Male Grooming in Brazil: Changing Attitudes and New Opportunities

The governor of this, Brazil's third-largest state, former Brazilian President Itamar Franco, simply stopped all state debt repayments to the Federal government. Franco's action, in turn, led to widespread concern among foreign investors. In response, Cardoso's government was forced to let the real float in mid-January The resulting readjustment at least temporarily restored confidence in Brazil's economy in The devaluation, in turn, gave Brazil a stronger export advantage.

However, this caused difficulties with its Mercosur partners, especially Argentina, which retained a one-to-one ration of its currency to the U. With the largest economy in Latin America, Brazil has always attracted interest from abroad. Brazil has encouraged even greater interest from foreign investors in the latter half of the s due to the relative success of the Plano Real, coupled with Brazil's increasing integration with Mercosur partners of Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay.

Yet for all its dominance in South America and its central role in Mercosur, Brazilian business culture is not particularly typical for Latin America. Indeed, Brazil differs from all other American nations due to its uniquely Portuguese rather than Spanish history, coupled with its marked internal regional differences. Arguably, it is not possible to understand Latin America as a whole without understanding Brazil. On the other hand, understanding the rest of the Latin American nations does not ensure particularly accurate insight into doing business in Brazil.

Brazil is the most populous Portuguese-speaking country in the world by a large margin. Brazil has well over 16 times as many people as Portugal itself. Brazilian Portuguese differs as markedly from the Portuguese spoken in Portugal as American English differs from the English spoken in England. Unlike the comparison to English, however, where British English is viewed as the more standard dialect and accordingly is more widespread world-wide, the dominant world dialect of Portuguese in the 20th century remains Brazilian.

Nor is Brazilian Portuguese uniform—significant regional accents exists between the Southeast, the region around Rio de Janeiro, and the North. The Portuguese language is a useful tool when doing business in Brazil because it gives access both to the large number of Brazilians who speak only Portuguese or to those who speak other languages poorly.

Additionally, because Brazil is the dominant Portuguese-speaking nation, a foreigner's use of Portuguese is often interpreted as a sign of sincere interest in Brazil. Thus, while speaking the local language is always advisable for gaining market insight and building relationships, the use of Portuguese in Brazil by North American business people is of particular value. Brazilians have come to expect that the majority of North American business people with whom they come in contact will speak little or no Portuguese. For this reason alone, it is an advantage for a U.

Because most of Latin America speaks Spanish while Brazil uses Portuguese, the use of Spanish has taken on a somewhat special status. Many educated Brazilians, including most of its business class, speak at least some Spanish.

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Nonetheless, some Brazilians have grown to resent other Latin Americans who may expect the Brazilians to use Spanish in their interactions with them. Another point of irritation for many Brazilians rests with non-Latin American foreigners who mistakenly believe that Brazilians speak Spanish. Like Spanish, English is also widespread, especially among the educated and the business class. Additionally, many government officials and business leaders have received degrees from British, U.

Indeed, for many Brazilians, fluency in English for business purposes may be viewed as a sign of their education. This can present potential problems in international business, since indicating that a Brazilian's English is poor or otherwise less than fluent may prove to be a source of loss of face. Brazil is a divided nation regarding its view of technology.

While it is unwise to speak in blanket terms, it may still be helpful to describe general geographic differences in this respect. The states of southeastern Brazil, along with northern Europe, Canada, and the United States, share a view of technology as a controlling mechanism. The northern states of Brazil, by contrast, traditionally hold a more ambivalent toward the use of technology than the United States and other control cultures.

Northern Brazilians, particularly in nonurban areas, are more likely to see themselves as subject to the forces of nature around them than as controllers of that environment. Finally, among native groups in the Amazon regions of Brazil, people are more likely to view themselves as neither controlling nature nor subject to it; instead, they are likely to view technology as a means to be in harmony with nature. Environmental issues are a major concern in Brazil. Since the nation has within its borders the vast majority of the Amazon rain forest, Brazil is home to over half of the world's known species of plants, animals, and insects.

