Here’s How Retailers Should Engage Latinx Beauty Shoppers — Beyond Latinx Heritage Month

As shopping moves online during the coronavirus pandemic, retailers and brands are placing increased focus on digital selling tools.

Target has a beauty-specific endcap designed for the Latinx consumer.

It features products from Latinx founders — Jessica Alba's Honest Beauty, Gabriela Trujillo's Alamar Cosmetics, Ada Rojas' Botanika Beauty, Eric Roa's Pacinos — in 250 of Target's beauty departments through the end of October.

But the endcaps are just part of Target's broader plan for engaging its Latinx consumers. The retailer is also shining a spotlight on grocery and baby brands with Latinx founders, and has created a content series called Más Que (more than), meant to highlight that people in the Latinx community are more than a label, language or surname. On Target's web site, Más Que has its own page featuring quotes from Latinx brand founders, easy access to their brands and a call for diverse suppliers looking to work with the retailer.

It also includes a note that says: “Más que a month, it's tu heritage,” meaning “more than a month, it's your heritage.”

That idea — that the Latinx community is Latinx all the time, not just from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15 — is one that all retailers need to take to heart, experts said.

For beauty retailers, it's particularly important. Latinx shoppers overindex in beauty shopping, and beauty rituals are closely tied to culture. Yet the demographic has not always received close attention from product developers and marketers, and is too often lumped together as one big group versus addressed in more individualistic ways.

“One of the reasons that retailers have shied away from marketing to the Latinx culture is simply because of the complexity,” said Mousumi Behari, an e-commerce and retail strategy expert at Avionos. “Latinx encapsulates people from the Mexican culture, from the Puerto Rican culture, Dominican, Brazilian, just to name a few. Each of those cultures have their own nuances. However, representation does matter, and we know that if a customer sees someone who looks like them with a product, they are going to be more apt to buy it.”

Patricia Reynoso, North America director of local and cultural relevancy at the Estée Lauder Cos., noted that companies should strive for “ongoing engagement” with the Latinx community.

“A lot of brands are afraid to do something and do it ‘ wrong,' so then they do nothing. It's better to do something and to be consistent, to be proactive — you go slow, you go steady, you learn, you apply your learnings. If you get negative feedback on your Instagram brand page, don't delete them, learn from them.”

That constant engagement is why the Target endcaps and messaging work, according to Jose Villa, president of crosscultural marketing agency Sensis.

“The majority of the stuff that brands and large corporations do for Hispanic Heritage Month is tokenistic, it's checking a box. And for the most part, Hispanics don't really care. It doesn't do much, it doesn't move the needle,” Villa said. “For brands like Target, who are heavily invested in the Hispanic community and do things year-round, it's not like a oneoff thing they do for Hispanic Heritage Month, it's more authentic.”

Executives from beauty retailers and brands need to hire people from different backgrounds to work inside their companies, but also spend time in Latinx communities themselves to learn about the cultures. With that insight, they could keep the varied Latinx beauty shoppers in mind at the beginning of the product development process, which could help make the resulting marketing messages more authentic, experts said.

“The biggest challenge is that people don't live in these communities,” Villa said. “They don't go down to Cuban

Miami or Mexican East L.A.” But spending more time in those communities would certainly be a good idea, he noted.

“I reject the idea that you have to be Hispanic to understand Hispanic culture,” Villa said. “You have to care, to do your research, learn about the market and immerse yourself in the market.”

Reynoso, who advises brands in the Lauder portfolio on how to market to people of color, suggested a similar tactic. “We tell the brands, ‘Go be where the communities are. Go sit in the pizza shop somewhere and listen to how Gen Z Latinas in the Bronx speak and see how you can work with that and learn from that,'” she said.

The marketing visuals are also important, she noted. “I have been championing Afro-Latinas for a long time. You can't grow up in New York, which is where I'm from, and not realize that Latinas are Black, too.” Brands need to make sure they're casting across the full range of Latinx people.

“It's a new era,” said Reynoso, who has Gen Z twins, and they and their multiethnic group of friends will “not stand for people being omitted from the conversation.”

“This next generation really has no tolerance for it,” Reynoso said. “They will take their attention elsewhere.

They will walk away from a television show, they will put away that