Companies have found different ways and strategies to talk to the Brazilian public; Language is a barrier on social networks
The Brazilian market has become a destination for the constant landing of Hispanic startups. Over the past two years, companies from Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Peru and Chile have arrived in the country, including unicorns, as companies valued at more than US$1 billion are known.
It is also common for Brazil to become the first destination for these companies due to the size of the consumer market, even before entering countries that have Spanish as an official language or that are closer, such as the United States, in the case of Mexican companies.
Along this path, a point of attention is the communication strategy to establish dialogues and connection with the country’s public. Justo Supermercado, a Mexican startup that aims to offer a shopping experience and encourage the consumption of fresher products, says that the communication design process began with the EIXO Study, by B&Partners, which helped to understand the market and to deepen knowledge about Brazilians.
“In addition to talking about healthiness, in Brazil we brought a little more humor to this territory, to conquer the Brazilian public at first sight, bringing it in a light, fun way and using digital channels as a great ally to reach more people through the entertainment”, says Bianca Brito, head of brand.
The positioning can be seen in actions such as the #SupermercadoSemSofrência campaign, developed with the Adventures agency. With the influencer and TikToker Vittor Fernando as a spokesperson and bringing together more than 100 micro and nano influencers, the action played with the common problems when shopping in supermarkets and placed the brand as an option to end suffering.
COMMUNICATION WITHOUT NOISE
The challenge for Casai, which offers smart apartments, was to quickly understand that the brand’s original tone of voice, which seeks to convey simplicity and elegance, could sound “a little cold” to Brazilians.
“As a company in the hospitality sector, launching in Brazil also meant opening up our communications to South American countries such as Argentina and Chile that were not on our radar before. This meant that not only did we have to create a Brazilian brand voice, but we also had to adapt our Mexican Spanish to other Latin American countries,” explains Luiz Eduardo Mazetto, CEO of the startup in Brazil.
The profile of the users who usually receive in their apartments in Brazil also weighed on the platform’s communication strategy here. In São Paulo, where the startup has more units, the most common guests are business travelers and the time in advance they make reservations is shorter compared to customers in Mexico. There, it receives more families and foreign travelers, the apartments are bigger and it has a large number of tourists from the United States.
In the case of fintech management of corporate expenses Clara, also from Mexico and who recently became a unicorn, Fernando Asdourian, South America Head of Marketing, Growth and Communication, says that one of the first actions he took when he arrived at the company, in mid-August, was implement the RID (Relevant, Impactful, Doable) method. As the brand had a strong positioning in the North American country and, normally, decisions are made at headquarters, he wanted to avoid “noise” and the impact on results.
“This brought data and insights that led to campaign decisions to be taken in the country and, mainly, to consider the Brazilian market as strategic, both for its growing consumption power and for its plurality of characteristics”, he explains.
According to the executive, before arriving in Brazil, the first destination in its expansion project, the company spent months discussing strategies. He notes that in a country with so much diversity, composed of different cultures, consumption and living habits that are not similar, the adequacy of language is of “extreme importance”.
For Roger Laughlin, co-founder and CEO of Kavak Brasil, a startup specialized in buying and selling used cars, the market in which it operates is very similar in the three countries where it is present, Brazil, Argentina and Mexico, with business being done between private individuals. , with a lot of informality and risk of fraud, a problem that can be found all over the world.
“However, the way this is communicated to the customer needs to be adapted to the language, context and reality of that consumer. Recovering the relationship of the Brazilian customer with the car, for example, in addition to offering a solution to the historic problem with insecurities and fraud that, until then, was a reality for the consumer, was one of the main points adopted in our communication in the country” , says.
SOCIAL NETWORKS AND INFLUENCES
Throughout this process of landing and building relationships with Brazilian consumers, startups also realized that companies’ global social media accounts weren’t working to create connections. Clara, for example, is studying the possibility of unifying or not the profiles, which it considers a “great challenge” strategic, when analyzing that it operates in Mexico and Brazil and should expand to two other countries in the region, with different cultural aspects. .
Casai also felt the need to create profiles focused on the country, mainly because of the language. For now, it has only opened on Facebook, which, according to the company, is the platform with a relatively older audience that identifies with the brand’s proposal. And there is a project in progress for the other networks.
Additionally, Casai’s Mazetto said the brand learned one of the biggest lessons when the company began its influencer marketing strategy. “It is a different market, with different dynamics and negotiations between the two countries. Digital influencers in Brazil have a very high voice on social networks and it is an extremely valued job, so there is a deeper negotiation regarding the choices of image association and experiences”, he explains.
For Asdourian, from Clara, the great learning “is that it is much more valuable to invest time, resources and study to adapt to a regional market than to choose, many times, only to translate content from one language to another”. According to him, although this movement involves a long process, it has been worth the results and impacts on the feeling of proximity and on the relationship with customers.
