H/L's Yunilda Esquivel On Prioritizing Cultural Nuance

For years, marketers have sliced the world into neat generational boxes: boomers, gen X, millennials, gen Z. Each with its tidy list of traits – cynical, loyal, authentic, avocado-obsessed.

But culture rarely plays by such clean rules. With technology, media and identities shifting faster than ever, are these buckets still helpful or just lazy clichés that flatten real people?

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For Yunilda Esquivel, VP director of multicultural marketing at H/L, cultural nuance is the crucial dimension that blunt age bands ignore. “Reducing diverse people to a birth-year bracket misses the individual fire and nuanced perspectives driving decisions,” she says. “Instead of relying heavily on blunt demographic segments, let’s prioritise sophisticated, culturally sound, data-driven segmentation. We can and should leverage lifestyle affinities, values, engagement patterns, content consumption, and attitudinal data. This allows us to focus on individual preferences, behaviours, and cultural sensibilities that reveal actual tribes and communities of interest and transcend simplistic age brackets.”

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