#3. Colombia setting standards for business
3 stories of outstanding businesses in Colombia: one of the most prestigious campaigns in 2020, the experiment that gave birth to a Unicorn, and the stories of people who love their jobs.
Welcome! Issue #3 Emerging Markets explorer ðŸ§Â will cover stories of outstanding businesses in Colombia: one of the most prestigious campaigns in 2020, the experiment that gave birth to a Unicorn, and the stories of people who love their jobs.
If you wonder what Emerging Markets explorer 🧠is, start here.
The MVP of Almacenes Éxito
Wednesday morning, doing my routine research when a new Newsletter arrives in my inbox: Contagious Pioneers Report 2021. This awarded the most excellent agencies worldwide for their marketing campaigns of 2020, and that is where I run into Sancho BBDO, a creative agency in Bogota, which created this campaign.
Almacenes Éxito is a Colombian retailer, founded in Medellin in the 1950s as a clothes store. As time passed by, it extended its offering, and now it covers from groceries to home improvement, technology, or cosmetics. It however is on top of mind for the Colombian audience as a food and beverage store and is particularly well-loved by the adults and parents segment.
But Almacenes Éxito sells much more than food and beverage and wanted to appeal to a less connected, but more strategic target: the young.
For this, they partnered up with Sancho BBDO. Sancho BBDO is a prestigious Colombian creative agency, awarded multiple times for its work. They created a campaign for Almacenes Éxito: The Most Valuable Promo.
In this campaign, they partnered with 3 gaming influencers to promote Almacenes Éxito in Call of Duty Mobile. Since no ads are allowed on the platform, they agreed that these 3 influencers would change their names to discount coupons in Almacenes Éxito. If they got killed, the killer would be able to redeem the coupon. The coupon was not a gift, it became a prize for the players to fight for.
The results?
540 coupons were given away, of which 78% were redeemed
They reached 535,000 gamers
Sales of Almacenes Éxito increased by 7% as the 5-day campaign was happening
You can watch the campaign video here.
Failure story: how corporates missed Rappi
Cooperation among corporates and startups can be an advantage, but it can also get tricky since both companies are fundamentally different: corporates have big budgets and slow paces, and startups have small budgets and a big rush.
Grability is a software company that provides mobile technology for businesses to create online grocery stores. It was founded in 2013 in Colombia by Sebastián MejÃa, Simón Borrero, and Andrés Bilbao, being a spinoff of Imagina.
Grability created a valuable UX of grocery e-commerce and quickly captured big clients, such as Cencosud in Latin America, El Corte Inglés in Spain, or Reliance in India.
From cooperating with their corporate clients they realized that they had improved the UX of their stores, but that the final clients were still bummed by the fact they had to wait for hours or even days to receive their groceries.
And so, they proposed to their corporate clients to improve their logistics so those final customers could receive their groceries faster.Â
Their corporate clients liked the idea, they pitched it and the budget got approved. It would get the approval in September to start in March of the following year. This is a common scenario for a corporate: corporations have lengthy procurement processes with a lot of approvals since they make big investments and have every interest to mitigate the risk.
For a startup like Grability, that pace was too slow. They decided to do the experiment of faster grocery logistics themselves to have proof of concept. They created an App for faster delivery in a neighborhood of Bogota (Colombia), encouraged people to download it and use it in exchange for a donut, and eventually got their first clients.
That App was Rappi, a delivery app that also happened to be the first Colombian Unicorn.
Recommended source: 13% pasión por el trabajo
13% is a Colombian podcast created by Andrés Acevedo and Nicolás Pinzón in 2018 and has 60 episodes to this date. They created the 13% podcast because they believe it is absurd that only 13% of the people love their jobs, and they wish to tell the stories of that special minority. The guests vary from Colombian entrepreneurs to the director of a hospital in Medellin, and they facilitate the story so that you can connect and learn from each of them.
When exploring the people who love their jobs, they seek for solving the fact that they are a minority and this shouldn’t be the case. They know it is a big problem, and they refuse to oversimplify it. The podcast has grown considerably during these 2 years, they have created a video podcast named Atemporal and a community that is 13% sin atajos.
Above is the episode of Andrés Aguirre, the director of the hospital Pablo Tobón Uribe in MedellÃn. His career philosophy is humble, he’s got a strong energy and overall the episode is a special type of heartwarming.
That’s it from me! If you like this, share it with someone who’d like it too. Furthermore, if you have feedback or interesting stories you’d like to learn from, do not hesitate to reply!