Profile

For years, Carlos E. Garcia toiled in relative obscurity at his Burbank-based Garcia Research Associates Inc., a market research firm specializing in the Latino market. But then major corporations started to catch on to the growing numbers and buying power of Latino customers, and Garcia’s business which focuses on understanding what Latinos expect of the goods and services they use became a hot commodity. So why isn’t the president of the Burbank-based company smiling? “I hate this sudden attention, because it seems very fad-like and it’ll just fade,” Garcia says. “I don’t want to be a fad. The Hispanic market doesn’t want to be a fad.” Since he founded the company a decade ago with two clients, Garcia Research Associates has grown to nine full-time and 50 part-time employees and a stable of about 30 clients, including such blue-chip companies as Warner-Lambert. Garcia believes he is doing more than provide information on Latino buying habits: He thinks his company has not only helped to shape the way Latinos are portrayed in advertising and how they are perceived in the larger community, it has also helped him to better understand himself. Question: How has the work you do helped you to understand yourself better? Answer: It’s the whole issue of growing up in the barrio in East L.A. and feeling inadequate and being told you’re inadequate. No matter how smart you are, you’re told you’re a stupid Mexican or a lazy beaner. And I look at all these gardeners and busboys and valet parkers and lawyers and doctors and I wonder, lazy? I don’t think so. If we’re so lazy, why aren’t Anglos doing their own lawns? Why aren’t they washing their own dishes? Latinos are a very hard-working group, (but) we don’t see ourselves in any kind of positive role. The only time we see ourselves is as a maid or as a drug dealer or gang lord or thug. But I can go to focus groups and talk to these people who are just, I don’t even call them salt of the earth, I call them honey of the earth. They are so sweet and so wonderful and so hard-working and so thoughtful and considerate, it just makes me really proud to be a part of that. All that negative imagery, all that garbage I grew up with, I get to actively fight. Q: I would imagine there were very few companies interested in conducting research on the Latino market when you began 10 years ago. How has that changed? A: It was a real uphill battle to convince corporate America that the Hispanic market needs to be paid attention to. And the numbers were not that dramatic. (Ten years ago) it was like 7 percent of the population, which is still not negligible, but everyone seemed to feel it was ignore-able. Even then, corporate America started doing most of their Hispanic marketing mostly out of compliance, a feeling that they had to and for fear of looking like bad public citizens if they didn’t do it. Ten percent was a real threshold. Suddenly people started saying, “10 percent, that’s enough to provide a good rate of return.” And now it’s past 11 percent 11.2 percent of the U.S. population is Hispanic. You owe it to your stockholders to maximize your profit potential, and if you’re not paying attention to the Hispanic market, you’re not doing your job. Q: Particularly in L.A., we’re finding third- and fourth-generation Latinos who appear to have more similarities to the general population than to the culture of their country of origin. As that happens, isn’t it less important to have specialized knowledge of the culture and perceptions of the Latino customer? A: On a superficial level that’s what most people think, and on a superficial level it seems obvious that that’s correct. However, on a more fundamental level it’s not. Even English-speaking Hispanics have very different attitudes and perceptions than the general market. The longer they’re here, the more likely they are to use coupons or to take advantage of sales, to be able to milk the system. They get over their qualms about debt and eventually they buy a house and buy a car and do all these other things. But some things don’t change some of the attitudes toward sexuality, roles within the family, conviviality, sociability a lot of these traits don’t change across the acculturation process. Q: How does that affect marketing strategies? A: One of the things advertisers and manufactures strive to do is to get down to the deep, deep, deep hot buttons, what really drives someone. You want to understand the fundamental driving force that produces these behaviors. And the behaviors in some ways seem similar, but sometimes the fundamental issues driving them are different. Q: Can you give us an example? A: (Radio station) KPWR plays music in English, and a lot of Anglos listen to it, a lot of blacks listen to it. Then you find that 70 percent of the young people who listen to KPWR are Latino. Why is that? Latinos are not looking at it as, “This gives me a separation from my parents,” which a lot of Anglo kids might feel. Latinos might feel, “I feel accepted here. These are the people who acknowledge me and accept me for who I am.” So the same behavior might come from a very different direction. Q: Some people might say that what you do only helps to influence Latinos to spend as much money on junk that they don’t need as does the rest of the population. Does that bother you? A: A lot of the areas in which we work are not needless junk. I just landed a big account with a health insurance provider, and that’s not needless junk. I think Hispanics deserve access to information. They deserve access to goods and services. I believe an informed consumer is a better-off consumer. There are three product categories in which I refuse to work. One is tobacco. The other is ambulance-chasing attorneys, and the third is the Republican Party. These are people who don’t care about the community and are exploiting it mercilessly. Q: Even less-controversial product categories, however, are not without negative overtones. A: We have fast-food clients. It’s not necessarily wonderful stuff. It’s high fat, high calories, high cholesterol. So it’s not a perfect situation, and it’s never going to be. All you can do is be an advocate for them and help them and communicate to them. We just won a project from HUD, an outreach program to communicate housing rights to immigrants who are unaware of them. That’s really meaningful. It will help people fight for their rights. These are rights that other people take for granted. These are people who need them. So this is really meaningful and it will make a difference in people’s lives. Snapshot Carlos E. Garcia Title: President Company: Garcia Research Associates Inc. Born: Los Angeles, 1951 Education: Bachelor’s degree, Cal State Pomona; Master’s degree in comparative literature, UC Berkeley; Certificate, language and literature, Universites de Paris, Sorbonne; MBA, National University, San Diego Most Admired Person: His sister, Rose Marie Garcia Fontana Personal: Partnered; one son, age 21, from a previous marriage