Marketing
Here ' s a word marketing doesn ' t spend enough time with: vantage point- a position, at height, from which you can see what you can ' t see from the ground below. Because a vantage point is a sniper ' s position and a sniper who ' s forgotten what the terrain looks like isn ' t aiming, they ' re guessing from altitude. This is the confusion at the heart of most marketing organizations: seniority gets measured in years, and years quietly get mistaken for vantage point. where it ' s been, is really a field-proximity idea dressed up as a hockey quote. You only see where the market is heading, the shift in what a customer values, the campaign that ' s about to stop working, the competitor move six weeks out, when you ' re close enough to the ice to feel the play develop, not reading the score from the stands. Skip the ground, and the height you ' re standing on shows you last quarter with great clarity and next quarter with none at all. Keep it, and every hour spent close to the ground becomes the raw material for strategy that ' s aimed at where things are going, not just where they ' ve been.
MARKETING AFRICA
Marketing
Naveen Sukumaran
The Marketers Who Know What Their Vantage Point Is For
" Positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect." Al Ries wrote that decades ago, and it still holds, because it points at where marketing strategy quietly falls: not in the deck, but in the mind it was meant to land in.
Here ' s a word marketing doesn ' t spend enough time with: vantage point- a position, at height, from which you can see what you can ' t see from the ground below. Because a vantage point is a sniper ' s position and a sniper who ' s forgotten what the terrain looks like isn ' t aiming, they ' re guessing from altitude. This is the confusion at the heart of most marketing organizations: seniority gets measured in years, and years quietly get mistaken for vantage point.
But a title doesn ' t earn you height, capability does, competence does. The grit of having actually walked the ground does. Time in a role can just as easily be the thing that lets someone drift furthest from the trade, further from the call cycle, the point of sale, the customer ' s actual face, while the org chart insists they ' re seeing more than ever.
This is exactly the same mistake organizations make in succession planning. The person pulled into the strategy conversation is too often the one who ' s been around longest, not the one whose vantage point is actually current. A field team lead spending three days a week in the trade often reads the market more accurately than a country manager five years removed from a call cycle.
The real paradox is this: to earn a vantage point worth having, you have to keep going down. Stay with the troops. Walk the territory alongside the rep making the call. Watch, in person, what messaging actually lands and what quietly dies on contact with a real customer. This is the only source material a genuine vantage point is built from.
And it buys you something sharper than hindsight. Wayne Gretzky ' s line about skating to where the puck is going, not
Here ' s a word marketing doesn ' t spend enough time with: vantage point- a position, at height, from which you can see what you can ' t see from the ground below. Because a vantage point is a sniper ' s position and a sniper who ' s forgotten what the terrain looks like isn ' t aiming, they ' re guessing from altitude. This is the confusion at the heart of most marketing organizations: seniority gets measured in years, and years quietly get mistaken for vantage point. where it ' s been, is really a field-proximity idea dressed up as a hockey quote. You only see where the market is heading, the shift in what a customer values, the campaign that ' s about to stop working, the competitor move six weeks out, when you ' re close enough to the ice to feel the play develop, not reading the score from the stands. Skip the ground, and the height you ' re standing on shows you last quarter with great clarity and next quarter with none at all. Keep it, and every hour spent close to the ground becomes the raw material for strategy that ' s aimed at where things are going, not just where they ' ve been.
Kenya ' s own beer aisle has a case study in exactly this. Tusker, for years, ran on nostalgic pride,“ Kenya as heritage, as history, as something to be proud of from a distance.” It worked, for a generation. Then it stopped, and the brand ' s equity slid year after year, most sharply with younger drinkers who ' d grown up on a different Kenya. The temptation, from altitude, would have been to read that decline as a media problem, wrong channels, tired creative, needs a refresh. But the read that actually mattered came from the ground: this younger cohort wasn ' t rejecting pride in being Kenyan, they were rejecting a positioning that had stopped moving with them. Pride alone no longer felt like enough of a reason to reach for the brand.
What emerged from that ground-level listening was " Kenya Milele ", a repositioning campaign in May 2021 around resilience and identity rather than nostalgia, " the indomitable spirit of Kenya," built for a generation that wanted to see themselves as active. The brand ' s equity, which had been declining for years, held. Distinctiveness and salience both moved. And critically, the
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