SPEAKER_00
You're listening to the Higher Ed Marketer, the podcast for marketing professionals in higher education. Join us every week as we talk to the industry's greatest minds in student recruitment, donor relations, marketing trends, new technologies, and much more. If you're looking for conversations centered around where marketing in higher ed is going, this podcast is for you.

Let's get into the show.

SPEAKER_01
Welcome to the Higher Ed Marketer podcast. My name is Troy Singer here with my friend and the co-host of the show, Bart Kaler. Now today, we have a wonderful conversation around multicultural marketing within higher ed.

We're speaking to Christian Ponce. He is the Associate Vice President for Marketing at Old Dominion University. However, we asked him on the show for his expertise around multicultural marketing, and you will soon see that his expertise is really driven by his passion for the subject.

SPEAKER_04
I love the fact that he's an immigrant from Honduras, and he really expresses and shares from his own experience of what it was like to be a student coming to the United States as an immigrant, but then also what it's been like for his kids as first generation students. I really appreciate the fact that he's lived it out, and so he's experiencing it both as a higher ed marketer on one side, but also as a recipient of it on the other side. He just brings such a wealth of knowledge, such a lot of really good practical advice about how to really up your game in multicultural marketing.

I definitely think you want to take some notes and be sure you're ready to really take in a lot of good things.

SPEAKER_01
Here's that conversation with Christian Ponce. Christian, our fun way of getting to know a little bit about our guests and keeping us an educational podcast is we always start out our conversation by asking our guests to share something that they have learned recently that our audience would deem fun or interesting. So the floor is yours to share what you've learned recently.

SPEAKER_02
Absolutely. So this week I was watching a live newscast from Argentina because I'm very interested in what's happening there and that the anchors, they're like commentators, three of them use chat GBT live and they are chapter B.T. in Spanish, obviously describe the people on camera and they received a perfect description of each one of them from left to right, including the tie they were using, the color of their suits, who had glasses, et cetera, et cetera, live in that particular moment on live TV. I thought that was amazing.

SPEAKER_04
That is pretty amazing. Very, very cool.

SPEAKER_01
Thank you. And you piqued Bart's interest because it's all about promoting AI. So I think there was a little bit of purpose in us for that, Christians of thank you.

Everyone, we are with Christian Ponce. He is the Associate Vice President for Marketing at Old Dominion University. However, today we are talking to him in his capacity from his experience and also his expertise around integrated multicultural marketing.

And that's what we're going to get started on right now. So Christian, if you could elaborate on the challenges of transcultural barriers and how marketing teams can authentically engage multicultural audiences, especially as we think about it through higher ed.

SPEAKER_02
Thank you so much, Troy. I appreciate the question. Before I get started, I'd like to define what multicultural barriers are.

And I'd like to number them. I think there are five main barriers that we need to be aware with. Number one are language barriers, stereotypes and prejudices.

Numerable barriers, beliefs and behaviors and ethnocentrism. I think those are five things that we need to be very aware of. As our nation becomes more multicultural, as we speak, we all as marketers have to understand multicultural marketing.

Why? Because our country will be multicultural marketing. And I think at some point in the future, and I'm not sure if I'll see it in my lifetime, but multicultural marketing will be just marketing. We won't refer to it as multicultural marketing.

It'll be just marketing. In the same token that right now, you remember probably 20 years ago, people talked about digital marketing, like this new thing, this niche thing. Digital marketing is marketing.

Yeah. Right. So I think that's where we headed. So understanding what the barriers are and how to overcome it.

I think it's extremely important.

SPEAKER_04
I love that. And I love how you kind of, could you go back through those five again, because I think it was so important. You talked about language was the first one.

SPEAKER_03
Yep. Stereotypes. Stereotypes is the second one.

Numerable. Okay. Barriers, communication, nonverbal beliefs and behaviors. Ethnocentrism.

SPEAKER_04
Okay. So I love that. And I wanted to point that out because I think we sell ourselves short as marketers sometimes because we only focus on number one, the language.

