I want it

The last time I visited the USA I was an impressionable 17-year-old teenager (I’m 24 now, exchange student peculiarities you can say) that fell in love with one of the many fast food chains in the country: Taco Bell. It was cheap, it had mexican food (which I love despite being the opposite of my mediterranean diet) and it tasted great. But it wasn’t until this reading week, when I went to California, that I could finally visit again my beloved restaurant.

It is kind of surprising I could perfectly manage through the state with only my spanish, and Taco Bell was no exception. Employees spoke spanish fluently (granted his accent is way different than mine) and gave a friendly smile whenever they realized we shared languages. There I started to realize the targeted market was quite well defined. So a quick search on the net confirmed it on a video campaign:

Tasty ingredients represented by super heroes? A mexican-looking guy as the “captain” and protagonist? An asian-looking military-clad antagonist? You don’t have to know much about mexican wrestling and general culture to realize how narrow is the public the campaign is aiming at. Hispanoamericans.

And then I suddenly understand why did I have so much trouble finding a Taco Bell in Seattle, and even a harder time in Vancouver (there aren’t any, are they?).  California’s demographics show almost 40% of hispanic dwellers while in Vancouver the 40% is asian and hispanics are down to 2%. I don’t think anyone inside or outside Taco Bell expected getting good results by mocking tofu. And considering asian settlements are now growing exponentialy in all regions of the world, I wouldn’t expect them to get any good results anywhere in the future.

Just a wild guess, but I’m not the only one that thinks so…