by Christian Calvillo

El valor agregado es algo que en años recientes los inversionistas transnacionales toman en cuenta de manera primordial para dirigir sus baterías de inversión hacia el extranjero. Los sectores más favorecidos en Latinoamérica han sido las manufacturas y los servicios, ¿Pero que hay más allá de estos sectores? ¿Puede Latinoamérica atraer inversiones en otros rubros?, de acuerdo a Jesús Mondrovejo, la mayoría de atracción de inversiones en estos rubros se ha debido a la localización y cantidad de las fuentes de mano de obra y al tamaño de sus mercados locales (México, Brasil), sin embargo la capacidad sectorial en los últimos años comenzó a dar un giro hacia el valor agregado traducido a niveles de competitividad en donde la facilidad de recursos para gestionar cobran cada vez más una mayor importancia.

México al igual que la mayoría de países latinoamericanos carece en estos momentos de estructuras sociales y educativas capaces de abastecer mano de obra calificada así como de los entornos políticos y jurídicos necesarios para brindar seguridad a los inversionistas a largo plazo, según el Boston Consulting Group México tiene como reto el cambiar su política de competitividad en el rubro de gestión si es que quiere entrar en franca competencia a nivel mundial en esos campos antes de que se posicionen otras naciones en estos campos.

Una de las soluciones puede ser el fomento de la regionalización y el enfoque hacia solo ciertos sectores priorizando aquellos que son en este momento proyectables hacia un crecimiento diferenciador en el futuro tomando en cuenta las etapas de desarrollo que se deben de ir cubriendo sin dispersar su espectro hacia sectores que pudieran parecer desarrollables, sin embargo el reto mayor será convencer a los actores políticos de enfocarse en unos cuantos beneficios dejando de lado las políticas todo-incluido que ha caracterizado a los gobiernos latinoamericanos.

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Christian Calvillo is Vice President of Latin American Affairs at Sovereign Market, a worldwide strategic communications consultancy (marketing, PR, and public affairs). He serves as their resident specialist of Latin American affairs. His professional experience spans years of public…MORE>

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By Jude Calvillo
August 8, 2010 (syndicated from an int’l class posting)

Something touched upon in our meeting with Edelman (HP’s relationship with Edelman’s Spanish office) is how the public relations function fits into the promotional puzzle of larger, MBA-driven organizations. One might be surprised to find that PR is, to many in the business world (particularly B2C), the last –albeit essential- step in the marketing process. This, I’ve learned, holds some important implications on how to brand oneself to would-be clients,…so I’m wondering how these implications could be affected by European business dynamics.

The tenets of B2C marketing can most elegantly be described by the Four Ps: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. Rather than delve deeply into each P’s relevance to an overall strategy, I’ll simply say this: after one has developed the optimal product for a market, has priced it for maximum gross profit, and has placed it in the most profitable mix of sales channels, they then seek to promote it via advertising and public relations.

This globally taught schema suggests two things right away: 1) after product release, biz school grads (those not schooled in relationship marketing) immediately see PR as asymmetrical, and 2) if one hopes to work with big business, one should brand oneself as an important, informative piece of the Four Ps or, after years of strategic experience, brand oneself above the Four Ps.

I am, however, hesitant about the best way to present oneself to European business, specifically. Given the more collective nature of many European business cultures (e.g. German), should one worry about transcending PR’s predetermined space? Moreover, given all of the cultures and varying measures of success, do European businesses tend to depend on more common-denominator, institutionalized capacity verification (e.g. professional schooling) than their American counterparts? – well, if so, having taken a course in PR and Public Affairs from a European Perspective certainly couldn’t hurt!

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Jude Calvillo is CEO and Principal Consul at Sovereign Market, a worldwide strategic communications consultancy (marketing, PR, and public affairs). With over a decade of experience in interactive marketing, he’s developed brands, new media products, and cutting-edge interactive marketing campaigns for clients such as MedTronic, Kid Fuel, SAC Financial Marketing, QuantRx Biomedical, Insight Investments, Precision Pharmacy, TrueProtein, and numerous political candidates/entities…MORE >

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“Un mensaje de Barack Obama”? En español? Si! Amid bitter opposition and acrid remarks cast from both sides of the political spectrum, there has emerged between the factions a commonality of speaking the same language – Spanish. This past Monday, the Obama camp launched an ad featuring the semi-Spanish-literate senator speaking entirely in Spanish. Further, Obama’s campaign purchased a half-hour block of uninterrupted advertising time on Univision, the nation’s largest Spanish-language network – for the evening of Wednesday October 29th. Why the festivities?

