Marketing in LATAM and its neighboring countries
How would you feel if someone knocked on your door and presented a service or product demonstration to you on a Saturday morning? How often do you buy an unbranded item of a brand being exposed in the middle of the street while you are walking by? How often have you heard already about e-commerce and leveraging of data for improving customer experience? How present do you think these practices are in South America e.g.?
Natura: one of the biggest cosmetics brands in South America from Brazil, for which one of their biggest revenue streams come from direct door-to-door sales.
Belcorp: another huge cosmetics brand, comparable to the L’Óreal of South America, is just now starting to collect their consumers’ data and transforming them into actionable information for digital marketing among other marketing tactics.
Telefónica: Telecom company present in Latam, Spain and other countries is just now hiring millennials and generation Zers to innovate team and, consequently, their product portfolio and work environment.
70% of the people in Peru will have access to mobile phones only by 2020.
In 2017 54% of the people surveyed in LATAM think that the usage of big data for advertising purposes should be illegal.
As of 2019, there are still 32% of people in Colombia that are not internet users.
In whole LATAM there is a mere 50% of the whole population (around 650,000,000 people) that are social media users, which compared to USA and its 74% is rather low.
In Mexico in 2016 14% of online sales were annulled due to fraud suspicion, which makes it clear why people in LATAM and Mexico are not yet fans of the e-commerce trend…
With these facts and figures my aim is to show that business and brand management vary from country to country, and in this case, from continent to continent. While in the U.S. McDonald’s invites people to put their plates away themselves, the same will not happen in countries such as Indonesia with remarkably high power distance levels.
Bearing these cultural and structural conventions in mind, obviously the marketing practices inside a company in this side of the world are abundantly differing- in Europe there is hardly a multinational business running without assigning shares of their budget to online marketing tools or e-commerce platforms’ enhancement, whilst in Peru the market on Sundays in Cuzco is for a lot of people the main source of income and minutes spent on Instagram are not even an option.
For me, while living in Peru, to realize first-hand in the classroom but also in my everyday life that these differences are so real and so present, was fascinating and only spoke to the fact that these countries have so much potential and will grow astonishingly in the coming years. It is marvelous to see that, for instance, European CMOs expatriated to Latin America would need to adapt and live within the culture to understand the populations’ needs and concerns, to market a product/service successfully.
Globalization is true and growing, but there are still differences- and I, personally, am glad!
Vice-President
Sources:
Social Media Usage in the U.S., Statista. (2019). Retrieved from: https://fesrvsd.fe.unl.pt:2058/topics/3196/social-media-usage-in-the-united-states/
Big Data Online Advertising Latin America, Statista. (2019). Retrieved from: https://fesrvsd.fe.unl.pt:2058/statistics/757738/big-data-online-advertising-latin-america/
Regional Distribution of B2C and e-commerce in Latin America. (2019). Retrieved from: https://fesrvsd.fe.unl.pt:2058/statistics/728193/regional-distribution-of-b2c-e-commerce-in-latin-america/
Number of Internet Users in Latin America countries, Statista. (2019). Retrieved from: https://fesrvsd.fe.unl.pt:2058/statistics/186919/number-of-internet-users-in-latin-american-countries/
Number of Social Network Users in Latin America, Statista. (2019). Retrieved from: https://fesrvsd.fe.unl.pt:2058/statistics/244929/number-of-social-network-users-in-latin-america/
*Special access to statistics by being Nova SBE’s student
