Both Communispace and SMG Multicultural will use the online community to provide their clients with insights into the Hispanic market in the US – the country’s fastest-growing consumer group.

The community is made up of 300 US residents aged 25-54 and will be managed by a bilingual team at Communispace with input from SMG.

Stephanie Abell, manager of agency solutions at Communispace, said the community will provide the company and its clients with “a valuable resource tool to tap into and obtain insights from this important consumer segment”.

Esther Franklin, executive vice president at SMG Multicultural, said it “will enable us to listen and obtain a deeper level of understanding about what is meaningful in their everyday lives”.

Communispace has also published a white paper on Hispanic identity, which says that the demographic categories commonly used in market research actually exclude most of the people who identify themselves as Hispanic or Latino, and do not lead to effective segmentation.