Spanish or English? How about Spanglish?

Reading multicultural and Hispanic marketing articles has become a daily routine. One article in particular called my attention and I am certain that – if you are browsing the Target Latino blog – it will capture your interest as well.

English? Spanish or Spanglish? Which one is more effective to connect with the U.S. Latino population?

It seems that Canadian marketers face the same dilemma than U.S. marketers. What do you think? Spanish? English? or Spanglish? Which one is more effective to connect with the U.S. Latino population?

Does hinging on Hinglish make business sense?

A picture speaks a thousand words. Yes, we’ve heard that. Now consider it from a different angle: the thousand words shrink to a catchy one-liner and the resulting image becomes a kaleidoscope of diversity.

Case in point: Late one Friday evening, I amble around Square One shopping mall in Mississauga, scouting through the window displays for the latest design trends, when I almost walk right into a column. Whoa, didn’t see that one out there. Glad I saved my head from an ugly bump, but wait, what’s that on the column.

Kitne aadmi ko text karna hai?

The red letters stand out on a vibrant swath of ochre. A poster shows three South Asian youth with their mobile phones, one of them morphed into a latter-day urbane Gabbar, while Katrina Kaif is portrayed cameo-style on the handset. Rogers, one of Canada’s leading telecommunications companies, is offering 250 free text messages per month to India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. And that’s not all: if you text the code “Bollywood,” you even get the latest Bollywood ringtones, videos and games on your mobile. Cool, eh?

Gabbar-speak for Canucks? Well, not exactly, it’s a Rogers ad in Hinglish.

Hugely popular in India in advertising, films, text message lingo and part of everyday colloquialisms, this Hindi-English mix is gaining ground in Canada. Though still a relatively young entity in the arena of multicultural advertising, Hinglish ads in Canada seem like they’re at the beginning of a rich multicultural journey that may probably see many more in the future, in print, television and public spaces.

Toronto however is no stranger to diverse communities and languages. Not only is it touted as one of the most multicultural metropolises in the world but, by one recent calculation, the city of Toronto has been ranked second in the world in the area of entrepreneurial environment. Statistics Canada projects that by 2017, immigrants will account for 22.2 percent of the entire Canadian population and that one out of every five people could be a member of a visible minority, of which South Asians and Chinese are the top minority groups. Multicultural here is the mainstream. And so the Canadian marketplace is the perfect setting for multicultural marketing.

Best quote of the day – Albert Einstein

Hindi article by Evellyn Monga