Pizza Patrón campaign benefits from ethnic focus

Marketers said restaurant brands could replicate Pizza Patrón’s successful limited-time offer within the Hispanic demographic by focusing more narrowly on a certain nationality, so long as they know whom their customers are and where they live.

Dallas-based Pizza Patrón recently reported that its La Chingona pizza was its most successful limited-time offer ever, making up 4 percent of the brand’s sales mix in the first three weeks of April — double the typical percentage its promotional pizzas achieve. Officials also said same-store sales in April accelerated from the 9 percent increase that Pizza Patrón had recorded during the first quarter of 2014.

Though La Chingona courted controversy, it embodied the 89-unit chain’s strategic reinvention to specifically serve a Mexican or Mexican-American customer, rather than just the broad Hispanic demographic, said founder and president Antonio Swad.

“We’ve sort of always known that we were a Mexican brand, but we had attempted to hold ourselves out as a Latino brand,” he said. “That’s good enough for most people, but you’re really not focused that way. We saw that the majority of our customers are of Mexican heritage, so why don’t we screw the focus down even tighter?”

Grow where your customers grow

Could or should other restaurants focus their Hispanic marketing more finely on one kind of nationality, such as Mexican-Americans or Cuban-Americans? The answer depends largely on geography as well as demographics, Swad and others said.

For Pizza Patrón, which has restaurants in Texas, California, Arizona, Colorado, Illinois and Georgia — where Mexicans and Mexican-Americans make up the vast majority of the local Hispanic populations — it made sense to “speak Mexican instead of Spanish” in its campaign for La Chingona, Swad said. The focus on Mexican-heritage customers also clarified Pizza Patrón’s growth plans for 1,000 potential units in the United States by filling out the markets in those states largely inhabited by the brand’s core customer.

“We still have a ton of headroom ahead of us,” Swad said. “The newfound, tighter focus would help us accelerate.”

Demographic expert Peter Francese noted that Pizza Patrón’s promotion had a few advantages, particularly that the Mexican-heritage segment of the United States’ Hispanic population is huge, highly concentrated in seven states and proud of its culture.

“When someone targets these folks using their language and their vernacular, it would be very successful, because their words are important to them,” Francese said. “This very smart entrepreneur took advantage of the fact that the numbers are big enough and attitudes of Mexicans toward their food and culture are sufficiently positive to make a package that all really works well.”

Francese cited data from the 2012 American Community Survey from the U.S. Census Bureau that found the nation’s 34 million people of Mexican descent make up 64.3 percent of the nearly 53 million Hispanics in the United States, and 10.8 percent of the country’s more than 313 million people overall.

Eight states have more than 1 million Hispanic citizens: California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, Arizona, New Jersey and Colorado.

Other nationalities far smaller than Mexican-Americans could provide a brand the ability to microtarget, Francese added.

“The key is authenticity,” he said. “If you’ve got a chain that is authentic in the way it serves Korean food or Mexican food, it would do well whether there are lots of Koreans or Mexicans anywhere near there. And a much bigger population wants different food and dining experiences that is authentic fill-in-the-blank cuisine.”

Speak how your customers speak

(Continued from page 1)

Experts in Hispanic marketing and advertising agreed that a focus on certain nationalities within the Hispanic population could work as well for any restaurant as it did for Pizza Patrón, provided that those restaurants find out which groups live where.

During an educational session at the National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago in May, Peter Filiaci of Univision’s strategy and insights group said broader Hispanic marketing is brands’ best bet across all regions, but local campaigns for local populations also could work.

“On a national level, you have to find a common denominator, just as you would in English,” Filiaci said. “But maybe a more granular answer is some markets may very much require [further segmenting]. If you decide on that approach locally, I would just keep an eye on demographics as it evolves. We still think of New York City as Dominican and Puerto Rican, but there are a lot of Mexican Americans there as well now. Miami is not just Cubans anymore.”

Scott Roskowski, chief development officer for TVB, the trade association for the commercial broadcast television industry in the United States, said finely targeted messaging at certain nationalities makes sense with local broadcast advertising. But a specifically targeted campaign would alienate many Hispanics if a brand tried rolling it up to the national level, he added, so culture-specific commercials should be aired only in places where those cultural communities dominate.

“Your creative can have themed music with appeal toward just Mexican Americans, for example, and that’s perfectly accepted, especially if it’s a promotion in Texas, where there isn’t an even split between Cuban and Mexican people,” he said.

Previously, Roskowski had been vice president of national sales for Univision.

“It’s a good strategy to make sure you’re being relevant to the culture and sensitive to the culture,” he said. “Within the segment, there’s Cuban pride, Puerto Rican pride and Mexican pride — I’ve seen it all.”

He added that understanding which nationalities predominate in which Hispanic populations from state to state or city to city is one thing, but the deeper challenge of understanding language stratification “is the science behind Hispanic marketing.”

Consider, for example, Arizona. The Census Bureau found that people of Mexican heritage in 2012 made up more than 90 percent of Hispanics and more than 27 percent of all people living in the Grand Canyon State.

Roskowski shared data from a 2013 Geoscape Intelligence System study that found two markets within Arizona have varying degrees of English or Spanish spoken at home among Hispanic citizens. In both cities, 49 percent of Hispanic households are English-dominant, but Tucson shows more Spanish dominance, with 33 percent of households speaking only Spanish and 18 percent speaking both languages. Phoenix, by contrast, has 28 percent of its Hispanic households speaking only Spanish and 23 percent speaking both Spanish and English.

“It’s delicate, and it changes from Dallas to Phoenix to Los Angeles,” Roskowski said. “I would look into market-by-market differences, not only in country of origin, but also of language stratification. You’ll misfire in New Mexico if you’re too heavy in Spanish; you’ll probably misfire in L.A. if you’re too heavy in English.”

According to the Geoscape data, some markets in Texas approach half of households being Spanish-dominant, such as Houston and Dallas, with 47 percent and 43 percent, respectively. Those markets have slightly more diverse Hispanic populations. People with Mexican heritage make up 78 percent of Houston’s Hispanic demographic, which includes another 15 percent of people from Central American ancestry.

By contrast, San Antonio’s and Corpus Christi’s Hispanic population are 94 percent and 96 percent of Mexican heritage, respectively, yet their English dominance is relatively higher, at 55 percent of households and 63 percent of households, respectively.

Contact Mark Brandau at [email protected].
Follow him on Twitter: @Mark_from_NRN