WHEN a TV advertising campaign promoting Indian cellphone company Bharti Airtel in Africa fell flat a few years ago, the marketers went back to the cutting room to work out why.
Images of the savannah, actors from South Africa and the use of coins — when many Africans use only paper money — had limited the advertisement’s appeal in parts of the continent. It was no good for a company with business in 17 African countries.
“This is where multinational companies go wrong. They come with their global brand positioning and they want to cut and paste,” said Bharat Thakrar, head of Nairobi-based Scangroup, Africa’s top marketing services agency.
“They think everybody looks the same, but just having black models is no longer enough. It’s like putting a Thai, a Chinese and an Indian in the same Asia advert. People can recognise themselves.”
Just as US megastore Walmart and UK supermarket Tesco found expansion into China tougher than expected, global companies face similar headwinds if they fail to adapt their advertising to Africa.
The potential consequences of failure are significant as multinationals from Heineken and Unilever to Nestlé and L’Oréal turn their attention to cracking Africa, a market with a billion people, a rising consumer class and some of the fastest-growing economies.
Although Africa still comprises a tiny proportion of the annual $500bn spent on advertising worldwide, information researchers Nielsen said that it and the Middle East region was the fastest-growing destination for advertising spending last year — it rose 14.6% against 3.2% globally.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecasts average economic growth of 5% a year on a continent where some surveys put the number of middle-class consumers at 300-million.
Consumer spending in sub-Saharan Africa is expected to reach $1-trillion by 2020, up from $600bn in 2010, according to research group Euromonitor.
The surge in marketing is in some cases failing to deliver returns, because companies have been too quick to characterise the continent as a single entity. Airtel learnt this lesson and, shortly after its disappointing campaign, put out a series of more tailor-made TV adverts. One was about a pidgin-speaking hustler in Nigeria to reflect the country’s “larger than life” appreciation for all things slapstick; another was about a Congolese mechanic whose poignant francophone tale was set to captivating local rhythms. Others showcased graduation ceremonies to capture East Africa’s “more conservative” culture.
Foreign companies starting to advertise in Africa face another challenge — the home-grown companies that understand the continent’s individual markets better than many global corporations and are prepared to work in fragmented markets.
In the past decade, a detergent named Toss from home-grown Kenyan company Kapa Oil Refineries has begun to take market share away from Unilever’s 60-year-old market leader, Omo.
Unilever said increased competition was “driving a long overdue shift to a consumer-centric marketing model in Africa”. The company now makes Portuguese-language adverts depicting traditional chicken stews to sell Maggi stock cubes in Angola, and Amharic script emblazons its adverts for Knorr products in Ethiopia.
Like Kapa, which serves 18 African markets, Kenya’s Bidco Oil, which bought several brands from Unilever in 2002, plans to take further chunks out of multinationals as it expands beyond East Africa.
“The barriers to entry are falling,” said Bidco CEO Vimal Shah, arguing that multinationals no longer have exclusive access to technological know-how, large capital and global networks.
“Plus, if you come with a brand that’s not known in this market -unless it’s Prada or Mercedes -it could be famous in London but it won’t necessarily appeal to consumers out here.”
The most successful brands go so local they become part of society — running marathons and music festivals, raising money after natural disasters, or regularly responding directly to customers. Bob Collymore, boss of Safaricom, Kenya’s leading cellphone company, in which the UK’s Vodafone has a 40% share, frequently tweets to his 209,000 followers.
Some international companies have begun recruiting local “influencers” to sell everything from vodka and phones to beer and mortgages, paying them a monthly wage to assess products on blogs and Twitter accounts.
Foreign executives from consumer companies privately acknowledge that they will have to adapt, and quickly.
“People are only just beginning to see Africans as consumers,” said a European corporate executive. “The time is coming where we and everybody else are going to have to tailor and adapt brands -advertising and marketing — to the different Africa markets.”