This emerging change in language is part of a vast media onslaught in pursuit of the Latino vote in the western battleground states of New Mexico, Nevada, and Colorado. In this last stretch before election day, both campaigns are focusing in on the eight battleground states where votes are up for grabs; New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada are among said battleground states and each happen to have a significant number of Hispanic voters. It should come as no surprise that the candidates’ “get out the vote” stops in New Mexico and Nevada on October 25th were backed by solid numbers; according to the William C. Velasquez Institute, Latinos comprised 32.4% of registered voters in New Mexico and made up 11.4% of the electorate in Nevada. 9.9% of voters in Colorado were also Hispanic.

With a combined 19 electoral votes, the western battleground states are in a position to lead either side to decided victory or defeat. Should election results be split in the key states of Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, each candidate will need wins in the western battleground states in order to prevail.

The potential victor’s fate lies with Latino voters. As the two camps arrive, gradually, at this realization, bilingual campaign volunteers greet and bombard with phone calls members of the Hispanic communities in the western battleground states. Latino voters are handed fliers, signs, buttons, and pamphlets written in Spanish. Voters in these states hear McCain’s Spanish campaign slogan “Estados Unidos.” But is a mere shift in language enough to woo Latino voters?

If there is one skill the Hispanic electorate is seeking in its chosen candidate, it is that of speaking another language all together – the language of survival, of money. The media is inundated with profiles of once Hispanic homeowners who now have lockboxes at their doors – alarmed by the declining economy and demanding a solution to their financial troubles. Fearful that John McCain’s plan may be too similar to the system under President Bush, Hispanic voters most concerned with the economy have turned to Obama, whose message to the Latino community is a promise of economic and immigration reform. The Latino vote is not, however, uniform by any means. McCain’s emphasis on his opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage has boosted his influence among older and religious Hispanic voters. Thus, each campaign has done its share in focusing on issues relevant to the Latino electorate.

More readily than in any previous election, campaign 2008 demonstrates the necessity of tailoring media strategies and buys to this growing demographic of voters. What was once a developing trend of Spanish-language advertising and emphasis upon issues pertinent to the Latino community is now an established responsibility to Hispanic voters – a promise to attend to their needs as citizens – that sets the stage for any and all of the elections to follow. In four years time, a candidate launching an all-Spanish language ad will be less of a novelty and more of a norm. The masses will notice less how frequently a candidate launches Spanish-language ads or addresses issues that are most relevant to Hispanic voters. Rather, the electorate will notice when a candidate does not do so. A thirty-minute spot on Univision today means tomorrow’s candidates must do at least as much, if not go for the full hour. The effort to secure the Hispanic vote is a whole different ball game from here on out.

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Wow, it’s been a while since my last post. To those of you who have asked about the blog, thanks so much for your interest and forgive me for the delay. I was swamped throughout the latter half of my DC trip and, to be quite frank, I desperately needed a break upon returning. Well, my batteries are almost fully charged now, and the first primary/caucus of the season is now complete! It’s time for another post at Power and Persuasion, where politics meets communication

To ring in the new year, I thought it would be a good idea to discuss some of the phenomena we should expect to see in 2008, at a time when the internet’s power is being mastered by campaigns and an international “super”-power is set to take the world stage. Without further ado, here are five things we have to look forward to in political communication this year:

1) The Echo Effects of a Compressed Election Cycle
The fact that Iowa’s caucus is the first primary is not unusual, but the fact that at least thirty more states will be holding their primaries within about a month after Iowa’s is. Just to give you an idea of how “front loaded” this is, the 2000 primaries had only designated 2% of delegates by the first week of February. This time around, we will likely see more than 40% of delegates committed by February 5 (“Super Duper Tuesday”). While some have expressed concern that this could muscle out the financially strapped, and others rightfully worry that the voting public will have much less time to mull over their options, I worry about how this will affect media coverage.

Many liken today’s media to an echo chamber, where the day’s discourse is initiated by one outlet, then echoed by others in some form or another until a feedback loop is maintained and there is a general feeling of “truth” to the opinion of the group. This is probably bad for civil society (duh!), but what happens when you shrink the volume of an echo chamber? Well, the echoes speed up; there is less time between them. Compressing the election cycle as much as “we” have will shrink the already microscopic time the press has to analyze a candidate or his/her relations per primary. Hurried journalists will feel even more inclined to forget about critical analysis and lean on groupthink, thereby magnifying the echo chamber effect.

