Global Links Brazil Program 2019 — 2020 | A Case Study
During the last four months, I had the opportunity to participate in the GLOBAL LINKS program, an initiative of the Crummer Graduate School of Business at Rollins College and Tupperware Brands in its fourth edition, the first in Brazil, hosted in the city of São Paulo.
Global Links is a cross-cultural training program sponsoring high-achieving female scholars from emerging countries, the program consisted of recruiting students from the best universities in the capital of São Paulo and placing them in a business management training program which aims to provide mentoring and consulting for female entrepreneurs who owns small businesses and thus foster social impact in small, often marginalized communities.
But what is Global Links? To ensure a lasting impact amongst women in developing nations, the Global Links program arises from a public-private initiative aimed at bringing the university closer to the small business market run by women. This program has 3 phases, the first consists of the application and selection of 200 young students of undergraduate courses, after this selection, the students are submitted to training workshops in the areas such as finance, marketing, planning, human resources and business management. The workshops are carried out by professors from the main business schools as well as professionals and consultants of each area. These workshops, aligned with the areas of academic background of the students are essential in the development of the program. After the workshops, students are submitted to a new selection process to determine who will be the 30 mentors who’s going to work in consultancy with the pre-selected businesswomen. After the selection, Match Day takes place, an event in which businesswomen and students have their first meeting, mediated by the Global Links team and which marks the beginning of the mentoring process.
I decided to share my experience in this incredible program and I hope that this report will be useful for other students who also want to be part of the next editions and I hope that this will be a useful resource to anyone interested in applying to Global Links.
The Global Links program has 4 successful cycles in 3 different countries with the participation of 5000 students. About 150 businesswomen had their businesses impacted by the program.
during the Global Links Workshop at ESPM in São Paulo
I am a student attending two undergraduate courses, Social Communication at a university with a strong focus on corporate and business and BA (Hons) in Design at a university focused on creative arts. The reasons that led me to enroll in the program are many, among them the opportunity to add an immersive consulting experience to my training, the opportunity to test my skills and knowledge acquired in my courses, and most importantly, the impact that I knew that the program has for small communities. I am a Brazilian indigenous of Guajajara ethnicity, a group that suffers prejudice and exclusion in contemporary society and I know how academic and professional training opportunities are essential to fight for equal rights.
during the Global Links Match Day at ESPM in São Paulo
After having made my application through online registration forms, attending orientation lectures and training workshops, it was time for Match Day, where I was able to meet the businesswoman with whom I would work for the next 4 months. Match Day is a very important day and one that brings a lot of expectations from students and businesswomen. The program creates a system that match’s between the students’ training profile and the business area and needs of the businesswomen. This is important for us to understand how to apply our knowledge and training to adequately meet the needs of each businesswoman.
On Match Day I was introduced to Amanda. Amanda is a businesswoman who works with custom cakes and pastries. She has a degree in human resources management and a postgraduate degree in psycho-pedagogy and worked in the corporate world until mid-2012, when, due to health problems, she left the segment.
At the time, Amanda started taking courses in the confectionery area and fell in love with the area. She started taking orders for cakes and pastries in parallel to her job and in 2013, he finally decided to open her own business.
As Amanda has a background in business and people management, as well as a great care with the continuous training in confectionery and cooking, she showed a company with a solid financial base and excellent products.
But during our conversations, she showed that she did not have a brand vision, as well as a mission, values or communication and marketing strategies. Her business was focused on products, and all of her energies were focused on taking more courses in the cooking area and keeping accounts upated.
My first step was to do a series of interviews with Amanda to better understand her background, her company and what needs and expectations she had regarding the program. She commented in one of the meetings that she did not see herself as a creative person or that she understood advertising. Based on that, the methodology I chose to work with to solve problems with Amanda was Branding Design aligned with UX and Design Thinking.
After the interviews, I started the research part where I focused my work in the following areas:
- Market segment.
- Values and worldview of the target audience.
- Consumer behavior.
- History and customs behind the celebrations (birthdays, baby showers, wedding showers).
- Demographic and geographical analysis of the public attended by the brand.
- Consumer habits in the market segment.
- Bakery in pop culture.
- Heads of Industry today.
After the stage of presentation and discussion of the research, comes the Brading Design part. In this step, we work together to analyze the aspects that make up the brand by applying UX Design and Design Thinking methodologies. For this, we created a brand positioning based on the characteristics that the brand already had, emphasizing its qualities and mitigating its defects.
These are the parameters that should guide the brand’s marketing, communication, language and actions strategies. They constitute the visual, textual and language production platform of the brand. It's from this platform that we will next determine which medias of communication, promotion and how to promote the brand. The next step is to analyze and determine the spirit of the brand.
After defining the personality and spirit of the brand, it is time to define the UX Persona. Persona is important to think about issues such as:
- Who am I talking to?
- What problems am I trying to help solve?
As well as understanding motivations, expectations, through empathy, defining the best strategies, designing products and solutions and in decision making.
After that we went to the Design section, to finally align the brand presentation with its spirit and new Branding. In this part of the consultancy, we started to work together on how to use graphic design tools such as typography, colors, text alignment, image editing using Canva and Photoshop tools. In addition, new graphic pieces (menu, stickers, bags and business card) were created aligne with the new brand positioning.
