Highlights on How Multinational Companies Operating in Brazil Organize Their Government Relations' Areas

Abstract

Among all non-market forces, and of particular importance in developing countries, the Government rises as a key stakeholder that needs to be addressed towards an integrated strategy in today's and future's business environments, especially in highly regulated sectors.

This way, this work presents a summary of the findings from a qualitative research conducted during 2018 with 15 private multinational companies from 8 different nationalities, aiming to throw more light on the nature of the strategic relationship with the Brazilian Government (at Federal, State and City levels), and how companies can organize internally to interact with this key non-market component.

Several highlights were derived from the research results, such as: the increasingly formal, structured and organized relationship with Governments; the importance of the Government Relations area as part of the company's overall strategy; many challenges faced, like headcount allocation and internal/external communication alignment; different forms of measuring and disseminating results; need for multiple competencies development; and increasing interaction with the business value chain.

The work contains conclusions and recommendations with the intention to contribute to the Government Relations' field of study, identifying best practices and challenges for multinationals when dealing with the Brazilian Public Administration, that can be used as insights for further research, aiming to be applied by Government Relations areas from other types of companies operating in different markets.

In order to avoid disclosure of any proprietary and/or strategic information and for privacy purposes, names of the companies and interviewees were omitted, without sacrificing the academic rigour.