Colombian-born Entrepreneurial Success Story

Hispanic female entrepreneur successfully launches new marketing research company and achieves highest level of certification in her industry.

MIAMI, FL (PRWEB) February 13, 2004 --Belkist Padilla has spent her entire career helping companies connect to Latinos. Born in Bogotá, Colombia and raised in the States, a love of Spanish literature and communications led to a double major and a business minor at Virginia Tech. It also left her with a question: how to build an interesting career around her degree.

Inspiration struck while conducting market research for a professor on the new" Hispanic segment. She left Virginia for San Diego in 1985, where an ad led her to Market Development, Inc.(MDI). After convincing MDI she could moderate Spanish focus groups, she began handling her own clients and developed a following. From there, she moved to Strategy Research Corp. in Miami to eventually direct their qualitative team of six.

Hungry for a new challenge she founded Insights Marketing Group, Inc., - a certified Florida Minority Business Enterprise (or MBE) dedicated to qualitative consumer research and diagnostic advertising research for Hispanics and multicultural markets - in 2000. Today Insights employs five and counts AOL, American Express and Kraft Foods as clients. Its never boring. Each project is a study of human nature."

Belkist continues to lead her company and industry; she was recently awarded the Master Moderator Certificate from the RIVA Training Institute. One of two in the US, she is the only Hispanic moderator to achieve this distinction through comprehensive RIVA course work capped by passing extensive written and practicum examinations.

Insights Marketing Group, Inc. is a full-service consumer marketing research company serving US multicultural markets and Latin America. IMG specializes in qualitative research and multicultural copytesing, through an exclusive license with Diagnostic Research, with over 400 African American and Hispanic targeted advertisements in a normative databank. For more information contact Insights Marketing Group, Inc.