If there is already concern that the public will not have enough time to properly consider the candidates, this should be compounded by the fact that the press, those who feed the public much of their information, won’t either.

With the echo chamber’s compression, look for candidates to be reduced to one issue, or one feeling about them, in the mind of the average Joe, and for momentum to be a stronger -perhaps exponential- factor than in previous elections.

2) Refining Internet Campaign Strategy
Al Gore may have invented the internet (maybe, just maybe), but it was Howard Dean who first effectively harnessed its power. At the time, the most anyone could do was to fundraise, setup social networks, and monitor the blogosphere. Howard Dean’s campaign just so happened to have embraced internet technologies much more than his competitors, because his team understood the potential of this more interactive media better than the rest. Sadly, you could also say that it was the internet that bit him in the proverbial you-know-what after his infamous scream speech.

Today, campaigns are more pro-active on the net, defining messages, cultivating buzz, and preparing for crises. They also have more sophisticated tools at their disposal, such as behavioral targeting, viral marketing, widgets, and wiki media studios. The biggest difference, however, between the first generation of online campaign tools and this newest one is a matter of metrics. Throughout this election cycle, campaigns will be able to measure the efficacy of many of these newer tactics, and once the ultimate measure (vote conversion) gets tallied, they will have a comprehensive knowledgebase on them.

By the end of 2008, campaigns and/or political parties will know what online tactics do and do not work under various conditions. As to how much of this information they will share with the inquiring public, that’s anyone’s guess.

3) China’s Diffusion/Deflection of Power Identification
The 2008 Beijing Olympics has been touted as China’s coming out party to the world. You may be wondering why, seeing as the PRC (Peoples Republic of China) has been competing in the Olympics since the 1980s (they were previously represented as the Republic of China by the mainland, from 1932 to 1936, then by Taiwan, from 1948 to 1976). Well, since the days of Deng Xiaoping, China’s economy has flourished, but it hadn’t become the skyrocket we see today until it ascended to WTO (World Trade Organization) membership in 2001 and began trading on a much larger scale. After less than a decade of unprecedented growth, China now sits as the third largest economy in the world and has steadily become a major player in world affairs, as is evident in their ability to get North Korea back to the six-party talks and their growing hunger for oil. China is now on the radar screens of the West’s general public, but what will make things salient for all is if China tops the U.S. in the medal count, as some have predicted will happen. Combined with a glitzy, well coordinated event, it will be clear to the world, Americans in particular, that there is a new superpower in town.

Till now, the Chinese have mostly adhered to their principle of a <span peaceful rise. They have silently risen up the political and economic ranks throughout the years by being careful not to make waves in the world order. A strong showing at the Olympics, which is inevitable, will screw that right up. At Beijing, China will be exposed.

Look for the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) to mitigate human rights activism leading up to, and during, the 2008 Olympics. More importantly, unless they’ve changed their perspective away from a peaceful rise, look for the CCP to use various communication tactics to diffuse or deflect the possibility of being identified as a U.S.-challenging power. In their quest for growth, the last thing they’d want is to evoke memories of the Cold War.

4) Communicating with Authoritarian Capitalism
As a product of China’s Olympic coming out party, Westerners will attempt to understand how China’s political-economic system works, just as they immediately tried to learn more about Islam or the Middle East after 9/11. Westerners might not be too comfortable with the notion of an authoritarian government (the CCP) controlling such an immense populous, especially when a good deal of China’s economic growth has come on the backs of the practically voiceless peasant and working classes.

The normative discrepancy between our cultures will cause some of our population to try and reach out to some of theirs. Because of our assumption (not necessarily wrong) that citizens of a country would naturally want to have a say in its internal and external affairs, the debate over political systems will move from the academic and political elite down to the general public. It will be interesting to see how we in the West will try to penetrate China’s communication systems with our personal missions of democracy. Conversely, as democracy would threaten the legitimacy of the CCP, one would be curious to see how they will try to stymy Westerners’ efforts. Expect this to include framing authoritarian capitalism into something Westerners might value, or at least sympathize with, in an attempt to neutralize Western individual efforts before they begin.

