Hispanic Brand Loyalty – Yes! … and No…
We’ve written before on this blog about Hispanic brand loyalty. In that installment we looked at CPG products and explored the likelihood of Hispanic consumers switching brands under various circumstances. We’ve often heard that Hispanics are more brand loyal than non-Hispanics which makes it an imperative to get them to choose your brand when they’re young or recently arrived since they’ll likely stick with it in years to come.
The basic result of our initial study was that Hispanic brand loyalty exists but appears to be overstated. They were brand loyal in some categories but usually not at higher rates than non-Hispanics.
Recently we decided to revisit the topic and look at some other categories to see if the initial findings hold up. First we asked if respondents were loyal to any brands and the results were nearly identical:
Respondents who said they were loyal to brands were asked which ones:
These results were intriguing because they would seem to indicate that Hispanics are indeed more brand loyal than non-Hispanics except:
Brand loyalty to some brands does not mean brand loyalty to brands in general. It’s possible that Hispanics are less loyal in the health & beauty category than electronics or apparel. Colgate appears to be an outlier in its category and has higher Hispanic brand loyalty but that may be driven by the brand’s strong presence in Latin America.
When looking at other categories we see a slight tilt towards greater brand loyalty among Hispanics towards most categories tested except for mobile phone service.
It’s worthy to note, however, that the slightly favorable tilt towards brand loyalty shown above disappears if we compare Top 2 Box brand loyalty, those who say they always or mostly always buy the same brands.
There does, however, appear to be a significant difference in loyalty among Hispanics from different acculturation groups. When comparing Top 2 Box brand loyalty of less acculturated Hispanics with the more acculturated, the less acculturated group had higher brand loyalty levels in six of the eight tested categories. Biculturals had similar scores as the less acculturated.
A twist on this finding though is that the less acculturated were also more likely to say that they “Like to experiment with new brands”. Therefore, while it seems that in certain categories there is indeed greater brand loyalty among Hispanics it would appear that it isn’t set in stone so if your brand is new to the space Hispanics may just choose your brand to “experiment” with. If they like it, and you appeal to the less acculturated and you’re in one of the categories they’re loyal in - you’re golden.
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