BrazilCoreBiz expands its services into e-commerce with new consulting practice
Brazilian digital marketing agency CoreBiz has expanded its offerings to include e-commerce and digital consulting as a way to leverage its customers’ digital sales.
The clash of horns between marketing agencies and consulting firms is heating up in Brazil with digital marketing agency CoreBiz extending its offerings into the consulting world. The convergence between the two worlds has been going on for the past half a decade with numerous creative and digital agencies being bought up the world’s largest consulting firms.
Tech savvy, post-recession Brazil is the latest battleground for this global war of digital dominance, with Accenture being the first to jump the gun two years ago by making a move on AD.Dialeto to bolster its Accenture Interactive footprint throughout the continent. Global PR firm Weber Shandwick have also been encroaching on the digisphere in Brazil, having recently acquired Cappuccino, a São Paulo based full-service digital marketing and technology agency.
Globally, Accenture, McKinsey & Company and the Big Four professional service firms – Deloitte, KPMG, EY and PwC – are ramping up the heat on their digital service capabilities. The competition is fierce, with Consultancy.uk putting the dollar value that the consulting world dropped on agencies in 2017 at $1.2 billion – a 134% increase on 2016.
CoreBiz’s consulting practices will solidify the advertising agency’s position in Brazil’s digital strategy marketplace. The agency has brought in e-commerce industry pioneer Rodolfo Alves as the Head of Consultancy, a position created alongside the new practice. Alves has a wealth of experience in digital merchandising, B2B support, e-commerce strategy and project management.
Prior to joining CoreBiz, he served as the Head of Partner Care for cloud commerce platform VTEX, working on a diverse range of projects across Latin America. Alves has also led Nokia’s e-commerce business and worked for some of the region’s biggest companies at Latin online retailer, B2W.
The agency’s consulting services will add to its cognitive marketing and omni-channel offerings and bring together its services under one overarching digital strategy service. This includes combining logistics, service, IT, B2B, commercial, direct marketing, digital marketing and strategy consulting.
According to Alves, “It is fundamental to understand the particularities of each project that a client brings to us in order to propose a cost-effective and efficient solution for the business model. This is possible through a detailed plan that looks at the size of resources and costs, as well as a clear and objective scope, able to guarantee the health of all the fronts involved in a project.”
CoreBiz was founded by Felipe Macedo and Renan Mota under the name Santa Monica and then went on to acquire a number of smaller agencies in the fields of digital media, SEO, CRM and CRO. Today the company has roughly 80 professionals and has developed its focus on cognitive marketing omni-channel. When the agency rebranded as CoreBiz back in 2016, it projected an annual revenue stream of just over $1 million.
Speaking of the recent shift into the consulting industry, Macedo says, “CoreBiz is already consulting on almost every project of the agency, because we have no doubt that this is the success of our client's business.”
“However, we have decided to give emphasis to the area in order to guarantee all the risks at the very beginning of a project, as well as the optimization of resources and results for the retailers and consequently for us. Therefore, we bet on an experienced person who has been active in the e-commerce market for some time,” Macedo concludes, referring to Alves.
