Apparently Latinos like to shop at Walmart, and the folks in Bentonville have taken notice. Next year, Walmart plans to double its ad spending budget targeting multicultural consumers. In addition, Walmart will be decentralizing multicultural marketing from a ‘silo’ approach and making all business units accountable for multicultural marketing. Big move!

Furthermore, Tony Rogers, Walmart’s Senior VP of Brand Marketing asserted that the retailing giant expects 100 percent growth from multicultural. Per Rogers, Walmart is not only moving away from silos, but also investing in training, setting quantifiable goals, and building partnerships outside of the company to help accelerate growth.

The big shift came as a result of last year’s Latin Grammys, when in preparing its spot, Walmart missed a great opportunity to focus on its successful layaway program. In Rogers’ words, “The layaway team was working hard on layaway. The multicultural team was working hard on the Latin Grammys and not going to the layaway meetings. That was a real eye opener for me.”

Some of the operational changes inside of Walmart include a set ‘multicultural ‘ agenda item during weekly Monday morning meetings, where top executives track progress and assess how to move forward. Multicultural has even made it into performance review objectives. “People may have three or four objectives, and multicultural is one of those things.”

At the recent ANA conference in Miami, Mr. Rogers was applauded when he quoted Javier Delgado, a Walmart marketing executive as saying that although some companies require permission to do multicultural initiatives, at Walmart permission is needed not to do one.