Because the Amazon is viewed by many other nations as an irreplaceable natural resource, Brazil has frequently been the subject of negative criticism for its policies toward development. To some extent, the criticism is arguably more critical of Brazil than many Brazilians believe it should be. One need only compare the Brazilian energy sector's carbon dioxide emissions of 60 million tons to that of other comparably sized nations such as the United States at 1. Still, to a large extent, much of the criticism regarding Brazil's handling of the Amazon rain forest has been justified, particularly during the s and s.

During that period, Brazil asserted that its growth as a world power depended at least in part on developing the largely unexplored resources of Amazonia. Brazil has not always welcomed these attacks, arguing that the United States and Europe have no great expanse of undeveloped territory because they exploited that territory to reach their level of advanced development. This official position led to many initiatives that increased risk to Brazil's interior. Beginning in the late s, Brazil markedly increased cattle production in the interior.

In , Brazil formerly began colonization programs in the interior, including extremely attractive pricing as well as building new roads into the previously undeveloped regions. This in turn led to large scale agroforestry and logging, particularly in Jari. Agriculture followed, converting much jungle to coffee, watermelon, and papaya cultivation. By the mids, small farmers had seriously expanded from the Amazonian floodplain well into the jungle using slash and burn techniques that not only rapidly contributed to deforestation but began to endanger the whole rain forest ecosystem.

By the s, Brazil's development activities had received widespread condemnation abroad from the scientific community and environmental activists. It is notable that Brazil responded positively to the criticism, reversing much of its support of rain forest development, and more closely monitoring that development it still allows. Indeed, in response to the earlier criticism, Brazil is a world leader in environmental monitoring from space, a project to which it has devoted considerable government resources. Moreover, it was not a coincidence that Brazil hosted the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in The Rio Conference assembled nations from around the world to adopt a common course of action for reaching sustainable development.

Family ties are somewhat stronger in Brazil than they are in North America or in many northern European nations. Moreover, family ties are not only stronger but broader in Brazil than in North America and northern Europe.

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The North American and northern European family usually consists of one's spouse and children and occasionally one's parents. In Brazil, family ties are equally strong for kinship relationships such as cousins, in-laws, uncles and aunts, nephews, nieces, and godparent relationships. Still, Brazil has a somewhat weaker familial bond, especially in business, than many Latin American Spanish-speaking nations.

As Roberto Da Matta explains, a conflict exists in Brazil" between the public world with its universal laws and contracts, and the private universe of the family, of godparents, relatives and friends. Still, while family ties are weaker in Brazilian business than they are in many other Latin American nations, they should not be underestimated by North Americans and northern Europeans. Brazilian family ties provide considerably greater access to business joint ventures, to favorable terms on negotiations, and to reaching people in power.

Family ties provide little of this in North America and northern Europe. The result is that many business people from northern Europe and North America working in Brazil may not be able to reach people in power. This may be simply because they do not know how to employ such connections, or because they believe based on their own native that use of such connections is somehow inappropriate.

Finally, as in most other Latin American nations, Brazilians as a whole look more or less favorably on the practice of nepotism—the hiring of relatives. In Brazil, loyalty is generally more highly valued than in nations such as the United States, Canada, or Great Britain. Nepotism, in turn, guarantees a fairly high degree of loyalty through family ties.

Moreover, the very fact of hiring a relative helps to carry through with one's own familial obligations, which makes those same loyalty bonds even stronger. Nepotism, by contrast, is disdained in North America and northern Europe where family ties are assumed to cover up the relative's incompetence. Indeed, many organizations especially in the United States have explicit anti-nepotism policies. The result of implementing such policies in Brazil may well produce the opposite effect in Brazil, instead reducing productivity and loyalty among one's employees there.

Gender is more clearly differentiated in Brazil than in the United States. To a large extent, the United States attempts both through legislation and social norms to ignore gender differences in the work place, while such differences are more emphasized in Brazil. The result may make some U. In general, many U. Gender-based etiquette in Brazil, by contrast, is not a sign of sexism but of good upbringing. Failure to participate in such exchanges or to reject such behavior as sexist is likely to be misunderstood.

Dress is also highly differentiated between men and women in Brazil. Many Brazilians give considerably more attention to make-up, for example, and women's business attire tends to emphasize femininity in a different manner than U. Misreading Brazilian women's dress may lead to underestimating the importance of their position; in turn, misreading the more conservative U. In Brazil, as in the United States, a considerable increase in the number of women in the work force took place between and A study by Connelly and Levison found that "In , the percentage of women aged 10 or older who were economically active was In urban areas in , it reached Of the economically active women in , Brazil has the greatest inequity of wealth distribution of all major economies.

