Hispanics Rely on In-Person Interactions for Product Advice

August 10, 2012

This article is included in these additional categories:

Analytics, Automated & MarTech | Data-driven | Email | Hispanic | Mobile Phone | Retail & E-Commerce | Social Media

biginsight-hispanic-advice-seeking-products-services-august2012.pngOf the various ways adult Hispanic consumers seek advice about products and services, face-to-face interactions far outgun any digital method, used by roughly three-quarter of survey respondents, according to [download page] a new analysis of information from the Hispanic InsightCenter by BIGinsight. The remaining methods Hispanics use to seek advice are largely digital, including: reading product reviews (34.6%); email (24.8%); text messaging (23.7%); via mobile devices (23.3%); and asking Facebook friends (20.1%).

This preference for face-to-face interactions extends to a subset of Hispanics examined by Sensis and White Horse in April 2012. These Hispanic smartphone owners who use their devices to help them shop in brick-and-mortar venues (“Hispanic mobile shoppers”) like to have company when they do so. Almost 70% said they prefer to shop with family members or friends when buying expensive items, citing getting their advice as the chief reason for bringing them along on these shopping trips.

Face-to-Face Also Top Method Giving Advice

Meanwhile, BIGinsight found that face-to-face interaction is also the leading way in which Hispanic consumers give product and service advice, at 83.2% of respondents, followed by email (35.4%), text messaging (28.6%), and via mobile devices (24.3%). Next in line – the old-school landline telephone, at 19.6%. Roughly 16% post to friends on Facebook, with instant messaging (13.5%), posting on Facebook retailer/brand pages (10.6%), writing product reviews (8.7%), and writing blogs (4.2%) less popular.

There are some clear distinctions between how Hispanic consumers seek and give advice. For example, while 34.6% seek advice in online product reviews, just 8.7% write reviews to give advice. Thus, less than 1 in 10 provide information in product reviews to roughly four times as many people who consume that information to make product decisions.

Hispanics Over-Index in Social Media Use

While Hispanics prefer face-to-face interactions for seeking and giving advice, they are by no means averse to digital communications. Indeed, they over-index non-Hispanics in their use of a variety of social networking sites and blogs, including Foursquare (index score of 166), MySpace (155), Hulu (144), Twitter (141), Google+ (133), and YouTube (133). They also skew above-average in their regular use of LinkedIn (127), Facebook (109), and Pinterest (109), though comparatively less so.

These findings are supported by April 2012 data from Nielsen, which indicated that Hispanics adults are 7% more likely than the average US online adult to have one or more social networking profiles. Further, that data revealed that Hispanics are 25% more likely than the average US online adult to follow a brand, and 18% more likely to follow a celebrity. They are also 21% more likely to post links, articles, videos, and websites, and 17% more likely to build or update a personal blog.

About The Data: BIGinsight surveyed about 15,000 US consumers (both Hispanic and non-Hispanic) in May and June 2012 in an online survey.

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