So kind of unpack that because I mean, each of those is really important. And I think that it's, it's one of those things that as you kind of look at that, everybody says, okay, language, yeah, we'll just hire a translator and just put it out. But what I've learned, especially as it relates to Hispanic marketing and Latino marketing is the fact that there's a lot more in the cultural things and the other items that you talked about.

So can you unpack those a little bit just so that we understand what you're talking about?

SPEAKER_02
A hundred percent. And I think that's a great follow up question. I know that we'll, we talk about language barriers, but I will tell you why those are important and then I'll go, I'll review the next ones.

Right now we have a situation in which the majority of the Hispanic market, if you will, or community sometimes are seen as a monolith and they're not. We come from 23 countries, even though almost 60% of the population among the Hispanics, Hispanic market are Mexican. We have Puerto Ricans, we have Central America, South Americans, and of course we have Spaniards.

And those have unique dialects, if you will, and unique cultural nuances and Prypoints and foods and, and in all of that stuff. So one, one way to reduce a language barriers right now is to identify what are the two types of Hispanics that we have, if you will, from a demographic standpoint. First is immigrant Hispanics like myself, I was born and raised in Honduras, but then first generation Hispanics, those who are born here, like my daughters.

And a lot of first generation Hispanics obviously are bilingual and they're native in both languages. But if colleges, for example, don't do a good job identifying what those prospective students and families are, then students, those first generation Americans are put in a very uncomfortable position to start talking about translating to their parents, having to explain to their parents what things are during admission calls or during visits. And data shows that they resent that they don't like that.

That is just not unique to higher education. Health, for example, is the same. You see these kids sometimes translating serious things that they shouldn't be talking about to their parents.

So it is important that organizations recognize the importance of that. So now that we address language, let's talk about stereotypes, right? It is what those beliefs that people put together cultures and make generalizations about groups. For example, Germans are punctual.

All Germans are punctual. All Asians are good at math, right? All Hispanics like spicy food or all Hispanics are good at dancing. All of those things that are not necessarily true.

And what makes it very difficult is, although I'm just giving you some examples, is when those make it into communication. For example, I'm going to do something super obvious, but depicting Mexicans by wearing a sombrero, for example, in a photo. And those are things that we have to be extremely conscious about.

And we need to understand how to avoid those things. Nonverbal barriers, for example, in the United States, thumbs up is a good thing. But in Bangladesh, that's actually very negative.

In the United States, we sit sometimes in a meeting, in a very formal meeting or in an executive type meeting, we cross our legs and we might show the soul of our food. That in Arabic culture is extremely insulting. I don't know if you remember this, but many years ago, the President Kirsten W.

Bush, somebody threw a shoe at him. It's because that's the worst offense because the feet are dirty, right? So those are some nonverbal barriers that we remember actually when history tells us that Brexit in Nixon went in the late 70s to China, his first trip, and he had this sign, this victory sign. And that was just a no-no, right? So it's important to understand that a little bit and then beliefs and behaviors.

What's important? What are the values? For example, in the United States, we really value convenience, right? But Hispanics value relationship very much so. So I'm going to give you a story about that really quickly. When I was in college in the United States many years ago, I went back to my country Honduras and was starting with my sister.

And then she said, I need to go to the mechanic. Can you want to go with me? And I said, yes. So I got in the car and she starts driving and she passes one shop.

And I'm like this, she passes another shop. She passes yet another shop. And then we're driving about 45 minutes across town.

And we go to this, to this garage and mechanic. And I say to my sister, Lena, her name, Lena, why do you drive across town to come to the shop? That's crazy. I mean, you have one in your neighborhood.

Her husband was a pediatrician and her husband saw the mechanics kids. And the mechanic, the mechanic took the care of his cars. Relationship is more important than convenience.

And I saw that and I see that over and over and over again. So those are things that are important. Those, that's why I think it's important.

What applies to us is that as marketers, we got to develop a strong relationship between our brand and the community that we're aiming on marketing. And then we'll see loyalty and trust, which is super important. And then the last one is ethnocentrism, right? We see ourselves at the center and everybody else is in the margins.

So we expect that everybody accommodates to us as opposed to us understanding that not everybody has the same experiences in our worldviews, if you will.

