As companies continue to expand across Latin America, many discover that even the most established communications strategies don't always translate as expected. Céline Heemskerk, founder and CEO of Global Village Strategies, explores the cultural and operational realities that shape communications in the region, and why relationships, trust, and local context remain critical to building influence and achieving business goals.
International companies entering Latin America with strong brand equity, polished messaging frameworks, and proven communications playbooks routinely discover the same thing: none of it works the way they expected.
Not because the strategy is wrong. Because the operating logic of communications in the region is fundamentally different — and most organisations do not understand that until they have already lost ground.
In Latin America, communications operates as a relationship system. Access, influence, and outcomes are driven by trust, proximity, and continuity with key stakeholders. The message matters. But who delivers it, and the strength of the relationship behind it, matters more.
The region is not what most organisations think it is
The patterns are not theoretical. Building communications functions across Latin America for global technology companies — from the ground up, with no existing team, no local agency relationships, and no regional playbook — makes certain things very clear: the decisions organisations make about structure and people determine almost everything about what communications can actually deliver in the region.
Latin America is not one market - it is many. Brazil and Mexico account for the majority of regional GDP but operate with entirely distinct media ecosystems, political dynamics, and business cultures. Colombia, Chile, Argentina, and the Andean markets each carry their own regulatory environments and stakeholder landscapes. Central America and the Caribbean add further complexity — tighter elite networks, a closer relationship between business, media, and political power. Within each country, a government transition, a regulatory shift, or a public crisis can transform the communications environment faster than any regional framework anticipates.
One principle holds across all of it: communication is high-context. Meaning is shaped as much by relationship as by message. Trust with key stakeholders is not peripheral to communications strategy — it directly determines access, alignment, and execution.
The cultural gap is larger than most companies realise
Geert Hofstede's model of organisational culture measures power distance: how much hierarchy a society accepts and expects. A high score means authority is deeply embedded — bosses decide, subordinates follow, and disagreement rarely surfaces directly. A low score means flat structures are the norm: people challenge upward comfortably, expect to be consulted, and say what they think. Mexico scores 81 on this index, Colombia 67, Peru 64, Chile 63. The US sits at 40, Netherlands at 38, Germany and the UK at 35.
The operational consequence is specific. A North American or Northern European communications director working with a Mexican counterpart who has serious reservations about a strategy will often wait for signals that never arrive in the form they expect. The Mexican colleague is unlikely to challenge directly in a meeting, will not flag problems without being asked, and will express disagreement — if at all — through omission or delay rather than direct objection. That silence gets read as alignment. Decisions get made on a foundation that is more fragile than anyone realises — until something goes wrong.
In practice, this shows up across two dynamics that international communications leaders must understand.
The first is hierarchy at the start of a relationship. Professionals from Mexico, Colombia, or Peru typically begin working with North American or European managers more formally — careful phrasing, waiting for permission to use first names, avoiding public contradiction. An Argentine or Chilean starts closer to a different register: more direct, more comfortable with flat conversation from day one. The typical North American or Northern European manager misreads initial formality as deference or lack of initiative. It is neither. It is respect and caution until the team's unwritten code becomes legible. The correction must happen explicitly on day one and cannot be assumed from informal style alone.
The second is how feedback lands. Blunt feedback without prior context reads as personal disapproval in Latin America, not professional correction — particularly in Mexico, Brazil and Colombia. What works: genuine recognition of effort first; feedback grounded in data not adjectives; a concrete next step so the exchange ends in action. Without that structure, the impression of harshness lingers and the relationship absorbs a cost that was never intended.
Hierarchy governs relationships in Latin America — how people communicate, how they show respect, how they navigate authority. Informality governs process — how work moves, where decisions are recorded, which channels carry the real conversation. International companies often arrive expecting both formal relationships and formal processes. What they find is formal relationships and informal processes. That combination is unfamiliar, and without someone who understands both dimensions, it is consistently misread.
It is in the agency relationship where this misread does the most damage — and where I saw it play out most directly.
The operating mismatch no one names
The disconnect between international companies and local PR agencies in Latin America is consistently misread as a capability gap. It is not. Local agencies employ talented communicators with deep market knowledge and genuine stakeholder relationships. I saw this directly building agency networks across LATAM: strong local teams, real relationships — and persistent friction in almost every interaction with global stakeholders measuring different things in an entirely different register.
The gap is one of operating logic. Local agencies operate where trust precedes task, indirectness is professional currency, and decisions move through personal networks. International companies arrive expecting structured reporting, direct communication, and output measured in volume and speed. These are not compatible defaults. Because no one names the incompatibility explicitly, both sides absorb the friction quietly — and neither understands why the relationship is underperforming.
The contrast plays out in the smallest operational details. International companies expect formal briefs, documented approvals, and communication through structured channels. In practice, much of the work in Latin America moves through WhatsApp — decisions made in voice notes, relationships maintained in informal threads, updates shared in ways that leave no audit trail and follow no process template. Neither approach is wrong. But a US or Northern European team receiving a WhatsApp message where they expected a status report is not experiencing a capability failure. They are experiencing a different operating system.
The cultural layer compounds this differently by country. What works in Brazil does not map onto Mexico. What is appropriate in Chile is read differently in Colombia. An agency knows its market. What it cannot do is simultaneously know your organisation — its culture, its decision-making cadence, its leadership temperament — and translate between the two.
The problem runs deeper still. Traditional agency models in the region rely heavily on junior talent — often with limited international experience — for day-to-day execution, with senior practitioners present at pitch stage but largely absent from the work itself. Those senior individuals are precisely the ones with the cultural range, strategic fluency, and international client experience that could help bridge the gap. Without them in the room, that bridge does not exist. The WEF Future of Jobs Report 2025 explains why: across Latin America, eight in ten companies expect to develop the talent they need internally — but barely a third believe it will be available on the open market. The people who could close this gap are not being produced fast enough by the market. The in-house communications leader ends up managing not just the programme but the agency team — coaching, contextualising, compensating — well beyond any normal client relationship. The Latin American Communication Monitor (EUPRERA), covering 1,134 professionals across 20 countries, confirms this is structural, not incidental: 73% of communicators see growing demand for external consulting in stakeholder communication, while 61% say ensuring its quality has become harder. More demand. Harder to get right.
The answer is architecture, not a better agency
The answer is not a better agency. It is a different architecture — and at its centre is one role that everything else depends on: the right person in the middle, to navigate both sides. Someone embedded directly inside the company, close to leadership and to the decisions that shape how the organisation shows up in the region.
Not a regional coordinator. Not a market manager with communications in their remit. Someone deeply familiar with how hierarchy, indirectness, and trust operate differently across markets — and trusted by headquarters to represent global priorities without losing their integrity, and by local partners to translate organisational context into something they can actually work with. Fluent in English, Portuguese and Spanish, because language is where relationships and meaning are built. Present where decisions are made — not managed from a distance, not consulted after the fact.
That profile is rare and not being produced fast enough by the market. Finding and securing the right person is not a hiring task — it is a strategic decision.
I built this architecture twice from scratch at global technology companies with no prior LATAM communications & PR presence. It worked when the right person was at its centre with real authority. It did not work when that person existed in title but not in practice. The difference was never budget, agency selection, or messaging. It was the person in the middle — and whether the organisation was willing to back them.
Build the right structure. Place the right person at its centre. Give them the authority and the flexibility the role requires.
In Latin America, the relationship is the strategy.
