Competitive Advantage & Customer Relationships: Lessons from Market Mummies of Ghana
How would you differentiate yourself in this informal retail market? Ghanaian market research guru Gerry van Dyke took a closer look at the market ‘mummies’ – Mama Biashara, as we call her – and their consumer marketing techniques in the “non-label environment”. His findings form an excellent foundation for understanding marketing and customer relationships in […]
Professionals stand above the competition: Branding lessons from street vendors of Africa
Farai Mushayademo’s distinctive dress sense, with a different shiny suit every day, makes him a darling of customers and helps him beat the “rising competition,” he said. This article on the increasing competition for the burgeoning informal economy of Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, came less than a month after we saw this smartly turned […]
Branding the Unbranded: The story of Cookswell Jikos, Kenya
These are jikos – metal stoves that use charcoal – displayed for sale in the jua kali market in the town of Nakuru, Kenya. Made from scrap metal, using the most rudimentary tools, under conditions of resource scarcity, they are one of the everyday products churned out by the informal manufacturing sector. These are […]
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 […]
Seeing the humour in marketing’s efforts to reach the rural
From the Chairman of Y&R Africa’s column, this amusing snippet on branding in rural Africa while making an insightful point: Wall painting is another tapeworm in the belly of the marketing budget. On a Continent dogged by marginal infrastructure, it’s a visual boon. Whole villages and trading centres can get spruced up overnight. They look […]
