While Centers of Multicultural Marketing Excellence certainly fulfill their function as specialized units for best practices and research, they are also sometimes mocked by insiders as consulting units that do not have decision-making power. This is not the case of Dish’s Latino Center of Excellence, Alfredo Rodriguez, Vice President, Latino Center of Excellence at DISH Network tells Portada. “DishLATINO is a brand and a product. A P&L focused mindset drives all acquisition, retention, programming & product initiatives.”, he asserts.
Led by Alfredo Rodriguez, the Latino Center of Excellence has 25 employees, including executives Nicole Preston, General Manager, Latino Center of Excellence; Juan Machado, General Manager Marketing in charge of acquisition, Jean Louis Bedout, General Manager, in charge of retention and upsell, as well as Reynaldo Pagani, who is in charge of the Puerto Rican market.
Dish Latino Center of Excellence: How it came about
In 2020 Dish acquired Boost Mobile and Sprint’s prepaid customers from Sprint as Sprint merged with T-Mobile. As a result, DISH became a nationwide U.S. wireless carrier. Dish’s leadership could not help but notice that in addition to Dish Latino and Sling’s Hispanic subscribers, Dish now had a substantial Hispanic customer base in the form of prepaid wireless client. Approximately a third of Boost Mobile customers are Hispanics. That is when the executives at the helm of Dish decided to create the Latino Center of Excellence. The main part of the new unit’s team was to be composed by Dish Latino executives, as the direct to broadcast satellite provider already had a an established brand marketing team.
“Because of the very nature of the product which is solely for Hispanics, Dish Latino has a very contained customer base and its own P&L. This affords as the luxury of running it as a business unit,” Alfredo Rodriguez, Vice President, Latino Center of Excellence at DISH Network, tells Portada. “We have our own marketing budgets for branding acquisition and retention. Additionally, we manage the entire budget , from media to production. We design the strategy. We are very keen on insuring that we have a return on marketing investment as we have full accountability for the subscriber base we manage,” Rodriguez adds.
As of December 31, 2021,Dish Networks had 10.707 million pay-TV subscribers in the United States, including 8.221 million DISH TV subscribers and 2.486 million SLING TV subscribers. Rodriguez claims that an important part of the Dish TV subscriber base is Hispanic and that they are the leaders in the Spanish-tier direct-to-broadcast satellige category, (DBS), where they compete with providers including ComCast, Spectrum and DirecTV.
Cross-selling Opportunities
Many of the insights that Rodriguez’s team obtains at Dish Latino can be be used to understand the customer base, particularly the Hispanic customer base of Sling and Boost Mobile. “We see a lot of opportunities to cross-sell and upsell to other brands, including combining data to provide existing and future customers interesting offers. We work very closely with Dish, Boost and Sling to leverage data, segmentation and insights,” Rodriguez maintains. He adds that more than about just using the data it is “about obtaining a real connection with our clients.”
How Dish Latino Determines its Hispanic Target
