Electronic Retailer - August 2011 - 34

The Wired World

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34

Listen Up Español became one of America’s fastest-growing companies by serving the U.S. Hispanic market for direct-response products. Trouble is, Latino love for social media and smartphones means that fragmentation is an even bigger problem when you say it in Spanish.
by JACK GoRDoN

According to the 2010 U.S. Census, more than 50 million people of Hispanic descent now live in the United States. That is larger than the population of Spain, and considerably more than Canada or Australia. The U.S. Hispanic population is growing, as well. In fact, more than half of all population growth in the United States for the past 10 years comes from the rising number of Hispanics. And that’s just documented Latinos. According to some estimates, the Census probably missed about 15 million undocumented Hispanics, says Craig Handley, co-founder and CEO of Spanish-language call center Listen Up Español. If, in reality, there are about 65 million Hispanics in the United States, that would match the population of France. Handley and his partner, president and co-founder Tony Ricciardi, love numbers like those. They especially love an estimate by Impre Media, publisher of Hispanic Market Weekly, that the purchasing power of U.S. Hispanics in 2010 amounted to $1 trillion – and that it will rise to $1.5 trillion by 2015. They’re also fond of an Impre Media finding that U.S. Hispanics demonstrate fierce brand loyalty: 85 percent of them are willing to pay more for a brand they trust than for one they don’t know.

Craig Handley

tony Ricciardi

Handley and Ricciardi love those numbers because the size and power of the U.S. Hispanic market lies behind the explosive growth of their business. By virtue of its performance from its founding in 2006 to the $14.9 million in revenue it posted in 2009, Listen Up Español (LUE) ranked No. 27 on Inc. Magazine’s 2010 list of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States. It was No. 1 in the category of Business Products and Services. With about 20 employees at its Portland, Maine, headquarters and 700 at a call center in Hermosillo, Mexico, LUE provides scripting, translation help and Spanish-language call-center services for direct response merchandise, including the Magic Bullet, ShamWow, ProActiv, Jack LaLanne’s Power Juicer and Ronco products. It also handles incoming and outgoing calls for nonprofits, including Children’s Miracle Network and the Humane Society. Last year, the company fielded 1.8 million calls.

A 2009 infomercial for a hair-straightening device called the InStyler was such an enormous hit in the U.S. Hispanic market that LUE doubled the number of seats in its 24-hour Hermosillo facility to 500 and hired an additional 500 agents in 30 days. That spectacular growth rate stalled in 2010, when revenue dropped to about $10 million. Handley and Ricciardi expect 2011 sales to rebound back to around the $15 million mark. They say that last year’s dip was due to continued sluggishness in the consumer market combined with what they describe as a mixture of caution and confusion by advertisers.

Fragmentation on Steroids

The confusion springs, they say, from the same phenomenon that has bedeviled English-language advertisers for years: fragmentation. The oncestraightforward media landscape of print, radio and television has been splintered by the internet, social media

electronicRetaileR | august 2011

Electronic Retailer - August 2011

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