SPEAKER_04
That's great. And getting back to that beliefs element. And this is one thing that I've learned recently in the last year or two is just how important it is for Hispanic cultures to make a decision about where the child will go to college as a group, as a familiar group.

And so I think as Americans, sometimes we look at it and say, oh, we're so independent and the child should figure out where they want to go and decision day, where are you going to go? But that's not the same in the Hispanic culture. And being able to understand that and then be able to provide resources for for mom, dad, grandma, and grandpa, maybe unpack that a little bit, because that's one thing that I think is is very foreign for a lot of Americans that are not sensitive to this.

SPEAKER_02
100%. So we have to understand that, for example, with the Hispanic community, the population growth among multicultural Hispanics have been driven by immigration. Right. So a lot of the parents and grandparents of the college bound kids are immigrants. And many of them are monolingual.

They only speak Spanish and you'll say, well, you're in the United States, you have to learn English. Well, some of those folks are working three jobs. Where is the time to do that? Right.

So the second thing is there's a tremendous talking about values and beliefs. There's a tremendous belief in the extended family. They don't think about it.

The extended family. They think of it as just family. That's where grandpa and grandma come in.

My aunt and my uncle and all of us are these, these, these tight-knit folks, family. So we all know that immigrant Hispanics create a lot of employment by being entrepreneurs and they do laundry mats and they do the restaurants and they do business and they do transportation services and, and, and lawn care and all of that. So guess what they aspire their kids to do? Join the family business or to work.

So we, as marketers, need to understand that it is not a given that they're thinking that they're going to send their kids to college. So we need to be advocates for higher education and train and educate and inform the community about the benefits of higher ed. So we have to make a case for higher ed that indeed, if you have a restaurant, maybe by sending your kid to college, he getting a business degree, he may end up coming back and build your business and you'll have 10 restaurants.

Exactly. Okay. So that's one thing. The second thing is we are living a true cultural shift in our country with Gen C and Alpha Generation coming up that they're really questioning the value of college.

They're going back into the trades. Right. I have very good friends of mine. I'm friends with both husband and wife and they both have graduate degrees and their first child is 23.

He didn't go to college. He wanted to be an electrician. It's real.

It's real. So we cannot assume that people want to go to college. So it's important that we educate the community and the families about what it means to go to college and what are the benefits of going to college.

And actually what it means to society as well. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04
I love that. And I just want to, before we move on Troy, just say one last thing, because I want to tie together what Christian just said there to what he said earlier was the fact that it's our responsibility as marketers to be able to communicate that to the parents, to the grandparents, to the extended family and to help them understand that. And we have to communicate it, not relying on the student to do that.

And so we've got to figure out creative ways. And some of that is going to be our next question of technology, of figuring out how is it that we can communicate to those monolingual parents that speak only Spanish, but how can we do it authentically and real? So Troy, maybe you can set up our next question.

SPEAKER_01
Sure, Christian. If you would, how do you see the role of emerging technologies such as AI in shaping the future of multicultural marketing?

SPEAKER_02
That is a great question. And I think that is going to be a tremendous tool. And I think already is becoming a tremendous tool for all marketers, including multicultural marketers.

I think that AI is already doing great things, for example, about scanning content, right? Ensuring that the content is inclusive, ensuring that the content does not have stereotypes, ensuring that the content is bias free, if you will. Super important. But in order for you to be successful using tools, you have to have a great platform, if you will, you have to have a great structure that you need to teach the machine about what your brand is, what the values of the brand is, and what the values of your targeted audience are.

Right. So in that sense, you need to start educating AI to the things that we just talked about. Check out for ethocentric beliefs or statements or assumptions.

Check out for stereotypes. Check out for language. For example, like I said, we come from 23 countries.

If we're talking about the Hispanic community and you want to make sure that if we're going to use Spanish language to communicate with immigrants, Hispanic immigrants, we need to make sure that our use that we are using standard Spanish. Why? Because things are different things to different countries, you know, localized things. So we want to make sure that if I'm saying banana, banana is a banana in Mexico, but also in Venezuela, and they both understand it.

