Isabel Valdes named one of top 25 women entrepreneurs in America.

HISPANICVISTA -(Noticiaswire) April 25, 2001 - Fortune Small Business Has named "in-culture" marketing pioneer and co-founder of Santiago & Valdes Solutions, Isabel Valdes, as one of the top 25 women entrepreneurs in America.

The women selected by Fortune Small Business for this prestigious honor all have a common understanding of the first rule of the new economy: one person, endowed with passion and purpose, can make an enormous difference. Isabel Valdes' career has made a difference by raising corporate America's awareness about the value of reaching multicultural consumers.

For years, corporate America virtually ignored Hispanic consumers or treated them as inconsequential to the bottom line. Valdes, a Stanford-educated marketing consultant, originated the "in-culture" marketing strategy, using an understanding of the culture as a starting point of any marketing strategy. As a market consultant and strategist, she has worked with major corporations in virtually every industry category to develop "in-culture" marketing strategies that bring about monumental change and deliver enormous bottom line results.

Valdes was the first to measure Hispanics' consumer tastes by testing their responses using visual images instead of words. She also developed and standardized language segmentation strategies, which have become widely used by marketing executives in every industry and have become the foundation for Nielsen's Homescan(TM) market research methodology.

"I am honored to be among such an esteemed group of fellow women entrepreneurs," says Valdes. "In the changing American landscape, corporations are just now beginning to wake-up to the power of reaching multicultural consumers. I'm glad that I have been able to help make a difference in the way corporations approach multicultural consumers. By helping corporations understand that to build relationships with multicultural markets they first learn about the markets and then develop approaches that ring true, corporations are able to see the results in the bottom line and in the fabric of our society."

Prior to co-founding Santiago & Valdes Solutions, Valdes, founded Hispanic Market Connections, which she recently sold to Access Worldwide Communications. She is the author of the groundbreaking books, the Hispanic Market Handbook (Gale Research) and Marketing to American Latinos: A Guide to the In-Culture Approach (Paramount Publishing). She is also a lecturer at Stanford University, a trustee of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute, is the senior project director for AC Nielsen's Homescan(TM) panel and is a board member for the National Hispanic Leadership Institute.

In addition to the honor from Fortune Small Business, Valdes has been awarded the Hispanic Entrepreneur Award by Hispanic Magazine, has been named as the Business Woman of the Year by the New York Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and has been named by American Demographics as the 21st Century Star of Multicultural Research.