Ludwig Duran
Social media research has been firmly adopted in Europe and the US as an invaluable way to hear what consumers really think about brands. Here are some lessons learned to help capture this unique opportunity for marketers and market researchers.
For brands looking to enter LATAM and, in particular, Brazil, the social media boom in these markets presents a unique opportunity to connect with consumers. A third of Latin Americans have internet access, making LATAM the fourth largest region of web users worldwide, trailing North America, Oceania and Europe. Of those Latin American web users, 82% use social media.This trend is set to grow, as on a per capita basis, the rate of social media adoption in Latin America is second only to North America.
With the European economy expected to contract by 0.3% this year Latin America is strategically important as a key expansion area for brands with its relatively stable economies, rising middle class, young and growing population and regional growth predicted at 4.5% for this year.Within LATAM, Brazil has become a key market to be present in, with the largest economy and the greatest population in Latin America, and recently ranking as the 6th largest economy in the world.
Importantly, 38% of web users in Latin America are Brazilian, making Brazilians the biggest Latin American population with web access. Of those web users, approximately 60% use social networks, placing Brazil ahead of the UK and United States. Brazil’s economic strength and leadership in LATAM social media engagement, offers a strategic nexus where economic growth, increasing consumer spending power and substantial social media engagement converge, providing marketers a unique opportunity. Complimenting this trend is the rapid growth of mobile penetration in Brazil and LATAM, a key method of accessing the internet in these markets.
Marketers need a balanced understanding of the social media opportunities in Brazil
In their zeal to capitalise on this opportunity, marketers must not rush into a market and engage with the evolving medium of social media without a comprehensive understanding of the drivers behind this phenomenon and the ability to discover consumer insights behind this development. Marketers need advisors who can balance their enthusiasm with an understanding of social media, the ability to quantify and qualify the consumer needs as expressed through and influenced by this medium, and the capability to link this understanding back to wider brand and business objectives. In short, marketers need social media research planners to partner with them as they explore Brazil’s social media eco-system.
Brazil’s social media eco-system is vertical.
As experienced travellers can attest to, knowing the lay of the land makes travelling easier. For Brazil, this means learning how to navigate a social media eco-system that is essentially vertical. Brazil’s social media boom is not evenly distributed geographically, with most growth in Rio de Janiero, Sao Paulo and the southern areas of Brazil. In the Northeast more traditional media channels are still the dominant means for brands to reach consumers. Furthermore, internet penetration in Brazil is limited at 37.8% of the population compared to 82.5% of the UK’s population where broad access to internet has contributed to a more horizontal social media eco-system. Brazil’s eco-system shape suggests that social media marketing campaigns will only reach a specific segment of the population; therefore marketers must have a strong understanding of who that segment is and how to ensure their efforts are relevant to them.
Social media campaigns must reflect Brazil’s digital culture.
Brazil’s narrow eco-system means that marketers must tap into the cultural references, tastes and sensibilities that drive social media behaviour of those engaged online. Researchers can assist by drawing on their experience of constantly factoring in how cultural norms and meanings influence the lives and desires of consumers.
A perfect example of how cultural understanding can reveal strategic opportunities is the emergence of class C consumers as the most engaged social media group in Brazil. According to Sparksheet, class C consumers represent 53% of the population in Brazil, 45% of which are active on social media. Marketers looking to develop a social media-led strategy must consider this composition and the opportunities it could offer.
Another unique trait of the Brazilian social media landscape is the popularity of YouTube. According to a report from Marketing Week, Brazil is the sixth largest consumer of YouTube content based on video views, with video. Anecdotal evidence suggests that YouTube’s popularity is a natural extension of Brazil’s strong TV culture. Creating online video content to promote a brand could be a useful approach in light of this reality.
Nissan capitalised on the popularity of YouTube through its campaign Pôneis Malditos [Damn Ponies], marketing its frontier pick-up truck. In the video, the driver opens the hood of his vehicle to discover animated ponies inside. Following the video’s release, registrations of the vehicle nearly doubled, indicating how understanding the relationship between social media culture and brand communication can help drive brand engagement.
Brazilians are also actively engaged with multiple social media platforms, including Google-owned social networking site Orkut, Twitter, and Facebook and are highly engaged with their online social life, the average Brazilian having 231 social networking friends. Diageo leveraged the heavily networked social media friendships Brazilians have when it promoted the Smirnoff Nightlife Exchange Project through social networking creating a one million strong fan-base.
