versatile and more reliable brands . Toyota , Nissan , Honda , Subaru , Mitsubishi and Datsun all had various advantages over Peugeot that made the French marquee become a minority shareholder on the roads brand market .
The error Peugeot made was to disconnect with the market . The vehicles they were selling here were older models from their plants in Nigeria and Brazil while the main headquarter plants produced advanced and more reliable vehicles that they thought were not suitable for the poorer African market and were thus limited in distribution to Europe where the marquee is strong to date .
The second hand market for the Japanese brands was also more vibrant than that of European models as a whole because of the maintenance cost factor as well as the fact that Asian producers , just like the Chinese are now presently doing , were able to offer their products at the lowest and cheapest prices in comparison to the expensive European makers .
Bata Shoes
The global and leading shoe brand was for many years stuck in a conservative thought pattern and so refused to change models or introduce new models for the diversifying market . The basic premise was that it was a brand for students and the end result of that brand positioning was that the former students rejected the brand for their shoe choices as adults leading to the introduction of many new brands into the market that ate a massive piece of its market share .
The recent more dynamic thinking from the Czech firm has seen them introduce many new brands for both adults and children , get into distributorship arrangements for other strong global brands and revamp their marketing plans to incorporate regular promotions , web savvy marketing , and brighter stores in many unique locations .
South African Firms In Kenya
From SASOL , to Supreme Furnishing , to Barnett ’ s , to Mocality , Metro Cash and Carry , and many others , South African business enterprises have had a tough time sustaining their forays into the Kenyan market . This can be attributed to a misunderstanding of the market , the cultural dynamics , trading systems and how things operate in local settings .
A marketing expert and longtime practitioner in the industry , Mutua Mutua , attributes the success of the few prosperous South African ventures into Kenya such as Multichoice and Pizza Inn to the fact that these establishments incorporated locals in the running of the firms and thus were able to get proper advice and guidance on how to craft their offerings rather than import wholesale the model that had been proven to work down south .
Airtel Kenya
The firm now known as Airtel started life as Kencell and had a first mover advantage in the market having been the first to obtain a mobile telephone operator license when the only telecommunication options for the market were KPTC fixed line phones , red telephone booths which didn ’ t work most of the time and letters to be posted through the post office .
Despite this advantage , they were overtaken after about three years by new entrant Safaricom . Their series of missteps began when they at first focused on providing services to the upper end of the market . Safaricom , who embarked on business about a year or so later , focused on serving the mass market . Kencell then became Celtel and with the change of brand identity focused more on the mass market .
All the while their major competitor Safaricom was expanding its reach and bringing more of the population into the fold with cheap rates and innovative products . The real deal clincher that sealed Celtel ’ s fate was the innovative money transfer product M-Pesa which Safaricom introduced and ran away with the market share to stratospheric levels .
The firm having changed brand identity yet again to the present Airtel , introduced low pricing strategies but these didn ’ t benefit the firm as its main competition , Safaricom , has reasonably low prices and an important element of the telecoms business – most customers . This means that if most of the people one calls are in a certain network it will not make sense to be on a different network because of the higher resulting rates from the crossnetworks call .
The firm is also guilty of transplanting strategies from one country to another . The second phase of the firm was called Celtel and was part of an international telecoms group with headquarters in Amsterdam .
Its campaigns were therefore pan- African oriented and this put it at a distinct disadvantage with its main competitor Safaricom who whilst being part of the global Vodafone group crafted their campaigns to the local parlance and with thoughtfulness to local cultural sensibilities . For instance , Airtel ’ s credit borrowing facility was called Kopa Credo but Safaricom dubbed theirs OkoaJahazi . The latter implies something very different from the former and people feel better about the terms applied to what they are doing even if the end result is fundamentally the same .
In latter times much as Airtel has introduced free money transfer services and extremely low calling rates with
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