Smart Fit is the fourth largest sports academy chain in the world and leader of the segment in Latin America. Present in 14 countries and with about 3.7 million enrolled customers, the company closed the year 2022 with about 1,225 units only in Brazil.
Challenge
Smart Fit’s Content and Growth teams had conducted a test with the use of local expressions in media pieces and identified higher than usual click and conversion rates. In addition to the tests, the Trade events that were held helped validate the expansion of regionalized actions in online and offline pieces.
After this result, it became clear that it was necessary to regionalize the communication. The big challenge was to do this in a respectful way, without stereotyping the populations or using terms in the wrong way. Therefore, the content team understood that it would be important to create a regional glossary contemplating the most common expressions used in each of the 27 Brazilian states.
This way, it would be possible to bring the communication closer to the target audience and increase the engagement and conversion of the media pieces.
Therefore, the Smart Fit team sought the help of Tuia specialists, as it was necessary to have professionals with experience in research methodology to prepare the glossary.
Process
With this context, we suggested a project composed of an online questionnaire and a Desk Research stage.
We created a questionnaire that was forwarded to our contact base and disseminated through advertisements, requesting answers about the most commonly used expressions in daily life. The objective of this stage was for us to understand and gather these mannerisms spoken in each state.
After finalizing the questionnaire, we started the Desk Research stage, where we conducted in-depth research in complementary materials such as scientific articles, journalistic articles, dictionaries and others, in order to understand the origin of the terms and enrich the Glossary.
We compiled the data obtained with the Questionnaire and the Desk Research into three distinct documents:
- A full version containing the complete research organized as a dictionary;
- A summarized version to be used by the media team;
- A document presenting the processes and with a user’s guide.
Results
- The final delivery of the project gathered 3,370 expressions, from the 27 Brazilian states;
- For each state, an introduction was created containing the creation history, including the people who inhabited the region and the phonetic characteristics of the regional speech for a better understanding of the local culture;
- For the larger and more populous states, we regionalized the glossaries for specific regions, which is helping the Smart Fit team produce more regionalized and personalized ads;
- We created an abridged version and a usage guide to facilitate search and day-to-day use;
- The project was quickly adopted and is being used daily by the entire SmartFit content team.
