Biography of Isabel Valdes

She provides clients with insights and information needed to unlock the high business potential associated with culture markets. Her clients include Fortune 500 companies and small businesses in virtually every industry and category, e-commerce, nonprofits and Government.

For more than 20 years, Ms Valdes, founder of Cultural Access Group (formerly Hispanic Market Connections), conducted marketing research with unique culturally sensitive methods and state-of-the-art techniques through her corporation and offered expert consultation services to effectively reach multicultural markets in the US, Spain and Latin America. Recently Ms Valdes founded isabelvaldes.com, a consulting firm, to advise clients on a broad range of business related issues in global and In-Culture marketing.

Isabel Valdes is the principal author of the Hispanic Market Handbook, "a bible for marketers and advertisers communicating with Hispanics" (1995). In June 2000, she launched "Marketing To American Latinos: A Guide To The In-Culture Approach", a book released in paper, CD-ROM and cyber formats.

Her leadership and vision led Hispanic Business magazine to proclaim, "Isabel Valdes may be a major force behind the maturation of Hispanic market research in America". She was awarded the 1997 Hispanic Entrepreneur Award by Hispanic Magazine and had previously been named Business Woman of the Year by the New York Hispanic Chambers of Commerce in 1995. In March 2000, she was lauded by American Demographics magazine as the "21st Century Star of Multicultural Research".

Ms Valdes is currently a lecturer at Stanford University's Professional Publishing Course and she is a founding faculty member of the National Hispanic Corporate Council Institute (NHCCI). In addition, she is co-founder of the research committee for the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies (AHAA) and sits on the Ethnic Research Committee of the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF). She is a trustee of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute, the National Hispana Leadership Institute in Arlington, VA, the Mexican Museum of San Francisco, the Latino Health Center in Orange, CA and Teatro Vision in San Jose, CA. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of Pueblo Corporation, one of the largest Hispanic owned businesses in the United States. She is a frequent guest speaker at major conferences and institutions and a regular columnist for several publications.

Before founding Hispanic Market Connections, Ms. Valdes conducted communications research for Stanford University and was a member of the clinical faculty at Stanford University School of Medicine's Division of Family Medicine for six years. She earned an M.A.in Communications and an M.A.in Education from Stanford. She also holds professional degrees in Communications Arts and in Advertising from two leading universities in South America.

Ms Valdes was born in Chile and recently became an American citizen. She is married to Dr Julio Aranovich, a native of Argentina, and is the mother of Gabriel and Clara.