Most importantly, however, we should examine how China’s lowest classes receive Westerners’ messages. Will they want to know more? Will they exhibit a sense of malaise? ..OR, to borrow a Marxist concept, is it possible that capitalism in itself can be a sort of opiate, numbing the want for democracy in a traditionally Confucian society? If so, this could eventually be detrimental to the interests of the United States and the West in general, as China’s economy will continue to grow at an astonishing rate, thanks to the cheap, voiceless labor they employ.

5) Collective Action : The Next Level
Recently, Ron Paul was able to raise over $3 million in a single day. That is an amazing achievement of collective action. Thousands of individuals came together on this day to each do their part to financially support their candidate. The problem is they all did the same thing.

The internet has proven to be a wonderful tool for materializing collective action towards political ends, but its utility has been limited. You’ll note that, for now, the tools available only foster a collective of simple, parallel actions (i.e. a syndicate of actions), like letter writing or donations. It’s difficult to find examples of tools to coordinate multi-stepped, multi-layered actions that require the efforts of many, like the process of campaigning for a candidate/issue or organizing a rally. When it comes to issues, the collective parallel action of writing thousands of letters might not outweigh the carefully coordinated efforts of an opposing professional lobbyist. But the carefully coordinated, multi-stepped, multi-layered efforts of thousands has the potential to blow lobbyists out of the water; that is, until they harness the same tools.

Look for online coordination/project-management type solutions to be developed for political campaigning throughout the year. These could start out as basic as Microsoft Project (web access edition) and move up to something resembling the high-end ERMs (enterprise resource management solutions) already used in the private sector, like Oracle’s PeopleSoft or SAP’s ERP.

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By Jude Calvillo

A friend and professor of mine, Gigi Johnson, recently directed my attention to a new venture by Blue Lithium (just acquired by Yahoo), known only as their Voter Network. What this network effectively does is mine individual web-surfing behavior from popular websites (a LOT of them) to target political campaign ads directly at you, according to your apparent interests/preferences, the next time you visit one of their sites.

A good analogy to this would be the way coupons are printed out for you at the supermarket checkout stand. Yes, I mean those coupons that seem to magically know you have kids, are going to need kitty litter pretty soon, and that, since high school, you’ve been trying to shed those last few pounds of “baby fat.” Now imagine that the next time you visit the supermarket the magical coupon printer happens to know that you’ve recently begun looking for work and blame the loss of your last job on “unfair” competition overseas, …so it spits out a coupon that reads something like “Vote for [or donate to] John Edwards: He’ll keep U.S. jobs and unions strong.”

Cool, huh?
Well, before you go cashing in that coupon, you should first know why such behavioral targeting technology could be dangerous for democracy…

For one, it could essentially give everyone a reason to vote for a particular Voter Network client/candidate. This method of individualization is dangerous because it gives us no sense of a candidate’s stance priority schema (the order of their stance preference/priority). Let’s say, for example, Lee of Long Beach might vote for XYZ candidate because, as the candidate’s banner ad expressed, they are Gay rights proponents. Ryan of Los Angeles might vote for the same candidate because the banner ad he saw said that the candidate is deeply religious. This might be all good, assuming the stances in the ads are true, but what happens if/when this person is elected to public office and they must make a decision of religious relevance that could exclude homosexuals from enjoying a particular right? At least debates and press conferences give us a feel for how a candidate might prioritize their stances.

But what if their stances aren’t true? Theoretically speaking, the level of individualization and issue specialization could be so microscopic that a female fisherman who would otherwise never vote for XYZ candidate votes for them because the candidate, according to their online ad, is an avid fly fisherman or advocate of women’s rights in sub-saharan Africa. Let’s face it: the average voter simply doesn’t have the means to confirm whether or not these very specific, or remote, appeals are true.

Then, of course, there’s the matter of PRIVACY. Just how comfortable are YOU with someone watching practically every move you make on the sites you visit most? Did you give them permission? Did you know that you may already have? Try reading the ‘privacy statement’ or ‘terms of service’ next time you join a website’s membership. ‘Nough said.

There may, however, be a silver-lining to all of this.

With the ability to engage voters per individual need/interest, one can’t help but feel that the Voter Network’s approach holds the potential to bring back those citizens who have tuned out of politics in recent years, especially when we factor in the supposed reach of their network. It seems inevitable that Johnny Novote might just want to “click and find out more” about a candidate that has made multiple direct appeals on those issues he finds important. Even if the investment of Johnny’s time and effort doesn’t ultimately lead to his voting, at least Johnny has informed himself of the candidate(s) and issues at hand. An informed citizenry, despite being subject to propaganda, is better than an ignorant citizenry any day. In that sense, the Voter Network could be good for democracy.

