This week, we’re featuring Jenina Nuñez as our Everyday Chica. The Brooklyn, NY-native is Manager, Global Menu Strategy atMcDonald’s Corporation, where she manages new product development activities from around the world. Prior to that, Nuñez led public relations and social engagement programs for the world’s largest fast food restaurant’s U.S. business. She spoke with Ain’t I Latina? about her career in strategic marketing and communications, engaging with the Latino demographic and growing up Garifuna.

Ain’t I Latina?: What led you to work at McDonald’s Corporation? Talk about your career trajectory and how you landed your role at McDonald’s.

Nuñez: My career trajectory is a very unique one, I would say. I’m in one of those kind of really rare positions where I had the very wonderful fortune of having a cross-section of experience. An integration of traditional, social, engagement, multicultural, digital experience, which I think really prepared me well for what I currently do at McDonald’s.

I spent most of my career on the agency side, learning different environments, different client models, and also really different ways to engage customers and do PR. It started out very traditional, looking up press contacts by hand; you know, just really getting my feet wet. I’ve worked for non-profit organizations. I actually started out in multicultural PR for a little while working with the Hispanic segment. Eventually moved into the general market segment working on the McDonald’s business at GolinHarris in Chicago, so it was then that I had been exposed to the golden arches for the first time.

I had a great couple of years on the brand and then I moved back into multicultural communications efforts for the Hispanic and African-American segment for a couple of different marquee accounts, and I think what was really good about that was understanding that there’s a way to effectively engage audiences. It really made me attune to the fact that there are opportunities for finding shared messages across all customer segments, but also at the heart of it [is] understanding the sensitivities and the value points that also make it relevant when you’re talking to that particular segment.

I had a really amazing experience working on Hispanic and African-American customer segments, and then moved into just social media engagement, so Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, leveraging these platforms for clients and really also seeing how they fit into a traditional integrated marketing mix. When you start to see your experience from all these different vantage points you kind of see how all the pieces of the puzzle work together.

When the opportunity at McDonald’s opened up, and it was a former client who was looking to hire for a team, it felt like a really amazing fit because at this point I had amassed a lot of those core tenets that you need to do PR today. When I look at my career from then to now, PR has completely evolved. When I think about the last several years, now you have the advent of social media, multiple market segments and it’s just a much more sophisticated profession. It involved a lot of alignment integration more than ever before when you think about how savvy the customer is and all the ways they can consume information. It was a really natural progression to really understand the marketplace from multicultural, traditional, digital, and social to move into the corporate space. I love the brand and I think it’s been really awesome to kind of leverage experiences from each of those parts of my background. There’s not one part of my background that I don’t leverage every day working at McDonald’s because that is how dynamic our customer base is.

Your experience has led you to work with numerous brands within the multicultural space in respect to various forms of media. What would you say is important for brands to keep in mind when marketing to the Latino demographic?

It’s about understanding there are a couple of different ways to effectively engage Latinos. Latinos come from so many different countries across Latin America. There are different ways to celebrate and embrace that, but there are shared points that Latinos have. It’s understanding those shared points are critical. But also understanding opportunities to really relate to those unique insights that are intrinsic to this segment is so critical.

The segment is savvy, sophisticated; they’re multi-segmented and they have the ability to consume in multiple languages and multiple ways. It’s very unique more so than ever before. Being able to understand those insights makes the connection much more authentic.

How do you identify? Do you consider yourself Afro-Latina, or use another term?

I struggled with this question a lot growing up. Now, personally, I feel very comfortable with my identity as a Black Latina, or Afro-Latina. I do define myself by those terms because it’s apart of the history; it’s apart of the culture. They’re inextricably linked. There’s no reason for me to feel like I have to identify as Latina without acknowledging the fact that’s a huge part of the diversity of my culture, my roots.

I personally grew up understanding very young that I was not just Afro-Latina, but I was Garifuna. That was just a given for me growing. I was taught to embrace it. I think it’s been amazing for me to celebrate it. I spent a lot of my college years and adult years continuing to not just embrace it but to educate on it.

Was there a time where you had to educate your peers on your identity? If so, how did their response shape your experience and, ultimately, identity?

I’ve always been aware that my background has not been so clear-cut, if you will. Always. I did find that there were points as a kid where it was hard to choose. I hung out with the Black girls in my class; I hung out with the group of Latinas/other Latin American girls in my class. I think that because I grew up in Brooklyn that’s not unusual. But for me there would be certain moments where it would be hard. I felt like I had to kind of choose.

Something as simple as pronouncing my name Nuñez. People would ask me a lot, well, are you mixed? It’s like, no, both of my parents are from Honduras. I’m first generation born in the United States. I felt like I always had to quantify who I was. It was second nature. By the time I was 10, I was quantifying my last name and what that meant. Why I had the last name Nuñez when I typically may’ve not looked like what you would perceive a Nuñez to look like. I know there were probably a couple of points in time in my teens in which I would have folks speak in front of me in Spanish, thinking that I didn’t speak any Spanish and surprised when I responded to them.

Having stepped into a role where I lead national Hispanic communication efforts and people meet me, they’re taken aback. Not in a bad way, but almost fascinated. I think that I’ve done amazing things to help blow over perceptions in the interactions that I do.

You can follow Jenina on Twitter at @Jenina11207.

This post was originally published on Ain’t I Latina?

Ain't I Latina?

Get relevant content delivered to you once a week