3 Proven Strategies to Improve the Customer Experience for Brazilian Clients

Success in the Brazilian market depends on mastering linguistic nuances and localization. Here's how to connect with your audience effectively.

1. Why Brazilian Portuguese is Essential for Your Localization Strategy

When it comes to winning and keeping the loyalty of Brazilian customers, using Brazilian Portuguese is crucial. It might seem obvious, yet many businesses still overlook this in favor of more widely spoken languages like English or Spanish. This oversight can unintentionally push away a significant portion of the Brazilian audience, making them feel disconnected and undervalued. By embracing their language, you not only show respect for their culture but also create a stronger bond that can lead to lasting loyalty.

Do not alienate 95% of the Brazilian market

Connecting with customers on a personal level is crucial, and one of the simplest ways to achieve this is by providing an online experience in their native language. This approach resonates globally, but it holds special significance in Brazil. With only about 5% to 7% of Brazilians fluent in English and even fewer—around 4%—speaking Spanish, it’s clear that language plays a vital role in reaching this diverse market. By speaking directly to Brazilians in Portuguese, businesses can foster trust and build lasting relationships, making them feel valued and understood..

While many Brazilians do speak English or Spanish, the majority of these speakers are found in the bustling cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, which are Brazil's key financial and cultural centers. By providing customer service, websites, and social media content solely in these languages, you risk excluding a vast audience of around 200 million potential customers. This is a significant oversight, especially when switching to Brazilian Portuguese can foster a more inclusive and welcoming experience for all Brazilian.

Brazilians also tend to get offended when offered European Portuguese

When engaging with Brazilian audiences, it is crucial to understand the significance of using Brazilian Portuguese. Offering European Portuguese can be perceived as insensitive. Many Brazilians take pride in their language, and using the European variant may seem dismissive of their cultural identity. The differences between Brazilian and European Portuguese are substantial, affecting pronunciation, vocabulary, and even grammar. Native speakers can quickly spot content that does not reflect their variant, which can result in misunderstandings and feelings of alienation.

There’s no better example of this approach than the official Microsoft website, which has both European and Brazilian Portuguese options for its customers; if they offered support to Portuguese speakers exclusively in the European variant, Brazilian customers would end up not only confused, but unwilling to interact further with Microsoft products.

Avoid losing 9 out of 10 of potential customers

When Brazilian customers encounter social media content in a foreign language, they often overlook it. Most people won’t take a second glance, and this means they are unlikely to engage with your posts or remember your brand later. To connect with this audience, it’s crucial to communicate in Brazilian Portuguese, the language they are most comfortable with..

In order to avoid this, make sure you have Brazilian Portuguese on your social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn) and on your websites, so that your content can reach as wide an audience as possible. This will allow prospective clients to fully interact with your posts/ads and give you the engagement that is such an important tool in today’s marketing landscape.

2. Make it about me: A Brazilian person

Tailor the content to cultural references: go local

Building a customer base online goes beyond language choices: your content can’t be limited to being translated into Brazilian Portuguese; it also has to go through a process of cultural adaptation.

As Brazil tends to be culturally isolated from its Hispanic neighbors, as well as from every other Portuguese-speaking country, its references and social media culture revolve almost exclusively around Brazilian society, lifestyle, politics, news cycles and celebrities. This means that references to global events or celebrities (e.g. using images of American celebrities, or referencing Brexit) yield close to no interactions from Brazilians.

Consequently, social media and ads employing global cultural references are not only insufficient, but are actually counterproductive in Brazil; the ideal scenario is to have a separate social media account, in Brazilian Portuguese using local references, to be able to establish a dialogue with that audience (e.g. using images of Brazilian celebrities, or referencing local news with which Brazilians have been interacting online.)

Only 20% of Brazilians can buy in foreign currencies

Of the 200 million people in Brazil, only 39 million have online shopping habits, and out those, only 8% of them use PayPal, while other online payment methods (such as Stripe, Payoneer and Venmo) either do not exist or have a negligible presence in the country.

71% of Brazilians use their credit cards for online shopping, but only 20% of them have an international card that can process purchases in foreign currencies. The most common payment method for purchasing online in Brazil is the “boleto bancário,” a bank ticket payable at any ATM machine, bank, post office or lottery agency, or via internet banking.

These are only a few examples of how far cultural adaptation has to go when trying to build a customer base in a given country. Another fundamental aspect of it, when we talk about Brazil, is representation.

3. Say goodbye to cultural clichés

Common stereotypes can alienate some of the richest parts of the country

No one likes to see themselves - or their country - reduced to a few, trite stereotypes, which is the quickest way of not winning over a customer base, as well as even offending them and pushing them away.

Notably, Brazilian audiences can be rather sensitive about the way they are portrayed, due to the fact that Brazil is so geographically, racially and culturally diverse. Across all sorts of media, the usual images used to represent Brazil are the beaches and landmarks in Rio de Janeiro, carnival, soccer and samba.

However, these are all extremely regionalized features that leave out more than 90% of the country. As a consequence, a customer from the state of São Paulo, for instance, the state with the highest GDP in the country, may feel uninterested at best (and insulted at worst) at seeing something marketed towards them using symbols that do not represent them at all, and ignore whatever it is being advertised.

Embrace multi-cultural and multi-racial

While the north of the country has a heavy concentration of black people and descendants from native Brazilians, Portuguese and the Spanish, southern states feature a majority of people of German and Polish descent, and a remarkably low black population.

When addressing a Brazilian audience, it’s important to acknowledge and represent just how immensely diversified they are from each other. Striving for a multi-cultural and racial representation of Brazil is the wisest path to assure Brazilian customers that they will have a personalized customer experience, and to really clinch customer loyalty from one of the biggest markets in the world.