Pepe Beker lived through the hyperinflation of his native country, Argentina, when he was very young. From a very young age he understood that a market with these economic conditions carries with it additional problems when making business decisions.
Now that inflation in Mexico has reached historical levels -in June it reached 7.99%-, the co-founder of BESO, one of the agencies that acquired LLYC for 7.2 million euros in September 2021, has seen that the scenario is also beginning to change. become more challenging for brands.
“Usually inflation makes short-term business decisions because nobody knows what is going to happen. What are we seeing in Mexico: it is a country that is going to end the year between 8 and 10% of inflation, and if this is not controlled in the next 36 months, it is going to be a problem for companies and their business strategies, and among them are us and our clients”, he mentions.
Expansión (E): BESO is an agency that is characterized by anticipating the needs of clients based on predictive data. Why is data important in a context of high inflation?
Pepe Beker (PB): Inflation is circumstantial and data is a short- and long-term issue. For us it is crucial that the entire agency is based on data, both in strategy, media selection and creativity, because that helps us to be much more assertive and give advertisers a greater degree of assertiveness when making decisions. a business decision.
Today the digital world is the basis of any type of business or industry. Predictive data allows us to have probabilities, degrees of affinity with the public we are going to and makes numbers play a very important role, in addition to intuition, since data and technology come to enhance human work, but do not replace it.
E: What do you consider to be the importance of ideas in this inflationary context?
PB: Creativity cuts across any discipline. At the end of the day it is lateral thinking to solve a problem and I am not only referring to creative commercial ideas, but to the need to think outside the box to make decisions in companies. For example, if a material makes production take six months, then you are going to have to find another way that allows you to manufacture in less time and if the products are rising in price, you are going to have to find a solution to achieve a balance in the costs.
Let’s not forget that inflation is a tax on poverty, those who suffer the most from inflation are the people with the fewest resources. For a lady or gentleman that before was enough with 200 pesos to buy certain things to survive, today those 200 pesos are enough for less. The sooner the production chains can be put in order, we will return to stability, that is where creativity comes in. We are going to see new commercial models from now on because that is what the market is going to ask for, otherwise, companies are not going to be able to sell at the rate they were doing before the pandemic.
E: In June, the category of food, beverages and tobacco was the one that had the greatest increase, reaching an annual rate of 11.84%. How do you provide solutions to brands that are in these categories?
PB: We have two important clients in these categories: Lala and La Moderna. Our job is to translate and persuade a client’s proposal with communication tools, that is, that communication is a factor for people to find out about the differentials or advantages of a product or service.
Today, more than 95% of what is in communication is informative and not persuasive, what people want to know is what that product can do for them. But to communicate the benefits to the consumer you have to understand how they are consuming. In addition, inflation creates a new category of consumers and that is historical, every time there is a recession or economic crisis, people consume in a different way and when doing so, companies have to adapt to it and not the other way around.
E: What are you doing to understand these new consumption habits?
PB: One of the things when entering the world of data five years ago is that we realized that historically you accessed the data based on what the client had or what there was of research, with the digital world you already have more habits than you can understand. When you start adding this data to your information, you complement the data of a client, not only do you know what a consumer does and how they live, but you can geolocate them and understand their reactions.
What the data allows is to know through the information hours of consumption, places, words that best reflect a brand, and understand what works and what does not. When you identify consumption patterns, you can make better business decisions based on numbers and not just intuition.
E: What do you consider to be the factors that most influence the buying process of a Mexican?
PB: Innovation. Beyond specific conjunctural moments such as inflation, any team has the obligation to be constantly innovating, it is much more difficult to innovate when things are going well for you than when things are going badly because you have no choice there. Part of the success of Lala and La Moderna is that their teams are innovating and thinking about the future, but their actions are in the present.
In addition to having the information, it is about going out, part of the success of the big brands is that both the general manager and the marketing and distribution directors are going out to the market to see what happens.
E: How do you detonate your creative process to offer solutions to brands?
PB: It has to do with curiosity and commitment to customers. Every morning I get up early and read at least three or four media. I review the categories in which I am working and when I see, for example, that raw materials are going to rise, I know that this is going to hit my client, so I go ahead and think about the possible scenarios, as well as the solutions. My head works as a client, that allows me to look for creative solutions to be able to contribute.
