& #260;Futbol Drive!
Hyundai Aims to Kick-Start Hispanic Sales With World Cup
By JENNIFER BELLANTONIO
For Hyundai Motor America, the 2002 World Cup is all about Hispanic marketing.
The Fountain Valley-based automaker is sponsoring the 2002 World Cup, under way in South Korea and Japan, on Spanish-language television for the first time.
More than half of Hyundai’s annual Hispanic budget (pegged at more than $12 million) is dedicated to the effort,the most Hyundai has spent on Hispanic advertising in the three years it has been marketing to the growing segment, according to Paul Sellers, Hyun-dai’s director of marketing.
“Each year our budget has gone up a little bit,” he said. “But this year our budget went up significantly because of the World Cup. We feel the return could be exponentially larger on a percentage basis than it will be to the market in general.”
The move is a logical one.
Seoul-based parent Hyundai Motor Corp. is the exclusive global auto sponsor of the World Cup, which “gave us the inside track,” Sellers said.
In the U.S., Hyundai opted to focus its World Cup efforts on the Hispanic market. The move is designed to give the automaker an inroad to a segment already mined by rivals, according to Yolanda Alarcon Cassity, account director at Hyundai’s Dallas-based Hispanic ad shop Dieste, Harmel & Partners.
“There are a lot of companies like Nissan and Honda that have established a strong bond with the Hispanic consumer already,” Cassity said. “They’re very strong advertisers.”
Hyundai, which is hoping to follow Japan’s Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co. into the top tier of U.S. automakers, is taking a page from its bigger counterparts, Cassity said.
“Honda used to be a World Cup sponsor way back when and they made a lot of progress with it. They realized how important it was to speak to the Hispanic market,” she said.
Hispanics,nearly 40 million strong in the U.S.,are a relatively untapped market for Hyundai. But the automaker’s sales among the group are growing.
In 1999, Hispanics were less than 3% of Hyundai’s overall sales, “which was kind of by default,” Sellers said.
“We weren’t marketing to Hispanics, but they were finding us regardless,in relatively small numbers,” he said.
In 1999, Hyundai hired its first Hispanic agency, Dieste, Harmel & Partners, which has an office in Irvine. It also tapped Miami-based Hispanic public relations firm IAC Group.
By the end of 1999, 9% of Hyundai’s sales were to Hispanics,30,000 to 35,000 vehicles, Sellers said.
The attraction?
The automaker’s 10-year, 100,000-mile powertrain warranty, Sellers said.
Hispanics are savvy auto buyers, he said, and “there has to be a value there aside from the price itself.”
Now that Hyundai has its foot in the door, it wants to kick it open. Enter the World Cup.
With its sponsorship, Hyundai expects to inch its sales to Hispanics to 10% of overall sales by the end of this year. Through May, Hyundai sold more than 153,000 vehicles overall in the U.S., up 15% from the year-ago period.
The World Cup is “a great platform for us to market to that community,” Sellers said of Hispanics. “Not only because we know we can get their attention, but it also demonstrates that we have a commitment to supporting an activity that they embrace culturally very strongly.”
Soccer, or football as it’s known outside the U.S., is hot among Hispanics and the rest of the world.
In 1998, 2 billion people,about a third of the world’s population,watched France throttle Brazil in the World Cup final.
But the sport has been a hard sell to other Americans. U.S. ratings of the 1998 World Cup in France were mediocre. This year, U.S. TV networks were slow to scoop up buying rights to the 2002 games.
One reason: The matches in Asia are spread throughout the night and early morning in U.S. time zones.
It’s a different story at Spanish-language networks.
Los Angeles-based Univision Communi-cations Inc. is said to have paid about $150 million for a package that includes the 2002 and 2006 World Cups and other events.
The company is broadcasting the 64 games,live and taped,on Univision, as well as on its cable networks TeleFutura and Galavision.
Sellers said Hyundai “negotiated long and hard to secure our sponsorship,” because “Univision is rather bullish as a network.”
“They’re the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in a relatively small arena of Hispanic broadcast platforms,” he said.
Hyundai’s exposure on Univision, the top U.S. Spanish-language network, is critical to exposing Hispanics to the automaker, Sellers said.
“We feel quite positive that our awareness numbers are going to jump exponentially with the latter part of this year” based upon the World Cup sponsorship, Sellers said.
Hyundai started advertising May 30 with the kick off of the World Cup. It’s running three commercials,two of which push the 2002 Sonata and things Hispanic soccer fans like to do. One ad shows a man honking the horn of his car celebrating his team’s win,a common practice among Hispanics, according to Sellers.
“They’re light hearted but we felt they would really strike a chord with the Hispanic soccer fan,” he said.
Hyundai also is running print ads in Spanish-language publications and launched a 125,000-piece mail campaign with a World Cup theme. The brochures were distributed in 14 Hispanic-heavy areas, such as the Southland and New York, Hyundai’s top Hispanic markets.
The mail piece touts the giveaway of a World Cup soccer ball, umbrella and backpack for those who test drive a Hyundai.
The marketing is set to run until the World Cup’s finish at the end of June.
This isn’t the first time that Hyundai has linked itself with soccer.
The automaker routinely sponsors women’s and youth soccer organizations, and even held its own “Hyundai Cup” last year, involving 138 amateur soccer teams throughout 10 U.S. cities. The finals were held in South Korea.
The company also holds media days for Hispanic journalists and sponsors cultural events, such as the Cinco de Mayo celebration in Los Angeles.
To reach Hispanics, Sellers said you have to “genuinely demonstrate that you are embracing something that is culturally important to them.”
“It helps you gain permission to market to the consumer,” Sellers said. “If they sense it’s not genuine and sincere, it can backfire.”
