Three times this year, I’ve watched a client’s shoulders tense the moment I said the word Hispanic. Not because they disagreed with the data in front of them. Because before I got another sentence out, multicultural marketing had already been mentally filed under DEI and deprioritized right along with it.
That’s the shift I’ve been watching.
Somewhere along the way, two very different conversations became one. As companies reassessed their DEI strategies, multicultural marketing investment started getting caught in the same pullback.
Nobody frames it that way out loud. What I hear instead is we don’t have the budget this cycle, or we’re focused on operational priorities right now, or we don’t have the bandwidth.
Thirty years in this business, and I can tell the difference between a real constraint and a polite way of ending a conversation. This is usually the second one.
Here’s where I think marketers are getting this wrong: multicultural marketing was never fundamentally a diversity initiative. It’s audience strategy. And in healthcare, audience strategy is growth strategy.
That’s a business issue, regardless of where you stand on DEI.
The numbers on the DEI side aren’t subtle. Use of the term “DEI” in S&P 500 and Russell 3000 filings dropped 68 percent in a single year, according to The Conference Board. Freshfields found more than 200 S&P 500 companies removed or reduced references to words like “diversity” and “equity” from their annual reports in 2025.
Something real happened here. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
But the Hispanic population didn’t shrink to match.
It didn’t stop growing either. And importantly for healthcare marketers, that growth isn’t happening only in the places where we’ve historically expected to find it.
For most of my career, if you wanted to talk seriously about the Hispanic market, you were talking about a fairly predictable group of places. Miami. Los Angeles. Houston. Chicago. New York. San Antonio.
Not anymore.
In 1990, nine states held 86 percent of the entire U.S. Latino population. By 2020, that had fallen to 73 percent. Today, Hispanic population growth is increasingly happening in markets that many marketers still don’t instinctively think of as “Hispanic markets.”
North Carolina’s Hispanic population, for example, grew 40 percent in a decade and is projected to reach two million residents by 2050. South Carolina is experiencing significant growth as well.
If you run a health system or provider group in Charlotte, Greenville or any one of dozens of emerging markets across the country, that growth is happening inside your service area right now.
Whether it’s in your marketing plan or not.
And that’s particularly important in healthcare.
Healthcare growth doesn’t happen against a national demographic profile. It happens ZIP code by ZIP code, service area by service area.
A recent JAMA Network Open study found that 82 percent of patients travel 30 minutes or less to see their primary care provider. People don’t shop nationally for a doctor. They choose someone close to home and often stay with that provider for years.
So the changing makeup of the communities surrounding your hospitals, clinics and medical practices should be driving your audience strategy. How your organization chooses to structure its DEI initiatives is a completely different conversation.
Your patients don’t know which budget line paid for the ad.
They don’t care.
Language, culture and consumer behavior don’t reorganize themselves because a company changes its internal priorities.
Neither does spending power.
There’s still a stubborn assumption sitting underneath some of these budget conversations: Hispanic consumers aren’t worth increased marketing investment because the money isn’t there.
That one’s pretty easy to check.
Hispanic median household income rose 5.5 percent in a single year, to just under $71,000 in 2024, according to the Census Bureau, at a time when non-Hispanic White household income showed no statistically significant change. Hispanic homeownership reached a record 9.8 million households in 2024, marking the largest year-over-year gain of any racial or ethnic group for the second consecutive year.
This isn’t a population waiting to become a growth opportunity. It already is one.
And culture still matters.
Kantar found that 64 percent of Hispanic consumers actively seek out brands that acknowledge their culture, compared with 48 percent of the general population.
Yet Hispanic-targeted media still receives roughly four cents of every advertising dollar spent in this country, despite Hispanics representing about one-fifth of the U.S. population.
Nobody sat down, looked at those two numbers side by side and decided that gap made sense.
That’s what happens when marketing decisions run on old assumptions while the market keeps moving.
So when someone tells me there’s no budget for this work, my next question is simple:
Where do your patients actually live?
Because that’s the question that matters.
Your DEI strategy may have changed.
Your growth opportunity didn’t.