NEW YORK (CBS.MW) -- As you search for companies to invest in, you might pay special attention to those that are pitching hard to sell to the fastest-growing ethnic group in the nation: The Latinos.

Not only are they the most rapidly expanding, they also are the biggest "minority" group -- the 35 million Latinos among us represent 12.5 percent of the U.S. population. By contrast, African Americans are 12.3 percent, Asian Americans 3.6 percent, and Native Americans 0.8 percent -- and all of them are growing more slowly than the Latinos.

Companies such as Kraft, Pepsi and Procter & Gamble are making an all-out, brand-by-brand marketing drive to win over Latinos. So is General Electric's NBC, which last October bought the Telemundo Communications Group, the nation's second largest Spanish language television broadcaster (after Univision), in a $2.7 billion deal.

Such corporations are impressed that Latinos tend to be much younger than the rest of the U.S. population (median age: 26 vs. 35), live in larger households (3.6 people vs. 2.6) and have bigger families. The managers at P&G, for example, look at these numbers and see tons and tons of diapers flying off the shelves.

Sales and marketing

Christy Haubegger, the 33-year-old ebullient founder of Latina, a bilingual monthly women's magazine with circulation of 239,000, loves to rattle off some typical sales and marketing statistics:

Hispanics, she notes, are more likely than other Americans to agree with the statement, "I feel the need to be well-groomed." Indeed, 69 percent of Hispanics strongly agree, versus 40 percent of non-Hispanic whites. Or take the statement, "I feel the need to keep up with new styles." In surveys, 67 percent of Hispanic women agree, but only 31 percent of non-Hispanic white women do.

Hispanic women are more likely than non-Hispanic white women to use lipstick seven or more times a day. They are 40 percent more likely to use hair coloring. Cracks Haubegger: "We don't get old, we just get red hair."

Hispanics also are a huge and rising factor in the food business. Asked whether food made from scratch is more nutritious than prepared food, 40 percent of Hispanics strongly agree that it is, versus 19 percent of others. Says Haubegger: "We tend to express love and care by painstakingly creating homemade meals."

Already this is influencing the food that mainstream America eats when dining out. When asked about the most powerful trend in food ordered in restaurants now, Ellen Koteff, executive editor of the weekly Nation's Restaurant News, answers with one word: "Latin." A lot of new Latin restaurants are opening in upper middle-class neighborhoods, featuring everything from Spanish to Cuban to Mexican food.

Potent force in the marketplace

The sheer force of numbers alone would make Hispanics a potent and much-courted force in the marketplace. For example, as Haubegger points out, the largest single automobile market in the U.S. is Los Angeles, and Hispanics constitute fully half of that market.

More broadly, the "minorities" -- Latinos plus African Americans, Asian Americans and Native Americans -- make up more than half the population of nine of the 10 biggest U.S. cities.

They are: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, San Diego, Dallas, San Antonio and Detroit. The only one of the top 10 where minorities don't yet make up toe majority is Phoenix, with just over 40 percent minority population in the 2000 census. But almost everyone expects that to change with the census of 2010.

True, three-quarters of all Hispanics are concentrated in just seven states -- California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Arizona and New Jersey. But Hispanics are in increasingly reaching out and making their mark in places where you might least expect to find them. Look at the southern and border states: Between 1900 and 2000, in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, North and South Carolina and Tennessee, the Hispanic population more than tripled.

So the Latinos are destined to play an ever-greater role in our polyglot culture, politics and markets. Small wonder that Christy Haubegger says any business that ignores this market does so at its peril -- and is missing a potentially rich and rare opportunity.