A mere 5 percent of the population owns 80 percent of Brazil's land. While the inequality of income distribution among Brazilians has a very long history, the disparity has grown even greater since the s. In , the richest 10 percent of the population controlled By , this elite 10 percent controlled When one considers that throughout this period Brazil remained in the top ten largest economies in the world, this is no small amount. Conversely, the poorest 50 percent of Brazilians controlled a mere Indeed, as Joseph Page observes, Brazil's "poorest 50 percent and the richest I percent have approximately the same share of the national income.

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Nor is poverty limited only to Brazil's poorest 50 percent by North American or European definitions. As late as the mids, fully 85 percent of Brazilians had no system of sewage disposal. And more than 70 percent of the population have no running water at all. By contrast, most business people in Brazil either already belong to the controlling 10 percent of the Brazilian economic elite or are actively aspiring to join its ranks.

Consequently, most Brazilian business people if not necessarily the society as a whole seem quite comfortable with what they perceive as natural order of economic inequality.

New Masculinity

This often causes friction when Brazilian business people deal with their North American counterparts. Generally speaking, most business people in the United States or Canada are uncomfortable with class distinctions. Brazil, however, more than any other major business culture, professes to be at ease with these social inequalities. Most Brazilians view the world as a whole and the workplace in particular as innately unequal, and are more comfortable with these distinctions.

Brazil's ruling elite are among the best educated people in the world. They are often educated abroad as well as in Brazil's many well-respected universities. Still, the Brazilian elite notwithstanding, education itself is not widespread in Brazil as a whole. One half of Latin America's illiterate population lives in Brazil, and fully 20 percent of Brazil is completely unable to read.

The figure for functional illiteracy is at least double that amount. Less than 18 percent of all Brazilians over the age of ten have gone beyond four years of school; indeed, more than half of all Brazilian children have never gone to school at all. Brazil can be divided into five major regions, each with distinctive business behavior, accents, and political orientation. Because Brazilians themselves often stereotype the behavior that characterizes each region, it may be useful briefly to outline these stereotypes here.

It is important, however, to point out that these characterizations are not necessarily accurate depictions of the people in each regions. The greatest concentration of business has centered on Brazil's southeastern states. While Sao Paulo is the largest industrial center in the country, the entire southeastern region is characterized by major emphasis on large business and large-scale foreign investment.

Many Brazilians view the southeast as having a faster pace of life than the rest of the nation and greater emphasis on business. People who live in Sao Paulo state are known as paulistas, with the widely accepted stereotype of being hardworking and business-minded.

Brazil, Doing Business in

The Northeast is comprised of the coastal regions from Salvador northward. Those who live in the Northeast are called nordestinos, and are usually held up as a contrast to the southeast. Despite many notable exceptions, the Northeast is generally less economically developed than the southeast. The Northeast is often viewed as having a slower pace of life than the rest of the country. The residents of Rio de Janeiro are called cariocas.

Even though Rio is geographically located within the Southeast it is actually south of the state of Minas Gerais , most Brazilians view the city as having a distinctly separate identity. Famous for its anual Carnival, Rio is also the nation's cultural center and for years served as its political capital. Brazilians often characterize the cariocas as fun-loving and spirited. On the other hand, Rio is also viewed as culturally and economically balancing the characteristics of the North and South. The Interior represents Brazil's vast non-coastal territory.

Much of the Interior is unexplored and little of it is developed. At one time, Brazil emphasized the need to develop the Interior as key to its future. Currently, these efforts to exploit the inland regions of the Amazon have come under reconsideration, at least since the Rio Earth Summit.

Finally, the Federal District of Bras-lia represents Brazil's last region. For many years after its founding, Bras-lia was seen as an artificial city carved out of an undeveloped area and centered only on politics. A major city in its own right today, some Brazilians may still hold this older view. It is important to keep in mind that these represent national stereotypes, and are not reliable characteristics of the people and the regions. These generalizations are most useful for understanding some of the friction between regions rather than for any clear indicator of actual behavior in the regions.

