International companies willing to brazilianize
O Estado de S. Paulo
During the Women's Week, in March, the multinational Proctor & Gamble put up a beautifying space sponsored by the Koleston line at the Santo Amaro unit of Poupa Tempo (fast service agency), one of the busiest of its kind in São Paulo. The proposal was to provide free services to the women using the facility to arrange documents.
It is an uncommon action in the portfolio of a company that is one of the greatest world investments in advertising. And it is part of the strategy of getting close to the Brazilian consumers, especially now that they integrate the emerging so-called C class, which the current president of P&G in the Country, Tarek Farahat, wants to get closer to. According to him, the increase in the consumption of items of personal hygiene is a one-way road. "That population now has an address, credit cards, bank accounts. One of the results of that are the expenditures with products that bring some sort of benefit. Before that, the expenditure was restricted to food", he says.
Together with such confirmation came the need of "making communication more Brazilian". In other words, the imported advertising campaigns produced to be on air all over the world, with Swedish models or Hollywood actresses selling unreal types in the local reality give place to a language that is more common to such public of lower purchasing power that starts increasing its consumption potential. The truth is that there has never been so much effort on the part of the multinationals to sound "Brazilian".
"The concept of the campaigns continues being global, but the execution becomes more and more local", explains Luiz Carlos Dutra, Corporate VP of the Unilever, another of the greatest advertisers of the world. "Today there is sensibility for the search of balance between keeping the integration of communication at the same time in which the peculiarities of the Brazilian culture are respected". The most recent example of his company is the new Rexona campaign, an investment of R$ 28 million (US$ 16 million) in which the faces for the men's line will be soccer player Robinho and, for the women's, actress Camila Pitanga.
In this same line of behavior, since Farahat took the rudder of the Brazilian operation of P&G, for years ago, he has been gradually betting on that trend. In 2007 he decided to influence what is called "brasilidade (or a Brazilian feeling)" in the marketing actions of the company. He began demanding that the advertising campaigns had only faces that were known to the public they intended for. It was at that moment, for instance, that the company hired the model Gisele Bündchen to become the face of Pantene only in Brazil. The action made the sales of the brand to triple.
The strategy of growing in emerging markets governs the agenda of the executives of multinationals in those countries. In the case of P&G, the intention is that the Brazilian branch goes from the 13th place in the internal ranking of the group to one of the five first places.