The debate on whether marketing theories and applications can be applied the same way in all continents has been on for decades. Should there be allusion to culture? Could there be universality in campaign? Should there be any room for domestication of creative ideas?
The above questions and others often come up anytime the issue of while some brands or campaign fail in Africa, are brought to the front burner. Also, in explaining why African creative agencies have always found it tough to clinch global awards, experts are always quick to state emphatically that lack of understanding of African narratives by the foreign judges, is responsible for the challenge.
Perhaps tired of the controversy around the subject matter, the Managing Director of Insight Communication, Mr. Feyi Olubodun, has come out with ‘The Villager – How Africans Consumes Brands’, a marketing book that reflects on what international brands get wrong about the African consumer.
Globalisation and westernisation
Through ‘The Villager’, Olubodun attempts to educate his readers on the need to be cautious while applying the word ‘Globalisation’. To him, globalisation, without recourse to culture, language and behavior of the people is an abuse of the word.
During an interactive session with Journalists in Lagos ahead of the public presentation of the book, Olubodun also tried to draw a line between the word sophistication and westernisation. According to him, lack of clear understanding of the application of some of the frequently used words, is the reason while many global brands fail in Nigeria.
“I argue very strongly that sophistication and westernisation don’t mean the same thing. You can be sophisticated and not be westernised,” he had stated. We need to hold our cultural identity very, very dearly and draw our authenticity from that while, at the same time, evolving ourselves so we can play significantly on the global stage,”
To him, the African consumer is a special breed. In The Villager, Olubodun points out cleverly that marketing to Africans using the construct designed for the Western world has been the bane of some marketing managers and international conglomerates’ below par performances and consistent failure for some international brands in the African space.
The Author paints a graphic picture of two conglomerates which deployed their home (country of origin) nuances in communicating with the Nigeria markets and in those instances the concerned products were seen to fall short of holding attention, trust and patronage of the local market and consumers.
Though, he admitted that marketing business is tough generally in the continent, no thanks to regulatory problems and changes in the industry, but he is quick to recognise that there is a fundamental disconnect between how brands working on the continent understand and relate to their consumers.