Hispanic Millennials: Implications for Marketing

The discourse on Latino Millennials, both in the online and in the offline literature, suggests that there is a great amount of similarity among those Hispanics born between 1980 and 2000. Also, that there is similarity between Hispanic and non-Hispanic Millennials.  While the exact years of birth vary by source, most of them are close to the 1980 - 2000 range.  From my point of view there is a fallacy involved in classifying Hispanics born in this age range as sharing a high degree of similarity both among themselves and when compared with non-Hispanics.  According to the Bureau of the Census about 37% of US Hispanics were born between 1980 and 2000.  That is a very substantive number of people. Are they similar in many ways?

The generational aggregation of people into assumed homogeneous populations is arbitrary at best.  Among Latinos this is even more arbitrary.  Let me explain.

In theory, for example, what makes “Baby Boomers” unique is that they are the post war generation.  It is understandable that those born in the US did have a large amount of shared experience as a consequence of being born at the end of the war.  But think about the case of Latinos.  Those born after the war in Latin America did not share the American experience.  Still they are referred to as “Baby Boomers.”  The same logical error applies to “Millennials.”  A large majority of them were born in Latin America and had very different experiences from those in the US.  

The history of the majority of Latinos born between 1980 and 2000 is greatly influenced by what was happening in their country of origin, their socio-economic circumstances, life-stage, etc. As many readers know most Hispanics in the US are of Mexican origin.  Also, a great majority of this subset were brought by their parents in search of a better life in the US. They were mostly subsistence farmers and blue collar workers earning very little money.  That is very different from the experience of the American middle class. 

And as Randy Stockdale emphasizes "The age range is so wide, that by the time they get to the end of the spectrum (those born in '80) they have gone through 2-3 life stages. And this may differ by gender - Hispanic females likely married with kids, yet many men likely not." REFERENCE

What makes Hispanics ages 15 to about 35 somewhat similar is a history of seeing their parents strive to make the life of their children better.  A life of decreasing deprivation.  It has been a life of ambition and achievement.  Latino youth are not the kids that went back to their parents’ homes because of 9/11 or the downturn of 2008.  Many of these Latino kids never left the home of their parents but not because they were depending on them but because they were contributing to the economy of a traditional household.  A household that enjoys keeping the kids around as long as possible.  A current example of trends among Hispanic youth is in the following video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjGSywSFceA .

As one can see the young Latino has a unique perspective on the world shaped by many diverse experiences.  Clearly, Latinos are also tech savvy, multitaskers, collectivist, etc. but that has been a characteristic of Hispanics in general not just young people.

The lessons are:

1. Generational groupings and generalizations are tricky and many times inaccurate
2. Latinos have not gone through the same experiences as their non-Hispanic counterparts, thus generalizing to them can be misleading
3. Young Hispanics come in many types and with diverse backgrounds.  Still, there are central tendencies based on experience, socio-economic background, and country of origin
4. Marketers need to pay attention to the subtleties of different segments of the population and avoid costly mistakes by assuming homogeneity
5. The “New Latino” is an important synergistic identity of not being from here or there, but shaped by the common experience of being different...  
6. Marketers and market researchers will benefit from researching this new Latino identity and behavior
7. Using giant clusters such as "Millennials" is not a segmentation approach but a way to avoid looking at important differences that can be used for effective targeting and communication