Whatever the effects of this new online venture turn out to be, two things are certain:
1) We need to counter the dangers of individualization/compartm

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You’re right

Blogs are supposed to be about editorial, or, at least, they usually are. They are about reporting, opinion, and preferably presenting professional analysis; essentially, blogging is just a new, more interactive form of journalism. With that in mind, from now on, my posts will only be as “bookish” as is necessary to make my point(s).

So back to the point at hand…

Just the other day, I came across a -mostly- heartwarming article in The Economist that spoke of a growing middle-class in Latin America (click for article). With a spotlight on the cases of Mexico and Brazil, the article details how a more true middle-class (vs. the fortunate few that we in the U.S. would probably consider upper middle-class) is burgeoning throughout Latin America thanks to trade liberalization, freer, more sophisticated credit offerings, and tempered pricing. The Economist’s numbers and charts mimic the humble climb of millions; Latin American workers are now upward -not necessarily northward- bound. This all makes for a chicken-soup to the Latin American soul with a hearty base of macroeconomic prudence and the spice of global engagement, but, just as I was beginning to savor sips of this stew, I choke on a bit of bitterness.

According to The Economist, political scientist Jorge Castañeda says that the new middle-class is “…more Mexican-looking than its predecessor.” What’s that supposed to mean? Let me clean my palette…

It’s obvious that Sr. Castañeda is, despite all of his years as an “intellectual,” not impervious to stereotyping or going simple. To make matters worse, he is a Latin American political scientist, which means he has most likely been exposed to the myriad “looks” of the region’s various nationalities. Today’s Mexicans, just like Americans, or any other nationality with a history of immigration -or conquest- and robust tourism, come in many different shapes, sizes, and colors. There is no particular “look” that can be claimed truly Mexican. Any such claim would therefore be based on a stereotype, or simplification, founded upon segregating/stratifying grounds from other groups, be they conscious or not.

What Mr. Castañeda must mean to say, besides telling of a certain level of ignorance, malice, or membership, is that the newest entrants to the Mexican middle-class have a more indigenous look to them. What that means for us, as observers of political communication, and to the political elite of Mexico, or any other rising Latin American economy for that matter, is that politics and its persuasive mechanisms must now factor in the changing aesthetic composition (“looks”) of the largest group of more likely voters (i.e. the middle-class). This means that messages aimed at the old middle-class of Mexico/Latin America could miss their mark, for the artificial aristocrats of yesteryear, products of post-colonial and/or polarized economies, usually European in descent and design, will no longer monopolize the ballot boxes. Therefore, they should no longer monopolize the podiums either. The new middle-class will require engagement, through propaganda respectful of their aesthetic, and demand political opportunities reflective of their mass (i.e. more public offices).

In short, a changing of the guard is in order. Political persuasion, in both the tactical and symbolic sense, as well as some of the current Euro-looking political elite, must quickly say adiós to the aesthetic remnants of conquests past and buenos días to groups that traditionally have had little representation.

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As was alluded to in the article, now more than ever, public diplomacy should be on the mind of any actor capable of showing others just how great America still is (not perfect, but still great in so many ways), and our businesspeople seem to be wonderful candidates for this special duty. In a world where international trade and open economies are beginning to level the playing field, and where interdependence prevents all-out war between trading countries, we are left with diplomacy, and who better to reach the people of other countries (not just the political elite) than the very actors that the international trade regime grants the most access to?: businessmen and -women, each with a story to tell…and Brand America to sell.

To read the article, please visit: http://www.fastcompany.com/articles/2007/08/open-debate.html
For those of you viewing this post via facebook, or another RSS syndication, and would like to view my new blog, Power and Persuasion, check it out here: http://judecalvillo.blogspot.com – hope ya’ likes, and tell you friends!

What about you? What are YOUR thoughts? Can you think of other means, or potential agents, of public diplomacy outside of the political system? Do you think that the ‘tarnish’ on our image is temporary and can be cleaned up after we, say, change administrations? If not by changing administrations, what political change do you think would rejuvenate our image? Do you think that there are elements besides our foreign policy that have affected our image?

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