Written by: Anthony Matos
Spanish is my native language. English isn’t. But growing up and even today, I hear “You don’t look Hispanic?” a lot. My reaction is always the same, “What does a Hispanic person look like?”
Today, the term “Hispanic household” by itself is not very descriptive. An individual who may be part African American or even Greek, may also have enough Hispanic cultural background to consider her/himself primarily Hispanic and speak Spanish!
The cultural makeup of the United States is more granular than ever and this granularity is only accelerating. If you’re not changing as fast as the culture around you, you are essentially going backwards.
Ethnic Technologies celebrated its 22nd anniversary this year. Do you think much has changed since E-Tech’s founding in 1997! In 1997 E-Tech was the first “state of the art, expert system” approach to multicultural marketing. Our match rate was in the high seventy percent range during those early years, and although industry leading, we knew we could do better. Our match rate coverage today tops 98%!
Anthony Matos has more than 15 years experience in all facets of business and strategy development, especially in the U.S. Hispanic market. He has consulted with companies such as Banco Popular on U.S. Hispanic Marketing as well as with a number of European organizations focused on increasing market share in Latin America and the U.S. Latino market. He has helped developed bilingual sales teams emphasizing cross-cultural understanding within the diverse U.S. Hispanic community.
EVERY year since 1997 Ethnic Technologies has brought in linguists, skilled onomasticians and expanded our research and/or IT departments. Every year through a lot of hard work and monetary investment, our team builds a new and updated version of E-Tech to accurately reflect “this year’s” multicultural makeup in the United States. In a few months, E-Tech 2020 will be our twenty third new release of our ongoing work. What started as a “state of the art, expert system” many years ago, today relies heavily on artificial intelligence (AI) and the latest in parallel processing technology to achieve the granularity required to correctly reflect today’s culture. Cultural change in the United States has led to new Ethnic Technologies products as well (e.g. Hispanic Connected, Digital Engagement and Access India) as well as unique products in Canada, Brazil and other countries.
We have advanced orders every year from major government agencies and our major university partners want to increase our collaboration together on their AI research projects in 2020.
If you’re wondering, “What does a Hispanic look like?”, we’ve spent the money and done the research to get you the most accurate answer. One answer we do know to the question is, “She doesn’t look like she did last year!” … but we can help!