In the meantime, the Mid Therm Presentations took place, where students showcased the partial results of their work with the entrepreneurs to the Global Links team and where they received guidance and direction regarding the program’s expectations and objectives once we identify the points to be worked with businesswomen
One of the highlights of the program happened in a simple unexpected way. At one of our meetings, where we discussed the current heads of the industry, Amanda expressed her desire to get to know Chef Carole Crema’s Coffee and be very fond of her work on TV. Carole Crema is a Chef, businesswoman, university professor and host of a very popular TV show about cooking. I promised that the next meeting would be at the Carole Crema Coffee. In the period between the two meetings, I wrote to Carole, introducing myself, the Global Links project, and talked about my work with Amanda and asked about the possibility of meeting her in her Coffee and if she could share her experiences and career with us. She accepted and on the day of the meeting Amanda was surprised by the two of us waiting for her.
Carole spoke for 2 hours about her academic and professional trajectory, about the challenges of opening her own business in relation to managing finances, people and deliveries. She also shared her opinions and experiences about what it’s like to be an entrepreneurial woman, about her career on TV and about teaching.
It was a very inspiring conversation and I believe it was a positive experience for Amanda. After that meeting, photography and videomaking workshops took place. I invited a group of friends, students in the area of audiovisual and creative arts who work in a collective called KORVO STUDIO. Photographer Gabriel Viana, videomaker Pedro Viana and 3D Designer Gilles Leite gave us a class on how to work with lighting, scene montage, photographic equipment, as well as how to use the cellphone camera in the most effective way. You can see a behind the scenes of the workshop ahead.
The next step was to plan communication and marketing strategies. We decided to focus on communication on the Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp platforms. As an activity management platform, I chose to teach Amanda how to use Trello. Trello is an online tool available in mobile and web versions for activity management and integrated with google calendar, google drive and others.
We also decided to focus communication on the main national holidays, creating a new product per campaign depending on the theme and period (Mother’s Day, Grandparents’ Day, Father’s Day, Easter, Christmas, among others) but always in line with the new branding.
For the campaigns, it was important to think of strategies to create links between new and old customers so that they understand the new branding in an organic way. Many of the clients end up becoming friends with Amanda in some way. So we decided that the language will be closer to everyday life than with corporate appeal. The arts for social medias must be clean, humanized, emphasizing their values and putting the quality of relationships ahead.
Another important point to be established was the MENU. Amanda did not have a specific dishes line with which she works. She was always open to do what her customers asked for. There were no flagship products, products that created a direct connection to her brand. The establishment of dishes that are part of the fixed MENU was important for Amanda to be able to organize herself in terms of weekly and monthly demands, establishment of fixed costs for the purchase of products, deliveries, as well as the establishment of the prices of her dishes taking into account not only these factors, but also the UX Personas.
We establish a line of cakes, sweets and snacks, taking into account a survey with a portion of her customers, as well as the acceptance of the dishes in relation to prices. Another major decision was made regarding the format of this MENU. We decided that it will be present in digital and physical formats as follows:
DIGITAL VERSION
PDF (For Email, Whatsapp and outhers)
PHYSICAL VERSION
Folder
It was necessary to align social medias with the new arts created. As Amanda mainly uses Facebook and Instagram as a portfolio for her products and uses Whatsapp to communicate with her customers, I taught her to use the LINKTREE app. It works as a link between all the communication media, centralizing them in a funnel that allows her to analyze various data such as number of accesses, times of highest audience, traffic of accesses and they if they happen through the cell phone or the computer and it’s a free tool.
For social networks, we created new arts mixing the new color palette chosen for the brand, photos of the products and phrases that motivate and engage the audience with a lettering that resembles conventional calligraphy, which gives an aspect of proximity, as if the message was addressed to each person individually.
For Instagram, we create highlights stores that value not only products but also customers, we also create a hashtag (#SejaDoce [#BeSweet] ) that will be used to engage customers to tag their product photos and moments with them to be reposted on the instagram page.
I decided to create an institutional video for Amanda, a video that showed all the values, mission and vision of her brand, in addition to showing her products. But more than that, I felt that a video would be a good form of expression for this work, as well as helping Amanda in terms of self-esteem. What I could see in relation to Amanda in this process is a great desire to learn, to improve her products and her relationship with customers, but still a lack of self esteem, of appreciation of what she has. What I could see throughout the program, in conversations with other mentors, is that women entrepreneurs often feel overwhelmed due to house care and the care of children and family and this often makes them feel that they are not developing maximum potential in their business. This video was created to symbolize this milestone in Amanda’s career, so that she could realize that she does have a creative potential, that studies and a lot of practice are necessary for continuous improvement, but that the tools exist, are accessible, and that the time always helps us to improve.
We will still work together, even after the program ends. Among our next steps are the creation and planning of an approach to the corporate world with a focus on coffee breaks and events, as well as the learning and application of digital marketing techniques for the growth of her business.
SOME FINAL THOUGHTS
I loved being part of the program. I believe that time management was the most complex factor I had to deal with because I attend two different universities, work and live alone, so this task management was something that I believe I have matured. I feel that the entrepreneur I was working with is someone that inspiring me a lot, because of her journey, for her professionalism, and because she embraced me in everything I proposed.
It is very gratifying to see a person who gives you complete confidence to develop this type of work, to propose new ways of expressing, of organizing, of methodology, of how to do networking, which does not mean that she agreed with everything I purpose. She was always open to dialogue, doing tests and analyzing feedbacks. The only thing I would say I thought could be better is that I think the mentors interacted very little with each other. Maybe if there was more dialogue we could help each other with the things we struggling with.
I hope this post has been informative about the process of getting to and working at the Global Links Program.
Good luck with your application if you choose to apply!
