Target wants Latinos as customers

 The profile of Target’s customers is changing as the nation’s Latino population surges.

“Digitally connected, time-pressured, savvy moms who are increasingly Hispanic” is how Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel describes the retailer’s typical customer.

Target wants to retain other key customer groups, from millennials to aging Baby Boomers. But Steinhafel said Hispanics are a critical market for the company. They are the biggest and fastest growing minority group in the U.S, comprised of Latin American immigrants and their offspring, as well as Latinos whose families have been in the country for generations.

Large retailers like Target are working hard to win the loyalty and purchasing power of those more than 50 million consumers, particularly in states like Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Florida and Colorado, where more than a fifth of the population is Hispanic.

Latinos in the United States have more than $1 trillion in annual buying power, according to the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business. According to its researchers, the U.S. Hispanic market is larger than the economies of all but 13 countries in the world.

Steinhafel wants Target to capture a big piece of that spending.

“We are going to source dominant presentations of Latino and Hispanic merchandise through the entire store,” he said. “It’s a big effort that we have internally to really stretch ourselves and jump way out in front.”

From MPR, read more at 

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2013/05/29/business/target-hispanic-loyalty