For example, in Mexico, banana de colplátano, for us Honduras means plantain, Venezuela is calling camboor, and I didn't know that that was until a Venezuela friend explained that to me. So backpack, we say mochila in Mexico, Central America, Venezuela say moral, but Venezuela also understand mochila because that's the standard word. So what word are you going to use in your marketing? The standard word.

SPEAKER_04
Got it. Got it. That's that's a really, really good point.

And I, and I think that that's what's so important, even having this conversation with you, Christian, is that I want to warn everybody, don't just say, oh, I've got Chad GPT now. So I'm good because you're not because it's only going to be as good as what you know to expect from it. And so I think that the fact that in at Kaler Solutions, I've done, I've got some clients that are, I've got a small school in Corpus Christi, Stark College and Seminarium.

And shout out to them. They're great. And a big part of their team are our first generation Hispanics.

They grew up here and mom and dad. And so one of the guys on my team that he's the director of admissions there, does some admissions work there? I asked permission of the president if I could freelance him to help me with some Hispanic work. And so he's been doing some translating.

He's working on his doctorate right now. But when I would talk to him, I mean, he was like, yeah, I remember being, you know, six years old in the doctor's office to your point, translating things for my mom and my dad, because, you know, they didn't, they didn't have the language skills. But I think it's so important to bring in people that understand the culture, that understand the language, that understand what you're trying to do to bring them in as team members, as opposed to just relying on chat or relying on a language service or relying on something like Google translate.

Talk through that because I think there's so much nuance behind this multi-cultural language. And it goes back to that idea that I think so many people just think, oh, let's translate it and we're good to go.

SPEAKER_02
That's a great question, Agrim. A great point, Bart. I was in a project, fairly recently, to be honest with you about a video.

And the first thing I received, they just passed it to me, came through my desk and I am noticing that the translation is literal. Right. And I noticed that one expression the agency used to convey closeness or being near to you is your backyard. And they translated that literally.

That is extremely offensive, extremely offensive. Actually, I have the agency kind of pushed back and I said, no, I'm not going to accept this. That's funny that they pushed back.

Yeah. So I'm not going to accept this. I cannot approve this.

I'm not going to get into geopolitics. But what do the United States government and Corsair say Latin America's our backyard? Do you think that we like that? No, we don't.

SPEAKER_04
Exactly. Exactly. And I think that that's why it's so important to, just like any other marketing that we do, we run up by a focus group of our perspective and users and get their feedback and take it seriously.

And so, I mean, and that's where, I mean, we could go into a whole combination about if you're doing all this stuff and you're not running it past your current students as Generation Z and saying, does this make sense from a Generation Z? You would do, I mean, we have to think beyond that's where that ethocentric gets into not only multiculturalism, but even multi-generationalism. We're thinking the fact that, hey, this is what I think is best and we don't ask the end user. Yeah. Shame on us.

SPEAKER_02
When I am reaching out to students that are 35 years younger than I. Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah. So that's one. The second thing that we talked about is authenticity.

And you mentioned that earlier. This video is in Spanish and has no Hispanic representation on the visuals. None. So, got to push back and I said, you got to find me some Latinx, you got to find me some Hispanics and some Hispanic parents somehow. They have to see themselves represented.

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04
Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about, I know that when you and I did the pre-interview, I showed you that, hey, Jen video. And that's a use of technology, but also I was very cautious of saying, okay, I'm going to use this video and just for everybody in the audience, there's a tool called heyjen.

com. You can upload a video and it will automatically translate it to different languages. So I've done a couple of samples in German and in Spanish.

And the German one was okay. And what I did though, as soon as I translated those videos using the tool, I reached out to friends that I knew that would understand it and that I knew were native language speakers so that I could get their feedback. And so the German one, you know, one of our friends, Chris Rapaz, it was like, eh, it sounded kind of weird, Bart.

I'm German. I could understand you, but it sounded, it's like the backyard stuff. It didn't make sense and some of it was offensive.

Now, when I showed you the Spanish one, maybe just kind of give your reaction to that because again, this was AI. I uploaded it first time. I'd be curious from Honduras and Hispanic.

What did you think?

