Recently, several strategic partnerships to better reach the Hispanic market have been announced. These partnerships bring together entities that don’t have knowledge of or a connection to the Hispanic market, with those that understand this market but may lack a specific functional area or expertise on the topic. Examples include Yahoo Telemundo portal’s partnerships with iVillage; the National Dairy Council Partnership efforts with the National Hispanic Medical Association; and Monster’s partnership with Consorte Media http://www.hispanictips.com/category/Business. This is not surprising and actually demonstrates how outreach to this diverse market is growing in sophistication. In fact, it shows that businesses understand their core strengths, and weaknesses, to define when and where to form strategic alliances or partnerships to reach the market.
The question, and challenge, is how do you make these partnerships work? It is not always that easy, especially as the two organizations have different priorities and budgets, or resources have already been allocated. In the case of Yahoo Telemundo/iVillage partnership, the potential is there according to the article in Media Week by Nancy Ayala: “Linda Boff, chief marketing officer for iVillage Properties, explains that iVillage’s 18.8 million ethnically diverse unique visitors in September can only help drive more traffic to Yahoo Telemundo, which already counts 13 million Latinos out of the 16.5 million U.S. Hispanics online through the Yahoo Network.” It also helps that iVillage, NBC and Telemundo are all corporate relatives.
There is no easy answer to ensure that these partnerships will work, but at the end of the day there has to be a commitment from both entities; you must allocate resources; you must set realistic goals and you should have the trust or confianza to have candid discussions. In many instances, the results might not be immediate, but they can be long-lasting, which also requires patience.
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