It’s been over two weeks, but we can still hear the “Mariachi” clearly in our heads: another great ESOMAR LATAM conference has just come to a close, and this time it has left us genuinely inspired. As ESOMAR Latin American Partners, we were happy to host this year’s edition in Mexico City in the first week of April. What an experience it was!
After Buenos Aires, São Paulo and Bogota, this year it was Mexico City’s turn: tequila was certainly in order, though it doubtless took a backseat to world-class presentations with a truly Latin American touch.
Latin America: land of innovative struggle
The prize for best paper went to Stephanie Landers for “Business in Today’s Latin American Society,” which presented the unique social situation in Latin America, how it has shaped businesses over time, and how it continues to do so today. It explored how consumer pressure has led to an increase in product ideas, strategic approaches, and innovative business models coming out of Latin America.
Culture was a recurring topic throughout the conference, even beyond the Latin American region. For example, a paper by Lightspeed entitled “Is Shopping Cultured?” used Netquest panel and survey data to pose open-ended questions on how consumers navigate the decision-making process in different languages and countries.
GfK and Mercado Libre—the latter being one of the foremost players on the LatAm ecommerce market—presented the fascinating paper “How to Analyze Big Data and Not Die Trying?” which used the Netquest panel’s passive data to gain insight into consumers’ digital purchase path on their website. They concluded that: “with Big Data we are forced to re-think the role of the investigator within the industry, it is because its relevance and protagonism also creates a new competence: digital platforms that not only have big databases, but also the technical expertise to treat that information.”