Leading-edge research techniques and technologies can help unlock Brazil’s social media opportunities.
In each of these examples it was an understanding of the target but also of the audience’s wider social media context, combined with cultural truths, that led brands to capitalise on the social media use in Brazil. Social media monitoring and topical deep dives are useful to begin to understand Brazil’s social media culture. These tools can provide a read of the current reception of a campaign or brand, or the impact of a certain event relative to a brand. However, if marketers are interested in digging into the emotional and cultural drivers behind social media behaviour they must move beyond focusing on key words and instead leverage more holistic research tools that can help tell a bigger story.
Brand graphs can lead to audience and wider brand-related insights.
Forward-thinking agencies have begun work on tracking online content and user behaviours in order to construct an audience profile, including connections and interests. These audience profiles can be graphed against brands to reveal how the audience engages with the brand through social media, and how the brand sits within the audience’s wider life. The result is the brand graph, which, among other benefits, can help marketers fine-tune their social media brand strategy and assess the impact of their strategy in real time by providing a 360-degree view of how the brand sits in the life of the target audience and where the engagement opportunities are. When applied to Brazil, with its multifaceted social milieu, where bespoke campaigns matter to the individual and regionally, such a brand graph could provide a Rosetta stone for marketers wishing to enter the Brazilian space.
Catching trends as they emerge can come from programming a bot.
In the rapidly evolving social media landscape of Brazil, marketers will not only need to understand and capitalise on existing trends but also be able to get direction on what future trends might be on the horizon. Using bots, to gain deeper insight into existing social media users and to assess what these users might move on to in the future can be one means of gaining this foresight. By programming bots with features drawn from an existing target and turning them loose on the web, researchers spot emerging patterns of content, interests and narratives relative to a certain audience or brand. As a result, brands can develop strategies that dial directly into the pulse of their target and distil implications that might be used higher up the value chain, such as inputs for creative teams or possible steers on NPD.
The Holy Grail, return on engagement, will be a key success driver.
As marketers become increasingly held accountable for their spend they will need a means of measuring the extent their social media campaigns drive engagement with their audience. This “return on engagement” will become even more important when entering a new market. One approach to cracking this crucial measurement is by linking behavioural data around content and campaigns gleaned from social media with survey data around a specific group that is engaging with particular content. The synthesis and analysis of this information can aid marketers with explaining how content is playing against competitors, isolating the most impactful content strategies, and helping identify the behaviours that brands are looking to influence online.
Mobile self-ethnography is useful in the economically and geographically diverse Brazil.
With the rise of mobile penetration in Brazil, researchers can use the degree to which the mobile phones are central to Brazilian’s lives to conduct self-ethnographic work, where users become “observers” of their own behaviour, using their mobile phone devices as a means of capturing and tracking their observations. Since Brazil is a diverse geographic region with many key consumers living in remote areas, this means of tapping into the emotional life of consumers could aid marketers by expanding their understanding of the customer beyond the online sphere.
Online communities can lead to rich emotional insights and co-created content.
Online research communities are another means of getting beneath the emotional drivers of social media behaviour. These research communities provide a controlled environment where marketers can pose direct questions to a defined audience or set them tasks over a set period of time to understand certain behaviours or test content before it is released online. This is a useful means for getting close to an audience and dynamically interacting with them during research which can lead to richer, more specific pictures of what drives people’s behaviour online. For marketers looking to take things a step further, these communities can also be used to co-create content with users. MasterCard’s 2008 campaign suggested that there is an appetite for such activities in Brazil when they invited consumers to post their own stories of what is priceless and turned these into online and offline adverts to widespread appeal.
Marketers bring the zeal, researchers bring the conscience.
For marketers building their growth strategies for the years ahead social media research planners will become a strategic asset. While the tools and the context, through which researchers support marketers in their drive for brand growth and engagement, may have changed, the fundamental need for clear, strategic, insight-based guidance has not. While marketers may respond to an instinct to take advantage of a new opportunity, researchers will provide the conscience that both saves them from themselves and points them in the right direction.
Ludwig Duran is a Senior Research Executive at FACE.
