Marketing
The African consumer is not a fixed cage of limited seats. It is a wide and hungry frontier waiting to be cultivated, and our Eden, it turns out, is not behind us at all. It is in front of us, still unfenced, still unfilled, waiting for the brands with the nerve to push the gates. So, stop trying to squeeze your brand into a crowded room. Look beyond the regional gates, leverage the brilliant elasticity of our digital infrastructure, and build relationships that last.
MARKETING AFRICA
Marketing
Frankline Kibuacha
Beyond The Garden Gates: Why African Brands Chase Scarcity When They Were Built For Abundance
I was in Addis Ababa for Africa Week this year for two truly African marketing engagements. One was the Africa CMO 100 launch, where the indefatigable Thebe Ikalafeng, who has spent a career insisting that Africa can build brands the world takes seriously, was announcing the top 100 marketing leaders in Africa. The second one was this year’ s Most Admired Brands in Africa report launch, which GeoPoll works on with Brand Africa. It was a week of celebrating brands and the people behind the brands- in Africa, for Africa.
It was about as much marketing authority as the continent can gather under one roof, so we sat in rooms at the heart of the African Union and discussed African brands and growth. The talk kept circling back to the African Continental Free Trade Area( AfCFTA), the agreement that on paper folds 54 economies into a single market of 1.3 billion people. Everyone agreed it was a generational prize. And talk we did, on how to claim it, and we will claim it.
Underneath the optimism, though, there is always an anxiety that every marketer on talk of expansion surfaces. Is the African market actually big enough to build a great talk of expansion surfaces. Is the African market actually big enough to build a great brand in, or are we all fighting over a room that was always too small?
From all the ideas that were exchanged, I came out with a new belief. I have come to believe we are asking the wrong question, and the clearest way I can explain why comes from … the Bible.
The reflex of scarcity
Think about the data most of us live in: the fickle disposable incomes, the currency swings( do you know 21 out of 54 African currencies lost value against the U. S. dollar last year?), the logistics that make moving a truckload from Mombasa to Kinshasa a great heroism. Scarcity feels like realism rather than a mindset. So we behave accordingly. We treat our home markets as rooms with a fixed number of chairs, and we spend
The African consumer is not a fixed cage of limited seats. It is a wide and hungry frontier waiting to be cultivated, and our Eden, it turns out, is not behind us at all. It is in front of us, still unfenced, still unfilled, waiting for the brands with the nerve to push the gates. So, stop trying to squeeze your brand into a crowded room. Look beyond the regional gates, leverage the brilliant elasticity of our digital infrastructure, and build relationships that last.
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