SPEAKER_02
I thought it was fantastic in Spanish. Your version was fantastic. You had a fairly neutral accent.

The technology gave you a fairly neutral accent, easy to understand and pretty standard, which I think is great. And I was just thinking about my own experience as I came to the United States as an international student. So back in the day, it was not as competitive as it is now.

30 years ago, I applied to three universities and actually my college application was two pages and that was it. But even then, I think about what if my mother would have received that type of video for me, she would have felt more comfortable. She would have felt hurt and understood and she would have actually, her trust would have been probably augmented.

If you will, that when you send your child across borders to a foreign land, I think that's important even for international recruitment. So from that standpoint, it's good. I think your video is doing the first part really well, which is outreach.

But I think for our organization to be successful, it needs a couple of things. Number one, representation. You need to have people somehow in the university that is going to be able to support the needs of the people you are attracting to your college.

For example, students support centers, even academic support, particularly for first generation students, which is most of the people that we're reaching out to. So that's important to know. But I think it's great that technology is perhaps saving tremendous amounts of your budget, which before it, you would have to go to a firm, you'd have to go to find a studio, you would have to find a voice down and a producer and people to get you from a camera.

So I would imagine this is a tremendous, very convenient.

SPEAKER_04
Yeah. And I would also just kind of warn people, don't try to sell it as it's not technology. I mean, if you're going to use it and you're going to have your president say how much they're valuing having this student on campus.

And if you have any questions, let us know. You've got to recognize and admit that you're using technology because the last thing I'd want is that family to visit campus and then run up to your president and start talking to them in Spanish. And he kind of is blinded and saying, I have no idea what you're saying.

So you've got to be really authentic of what's going on and be able to communicate that well. So I love that. That's great for you.

This is a really, really good conversation. And again, technology is not the end all. You've it's going to be a tool in your toolbox of doing this multicultural marketing.

SPEAKER_01
Christian, if you could please share some successful examples of how brands have effectively blended both emotional and functional aspects in their multicultural marketing strategies.

SPEAKER_02
Yes, sometimes corporate America is ahead of us marketers in higher ed. I'm going to give you an example. And what I mean by that, one of my advertising heroes, one of my advertising heroes is Tom Burrell.

You probably are familiar with him. He's the founder of Burrell Communications. I want to the first African American advertising agencies, multicultural agencies, incredibly successful.

He founded in 1971. He built his business by trying to convince clients that African Americans were not white people with dark skin. Think about that.

African Americans are not white people with dark skin. What does that mean? That means that as a people, they have or a unique culture and perspective and value set of values and that are extremely important to create persuasive communications. And also they need to see themselves represented.

So I believe that was one of the first areas or if you will, one of the first seasons when we started seeing the importance of multicultural marketing. So obviously his agency did create incredible work, working for Coca-Cola, working for Toyota. Those are huge brands.

They've been doing a great job for the past, my goodness, 40, 50 years. And then the same happened with Latinos. Hispanic agencies came a little bit later in the same happened.

I love the work that, for example, McDonald's is doing, is phenomenal. Toyota is doing a great job. Ford is doing a great job.

What I'd like to see is universities, following up on that. And I'd like to see our billboards, our students being truly represented, but not just with, OK, I got my black student and got my Latino students of the cover of a view book I'm done. No, no, no, no, no.

I want to see all those important things that we have talked about today, sprinkled into our messaging, right? As a black student, as a black family, why is in my personal experience here, what are you good for? And research, there's clear data, which is preparing for this interview. I was taking a look at some data points out there in multicultural marketing. And there's a fantastic group called the Collage Group, and they do incredible research on multicultural marketing.

And one of the latest data points they found is that African Americans have expressed that seeing other people successful or seeing other successful people or people succeeding drives them even more to achieve. And they have, for them, title, income and status is very important. Duh, for everybody too.

But for them, it's important. They're so driven to achieve success despite of systematic discrimination. All right.

So they said, keep point, highlight, how can you brand help African Americans achieve? And if we can use that for our colleges and universities, I have no doubt that we'll be successful, but it needs to be authentic.

SPEAKER_03
Yeah, love that. I think it's so true.