Moreover, the regions are not populated only by people born to them; since the s, large numbers of Brazilians have moved to the nation's industrial centers looking for employment opportunities. While all major Brazilian cities have seen some influx from the countryside, the highest concentrations have come to the southeastern cities, such as Sao Paulo, Belo Horizante, Porto Alegre, and Curitiba.

Regional identities are not the only associative divisions in Brazil. As Leni Silverstein has written, "there is a nationally held belief that the identity of the Brazilian people is characterized both racially and culturally as one-third Portuguese, one-third African, and one-third Amerindian, a result of the intermarriage of the three most populous occupants of the land.

The Portuguese heritage remains a gray area. Clearly, Brazil owes its language and its Catholicism to Portugal. Indeed, it was Brazil's Portuguese heritage and the difference of Portuguese as a mother tongue that enabled Brazil to remain a single nation in the post-colonial period. This contrasts markedly with the divisions that followed the independence of Spain's former lands in the Americas.

Spanish America splintered into a wide variety of independent nations, while Portuguese America became the largest single nation in Latin America. Yet for all its historical ties to Portugal, Brazil's relationship with its former mother country remains ambivalent at best. Even while still a colony, Brazil had grown in many respects to greater or at least equal power to its mother country. When Spain took over Portugal from to , Brazil remained Portuguese-speaking and essentially independent of direct Spanish rule.

When the Dutch attempted to take over Bahia and Pernambuco during this period, it was Brazilian forces rather than Spanish or Portuguese troops that forced them out, a point not lost on the Brazilian conception of nationalism when Brazil reverted to Portuguese rule in Even more significantly, when Napoleon conquered Portugal in the early 19th century, the Portuguese royal family established its capital at Rio de Janeiro. This made Brazil the only country in the Americas to have ever served as a European seat of government. With this move came marked development in industry, finance, and the arts.

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For middle-class Chinese men, male beauty care is now seen as a symbol of sophistication and professionalism. Despite the trend being most pronounced among younger men, older Chinese men are certainly not letting themselves be left behind. This group is also paying significantly more attention to their appearance than before. A key attribute of Chinese male skincare shoppers that was highlighted by the survey is that they tend to be somewhat brand loyal, often having a particular brand in mind when heading out to buy; however, on the other hand, they also claim that they are open to being directed by sales assistants when making purchases.

Younger consumers were said to be slightly more likely to make planned purchases compared to older consumers, and the richer the consumer, the more likely they would be to make impulse purchases. The HKTDC survey further reports that the higher the average income, the more likely it is that an individual will have a regular skincare routine and the greater the number of skincare products used. Acne treatment, sun block and oil-control products are the top three features male Chinese consumers are looking for according to Cinda Research. Separate research by Kantar Worldpanel backs this up, stating that men are more likely to have greasy skin and that male-specific brands with oil-control features show high levels of demand.

Chinese men have strong brand preferences and if buying new products, tend to stick to the brands they already know and prefer. However, when buying new products they look for ones that provide well-defined results or meet a specific need, such as products designed especially for men or particular skin types, or ones that have specific features such as anti-aging and anti-wrinkle results. The next most important factor for consideration is products that offer innovative new ingredients.

In terms of the country of origin for the skincare product used, while Chinese brands are considered to be good value, higher-income individuals tend to have a greater preference for foreign brands, with European and South Korean brands being most popular. Skincare products from different countries have very different perceptions among Chinese male consumers.

Swiss products are seen as focusing on medical cosmetology, US brands are considered to have more advanced formulae, and Japanese brands are seen as focusing more on skin whitening and are considered as more suitable for Asian skin types. It is estimated, however, that it will take around eight years at a minimum for premium brands to achieve the same level of market penetration in China as they currently do in South Korea. This future potential for premium skincare brands is backed up by a report from McKinsey that details how Chinese consumers currently account for a third of the spending in the global luxury goods market.

Since , three quarters of the total growth in global luxury spending can be attributed to purchases made by Chinese consumers, and by China is expected to have the greatest number of affluent households in the world. Surveys further show that affluent Chinese consumers are more likely than lower income Chinese consumers to plan to increase their spending in the next year.