Food and Beverage: Finding the Hispanic Growth Opportunity

The category as a whole offered a strong opportunity with Hispanic consumers, yet this particular brand was seeing consistent year over year declines that did not match the category's overall trend. Leadership suspected the issue was cultural relevance rather than product quality, but had no research to confirm it or point toward a fix.

Without a clear diagnosis, the team risked either overinvesting in a fix that missed the real problem or underinvesting because the opportunity had never been properly sized.

Research began with a close review of existing syndicated and internal data to size the actual growth opportunity, followed by a quantitative study among Spanish dominant, bilingual, and English preferred Hispanic consumers to understand interest and category experience. Discussion forums across several Hispanic markets surfaced the specific barriers and triggers driving the disconnect, and virtual focus groups pressure tested a revised positioning before it went further.

The five phase structure meant every recommendation that followed was grounded in more than one type of evidence, not a single data source generalized too far.

The brand's positioning was revised specifically against the Hispanic target, with clear guardrails on messaging, product framing, and communication strategy. The team walked away with a solid understanding of the reasons Hispanic consumers would actually believe in the brand, the preferred flavors and formats for future offerings, and how significantly the base strategy needed to shift versus stay consistent with the general market approach.

The brand incorporated the revised positioning into its broader portfolio strategy rather than treating it as a side initiative, which made the Hispanic-specific work part of how the brand thought about growth generally, not a separate campaign running in parallel to the main strategy.

Perhaps more importantly, the internal team walked away with a research-backed answer to a question that had previously only generated internal debate: whether the category opportunity with Hispanic consumers was real and worth pursuing seriously, or a distraction from other priorities. The data settled that question decisively.

That internal alignment turned out to matter almost as much as the external results. Teams that had previously disagreed about priority now had a shared, evidence-based starting point to plan future budget and product decisions around.