital storefronts, Spanish speakers online will become an increasingly important online customer group. Online shopping has been growing exponentially, and many established retailers and start-ups have generated impressive revenues. Online bookseller Amazon.com was the third most popular site on the Internet in April of this year, while Cisco's online storefront has processed nearly $2 billion worth of consumer orders online, and the Expedia travel service has logged more than $100 million in sales. Convenience may be the most important attribute of online shopping, and the main reason virtual shopping will be a boon for Spanish speakers dispersed across the real world. For a Mexican person in Georgia, the Internet might prove the only convenient way of buying a favorite CD. Variety is another factor contributing to the success of Internet shopping, and the coming explosion in online shopping sites will mean that millions of heretofore unavailable products and services will be a mouseclick away for Spanish speakers. As online shopping grows, a range of Latin American goods will be available in Spain, and vice-versa. Virtual shopping is already an established practices for many Spanish speakers online. According to Nazca, already 27% of Latin Americans have made purchases over the Internet. And online shopping is growing fast: by the year 2001, online shoppers will spend $59 billion. As the market expands, more goods and services will be aimed at Spanish consumers. As it matures, online businesses will look to new audiences, and youth, women, and aggregated language groups will be sought after by online vendors. How can online shopping sites exploit these new and traditionally overlooked markets in the short-term? Those with products appropriate for some or all Spanish speakers should create Spanish versions of their sites. Translation costs are low. In fact, there are many free programs that help even the most linguistically impaired create a rough draft foreign language site. Nor is setting up an online storefront prohibitively expensive. With Internet malls offering low cost kiosks and good shrink-wrapped products available for online catalogs and credit card transaction, the pricetag may well be less than $5,000 and the return-on-investment swift. If content is king, then language must be queen. As the Internet moves from a technology medium, driven by software inventions and populated by technophiles, to a communication medium, driven and populated by the rest of us, language will become a vital Internet tool. And since English is old hat online, the Spanish language promises to be one of the most important Internet forces on the horizon.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ FOOTNOTES 1. Instituto Cervantes, 1997. 2. EuroMarketing, 1997. 3. Estudio General de Medios, EGM and Telefónica Studies, 1998. 4. The Knowledge Channel, 1997. 5. Wired, "Encyclopedia of the New Economy," (May 1998). 6. Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, The One to One Future (Doubleday, 1993). 7. International Data Corp., 1997. 8. Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi Survey (Nov. 20, 1997). 9. Pan-Latin America survey by Audits and Surveys, 1996. 10. Tom Peters, The Circle of Innovation (Knopf, 1998) 11. Internet World, April, 1998. 12. Internet Computing, March, 1998. 13. Inter@ctive Week, 1997. 14. Nazco, (Nov. 20, 1997). 15. International Data Corp, 1998.
Anthony
is President of Web Zeit, a New York Internet strategy and development
company. Web Zeit specializes in online shopping strategy, Web site development
and Internet marketing. Their clients include Pfizer, Chase Manhattan,
Roche, SmithKline Beecham and others. Anthony has studied marketing at
The Wharton School and interactive media at New York University. |
350
million people in 23 countries around the world speak Spanish, the
world's fourth most spoken language. Geographical, political and cultural
divides, however, have stopped businesses from reaching this large demographic
as a whole. Until now.