Resonate with BRIC countries

The BRICs should be looked at as four separate markets says Evan Ivey, planning director at Gravity Global. Here he details what plans should be in place

The BRICs are four separate countries, not one market. They are different from the Western markets, but they are also very different from one another and no single market plan will do.

1. Getting started


Media and channels to market may look familiar but don’t necessarily work the same, so don’t cut and paste your plan to fit. Create unique plans that take advantage of the opportunities available locally.

Data, for example, is notoriously unreliable in all four BRIC countries, so your B2B direct marketing may have to be scaled back. Publishers however can be more flexible. It’s possible to buy some interesting, non-standard ‘ad spaces’ such as strips down the middle of a page.

The number one search engine in China is Baidu with over 56 per cent marketshare. Baidu is very different to Google, it offers a different set of services and tends to be more entertainment focused, which could mean you would still be better off working with Google.cn despite its problems.

In Russia the number one search engine is Yandex and it serves up search results differently – because Russia is so vast, geo-targeting really matters. You may think your brand is being served to everyone, but it might be being seen by users in just one of the 19 regions recognised by Yandex.

2. Do your research


Research the buyers locally and find out their perceptions of your brand, or at least your category, and then create the campaign that will work in that market.

If you do the research not only will you be surprised at how your brand is viewed, you will also discover that provenance matters and not always in a good way.

Research I conducted on behalf of UKTI in 2010 across the BRIC territories warned us that our brands might have to work extra hard just to overcome their association with the UK. Having said that, sometimes the association is positive: while Clarks is seen as a comfort shoe trying to become fashionable in the UK, in China it was already seen as a fashion status symbol simply by dint of its provenance. That changed the entire way Clarks marketed its range to the trade.

There needs to be at least two phases to your research:

1. Do the basic diagnostics: who are the decision makers, what do they think of your brand or product?

2. Develop your creative solutions and take the creative routes to market to research them before you finally pick a winner.

3. Contingency plan


Build in plenty of contingency time and money until you have your own experience to rely on. Getting things approved can take longer than you thought was possible.

Obviously there are the language pitfalls (only 41 per cent of Indians speak Hindi for example) and those unfathomable social mores. ‘Guanxi’ in China, ‘describes the basic dynamic in personalised networks of influence’, and needs to be considered when thinking about brand positioning and campaign planning.

4. Fine tuning


If you want to maximise your ROI then you need a campaign entirely devised for the local market.

You may have a great desktop website but if you plan just to create a Hindi version of it for the Indian market then you’ll miss decision makers who only access the internet from their mobile – most of them.

Buyer needs can be surprisingly different. What I’ve found with many developing markets is buyers still exhibit either primary needs (‘I need an accounting software package’) or secondary needs (‘I want a better accounting software package’).

In Western markets most buyers have tertiary needs (‘I want an accounting package to work with my CRM system’).

When customers have primary and secondary needs the benefits and features they look for are different from those sought by more sophisticated customers. So the way those products are marketed has to be modified.

5. Local team


Work with a local team on the ground. Agencies are much more capable in these markets than they once were – not only do you need their local insight you need their local wherewithal to get stuff done.

I am a so-called expert on the BRICs but I only ever oversee the planning. I have local planners guide me through the minefields hiding in these markets.

The same goes for finding your way around local regulations. The BRIC markets are growing up fast and all have regulatory bodies and marketing legislation aimed at protecting buyers. Although much of it will be comfortingly familar, the detail of the legislation, does vary market to market.

Marketing to the BRIC countries will be easier than you first thought if you stick to these principles.

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