Report: Demand For Retail Rewards In Brazil Outpaces Actual Perks By A 5-To-1 Margin

Local commerce is a key part of everyday life in Brazil. Fifty-five percent of the nation’s consumers regularly shop with the small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in their area, and 28 percent say they shop with those businesses more than with any other type of retailer.

For all the Brazilian consumers who shop locally, there are even more who might if doing so could earn them loyalty and rewards perks. Only 16 percent of consumers across Brazil use local businesses’ loyalty programs, in fact, even though as many as 66 percent would like to do so. Tapping into this latent demand could help Brazilian SMBs drive conversion among local shoppers and boost their bottom lines. What is stopping Brazilian consumers from signing up for local businesses’ loyalty programs, and how can local SMBs deliver the programs that they need to win over more customers?

This is one of the questions that PYMNTS, in collaboration with Pollinate, set out to answer in Making Loyalty Work For Small Businesses Playbook: Brazil Edition. We surveyed a census-balanced panel of 1,106 Brazilian consumers as part of our larger research into the loyalty and rewards preferences of 4,519 consumers across Australia, Brazil, the United Kingdom and the United States. This enabled us to find out how many Brazilian consumers would like to use local businesses’ loyalty programs, the roadblocks that local businesses must overcome to deliver such programs to customers and the steps they must take to overcome them.

One key roadblock is preventing Brazilian SMBs from unlocking this loyalty and rewards potential: data security concerns. Brazilian consumers are more likely than those in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia to cite concerns about how local SMBs might use their personal data as a reason for being wary of local loyalty programs, with 30 percent of all consumers who are uninterested in loyalty programs citing this as their reason.

Brazilian consumers may not trust local merchants to handle their personal data, but they do trust banks. This means that partnering with banks on loyalty programs can help Brazilian SMBs overcome their customers’ lingering data security fears. Brazilian consumers are five times likelier to trust banks as they are local SMBs to collect and manage the personal data needed to enable local loyalty programs, in fact, and 51 percent say they would want banks to enable their local loyalty programs even in the absence of security concerns.

Data security is only one piece of a much broader story about loyalty programs and Brazilian consumers’ relationships with their local businesses, however. The Making Loyalty Work For Small Businesses Playbook: Brazil Edition provides actionable insights into the steps that Brazilian SMBs can take to engage local shoppers and boost their bottom lines.

To learn more about what Brazilian consumers want from their local loyalty and rewards programs, download the Playbook.