SPEAKER_01
Thank you. Our last question for you is the one that we usually ask all of our guests. And that is Christian, if there's a piece of advice that you could offer that could be easily or immediately implemented by a listener, what would that piece of advice be?

SPEAKER_02
That's a great question. That piece of advice is when there's a will, there's a way. You don't have to have a million dollar budget to do multicultural marketing.

I never had a million dollars to do specific multicultural budget. I have maybe a million dollars to do marketing. And I have to figure it out how to make it successful, including, as I said before, multicultural marketing is part of marketing.

We should be embedded in your strategy. So I'm going to give you an example. And the advice is ask questions to people who live and breathe the culture you're trying to target.

Okay. If you don't have the budget to go find a firm to do a elaborate research study, you can ask questions. What I did at Miami university is I asked my VP at the time, Jamie Hunt.

I will know her or a lot of us know her. I said, Hey, Jamie, I'm really hungry for this because I think it's important that we start reaching out to multicultural audience. I said, just like go for it.

Go. So I did. And I did two things.

One, I checked the pulse of my team about cultural intelligence. And I noticed that we needed training. So I created something that is called multicultural marketing series.

And every month I would bring an expert in different areas, an expert on black or African American marketing, an expert in Hispanic marketing, LGBTQ plus marketing, Hispanics in politics, immigration, whatever, what have you. And only after a year of doing that, then I reached out to several campus partners and I established what we call the multicultural marketing consulting group. It was a multi task force.

We worked together for a year and a half doing a roundtable discussion. What's important to African Americans? How do you see life? How do you live life? What drives you? Same with Hispanics, same with Asians. And after that, we came up with highlights and recommendations.

And then we launched our first ever multicultural marketing campaign.

SPEAKER_04
That's great. I really love that. That's perfect.

SPEAKER_01
Thank you. We've been talking to Christian Ponce, Associate Vice President for Marketing at Old Dominion University, tapping into his expertise on multicultural marketing for higher ed. Christian, if someone would like to reach out to you for further conversation, what would be the best way for them to reach you?

SPEAKER_02
They can find me on LinkedIn. Send me an email. The best ways to send me an email, jponse.

com. At Odu.edu. Or you can send me an email to my private email account, which is jrcp.com.

SPEAKER_04
Very good. We'll put those in the show notes.

SPEAKER_01
Christian, thank you so much for what you gave us today in wisdom and knowledge and an awareness around multicultural marketing.

SPEAKER_02
Thank you, Bart and Troy. Keep doing what you're doing. It's great work and I've been a fan for a long time.

And so I'm very thankful for the opportunity to be here with you both. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01
It's been our pleasure. Bart, do you have any final comments that you would like to share?

SPEAKER_04
Yeah, I just want to just kind of underscore Christian's perspective on authenticity and asking questions. I think that, you know, if you don't take anything else away from this, I think that if you can just start with, you know, a little bit of it's the golden rule. What would you want somebody else to do for you? If you were in a different country and you didn't know what's going on, how would you want them to react to you? How would you want them to respect your culture? How would you want them to respect you? Start with that and be authentic about that.

Ask questions, get involved. Ask what you don't know and don't assume anything. I really like the ethnocentric issues that he posed is that I think that so frequently, especially when we're in the majority sometimes, it's very easy for us just to kind of think that everybody thinks the same way.

And I think that Christian's done such a great job of helping us kind of unpack that with those five different things that he talked about at the beginning. And it's well beyond language. And so really being able to understand and get to know people and understand how you can actually serve them through your institution.

And so again, Christian, what a wonderful time. What a wonderful conversation. Thanks so much.

SPEAKER_02
Thank you so much to both of you. Have a great weekend.

SPEAKER_01
Yes. Have a wonderful weekend and week. The podcast is sponsored by Kailer Solutions and Ring Digital on behalf of Bart Kailer, myself, Troy Singer and our wonderful guest, Christian Ponce.

Thank you for joining us.

SPEAKER_00
You've been listening to the higher ed marketer to ensure that you never miss an episode. Subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player. The higher ed marketer is a production of Kailer Solutions and Ring Digital in partnership with Westport Studios.

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