While you were outsourced: Last 10 years of mobile design, business and emerging markets
There’s a lot to be said here and I’ve been trying to sort it all out into some kind of logical flow. The global landscape of mobile phones is undergoing a huge shift, and like the iceberg that sank the Titanic, much of it is still under the radar. If I hadn’t gone down the […]
Segmenting the African Middle Class without dollar figures
Continuing the thinking from my previous post on the various attempts to size and value the potential of the emerging African middle classes based primarily in dollar figures, I thought to take a step back from income data to see if I could approach the challenge of segmentation in a different way. Below is the […]
My 2 shillings worth on the size or value of the emerging African middle classes
There’s been a lot in the news of late about the size and worth of the emerging African middle class subsequent to the release of an as yet unseen report by an economist, Simon Freemantle, at Standard Bank, South Africa. The various headlines conflict each other, some say the middle class isn’t as large as […]
Why social enterprise marketing tends to fail – hidden competition, invisible consumers
A couple of years ago, I was frequently in East Africa, consulting with a consumer product company set up as a social enterprise in the renewable energy sector. An extensive distribution network across Kenya had been established through what they called TT – traditional trade. Yet their sales were nowhere near the figures one would […]
Why the African consumer market opportunity will force marketing to reinvent itself
Mass markets were a shorthand forced on marketers who had too little time or information or leverage to treat different people differently. They are the result of the mass merchant, the mass media and mass production. But humans aren’t a homogeneous mass, we are individuals, as individual as we dare to be. ~ Seth Godin […]
Flux and the Farmer: the evolving concept of marketplace and of “online” in Africa
There is a digital convergence happening in rural Kenya that echoes, somewhat faintly, the combination of factors that led to the first phase of market growth and creation. In the late 1980s, for about a decade or so, enough market forces converged in rural Kenya, particularly centered around the Chuka to Meru market region just […]
Thinking like a user centered designer about brand management
Design is fundamentally a value system, a set of principles, that is then manifested in tangible form. Conventionally, this has been known as setting the design criteria. However, rather than specification guidelines, as used in engineering, if one were to change metrics and numbers into values or emotional responses, one could, in fact, create a […]
Empowerment and co-creation – Entering new markets with a long established brand
From personal experience, the biggest frustration with being a cog in the remote outpost of a global behemoth that actually has to implement or execute the marketing, advertising or branding strategy in the field is tussling with the brand’s identity. Clausewitz has said, It may be of interest to future generals to realize that one […]
Part 3: Three weeks waiting for Result
This is part three and was first published on December 2nd, 2005 while I was living in San Francisco. You’d think that the coolest thing that could happen to you in the world would be to come into work whenever in the morning as long you managed to saunter in by 11ish, have lunch that […]
Part 2: Result in transition
Hmm, I was overwhelmed there for a minute, for this post is about the events of that one day when the future existence of Result, as an entity, as a company, as the direct marketing arm of McCann Erickson Worldwide would still exist. For there were just six people in the office, not counting the […]
