Inside Dish’s Latino Center of Excellence: Why it is Different

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.

Rodriguez, who leads enterprise-wide efforts to maximize segment opportunities across Dish Network’s three main lines of business: Dish (DishLATINO) – Sling and Boost Wireless, notes that on the Boost Mobile Brand, his work focuses around identifying which consumers are in fact Hispanics. “We analyze the retail footprint and how it corresponds to the density and location of Hispanics.” Marketing budgets for Boost Mobile and Sling are managed by these business units. Rodriguez notes that the wireless segment has a lot of unmet needs and that his team is working on strategy refinements for Boost.

How Dish Latino Determines its Hispanic Target 

The direct-to-broadcast satellite Dish LATINO service, the suite of stand-alone programming packages containing both Spanish & English language channels, targets two segments of the Hispanic population.  The unassimilated segment (18% of the Hispanic population) and the bicultural-Spanish-dominant (30% of the Hispanic population). The unassimilated segment  is foreign born and Spanish-dependent for all aspects of their lives as well as culturally attached to their country of origin.  The bi-cultural Hispanic segment tends to be foreign born and has lived in the U.S for 10+ years. They are comfortable with English and are exploring a new culture through the lens of their cultural heritage.

These two segments are the ideal customer for DishLATINO,  How does Dish-Latino’s marketing team determines which Hispanics belong to the the above segments and not the bilingual and fully acculturated segments? Rodriguez notes the assimilation algorithm takes the following factors into account: Language spoken at home, Language of media consumption, Cultural affinity, Proportion of first 18 years lived in US and preferred language. According to this acculturation algorithm, roughly 30%-40% of the 60 million Hispanics living in the U.S. are either unassimilated or bicultural, Rodriguez says.

Research by Rodriguez and his team has determined that these two segments have many unmet needs. One of them is the need for speaking and perfecting English. The programming  channel “Inglés para Todos” answers to this need as learning English affords more opportunities to Hispanics.  Rodriguez also sees opportunities to cross over to Boost Mobile and Sling with a similar offering.

“We are looking to carve out opportunities on the wireless side and trying to leverage and take advantage of some of the things consumers are telling us are very appealing like for instance Inglés para Todos”, Rodriguez concludes.