Marketing to a Hispanic audience

BY GEORGETTE GOUVEIA

he Hispanic market in the T United States represents 60.6 million people and a GDP of $2.3 trillion, which would make it the eighth largest economy in the world if it were its own country.

That’s a mother lode for American businesses to mine. And yet, it’s one that often alludes these businesses, because they don’t know how to engage a Hispanic audience.

So say Francisco “Paco” Sinta and Humberto Gutiérrez, the Connecticut-based co-founders of Fingerthink, whose “main objective,” Sinta says, “is to help companies explore opportunities to tap into the Hispanic market with a well-rounded strategy” — companies like ADT, AT&T, Dish Latino, Keches Law Group, Liberty Mutual, Productos Medicos 24 and Spectrum.

“Most of our companies see an increase in sales and profitability,” Sinta says. “If they didn’t see good profit margins, they wouldn’t be working with us.”

What Fingerthink — the name comes from linking the brain to the hand and communication devices — does is connect businesses with Hispanics’ core values.

“It’s very important to tap into a sensitivity to their cultures,” Sinta adds. In general, he and Gutiérrez say, Hispanic-Americans are family-minded and remain connected to their native lands through their mobile devices, their primary source of news. They’re also industrious. Some 60 percent of Hispanics make more than $40,000 a year. And they’re proud of their individual cultures of origin and their overall Hispanic identity, with 55% preferring to speak Spanish at home. That means targeting different aspects of what Sinta calls the “digital ecosystem” with a variety of Spanish, English and Spanglish.

“Do they talk on Snapchat or TikTok? Do they watch Netflix?” It’s not just what you say or how you say it, Sinta and Gutiérrez observe, but where you say it and when you say it.

The pair met at a Greater Danbury Chamber of Commerce luncheon in 2015 and shortly thereafter decided to merge their synergies, Sinta’s digital company with Gutiérrez’s marketing one.

Sinta hails from Mexico City but moved to the United States in 1993 when his father — who worked in human resources for the Upjohn pharmaceutical company, now part of Viatris — was transferred to the headquarters in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Sinta says he was excited about the move, having already been an exchange student in 1990 at Westford Academy in Westford, Massachusetts. He graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from Western Michigan University and headed to Miami, but with no job in his field he took one in project management. “Every road was leading to sales.”

He also earned an MBA from Nova Southeastern University in Broward County, Florida. “I knew I wasn’t going to go back to engineering,” he says with a laugh. In 2007, he moved to Brookfield, where he started his own company.

Meanwhile, Gutiérrez, who was born in Caracas, Venezuela, was getting an MBA of his own, from Universidad Metropolitana there, and worked for Johnson & Johnson and Unilever. Marrying and settling in Mexico, he, too, was looking for work and decided to start his own company in 2011. When his wife, who works for PepsiCo, was transferred to its Valhalla site, Gutiérrez decided to relaunch his company here. It was not long before he and Sinta would be off on their new venture.

Today both men make their homes in Brookfield. Sinta and his wife — Denise Noto, a delivery nurse at Danbury Hospital — are the parents of two teenagers, one a student at the University of Connecticut and one in high school. Gutiérrez and wife Gabriella González, a supply chain integration director in PepsiCo’s beverage division, have two elementary school-age children. Gutiérrez is a soccer dad who loves mountain biking and baseball.

Sinta loves soccer and baseball, too, along with tennis. Both men are fans of Real Madrid, the pro soccer team, but where they part company is in their baseball interests. Sinta’s time in Florida has made a Miami Marlins fan out of him. Gutiérrez roots for the New York Yankees.

However, should any of these or other teams need help marketing to their Hispanic audiences, we know whom they can call.

For more, visit fingerthink.com.

Francisco “Paco” Sinta (left) and Humberto Gutiérrez are the Connecticut-based co-founders of Fingerthink, whose “main objective,” Sinta says, “is to help companies explore opportunities to tap into the Hispanic market with a well-rounded strategy.” Photograph by Bob Rozycki.