The American TV series, ‘Mad Men’ is not only a fascinating sociological study of the world of ‘free love’ and political incorrectness of the 1960s (can you believe how everybody smokes all of the time, and how the women in the programme are seen to fulfil only supportive roles), but it also provides a fascinating historical perspective of the evolution of marketing over the last 50 or so years.

The 60s marked the emergence of the “Era of Mass Marketing” facilitated by the arrival of supermarkets and mass media which meant that a manufacturer needed to communicate with the consumer in order to attract them to his product. Advertising provided the most potent form of connection and given that the majority of the products were relatively new, it was sufficient to go out with a simple demonstration of how the product worked, plus just a hint of the benefit to the user.

In a very short period of time the number of similar products began to make differentiation critical. In some cases this could be achieved by design and innovation, but in many cases the products performed similarly and it was up to the marketers to find a way to differentiate them. Enter Al Ries and Jack Trout with their definitive book, “Positioning the Battle for Your Mind”, which even today remains a classic text-book on the importance of ‘owning a space or a gap in the mind of the consumer’.

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Africa is a continent of continents; massive in scale and diversity. Expanding across Africa requires not just careful consideration and planning but nerves of steel to deal with the complexities in data gathering, politics, consumer influences, exchange rate fluctuations and ways of doing business.

It is doomed to fail unless you understand the consumer dynamics at a hyper-local level. Don’t expect to rely on Big Data - not only is it difficult to gather; it is incomparable across markets due to varying collection methods, quality controls and infrastructure. Ideally, you need to build your own data from the customer up, but this takes time and resources that few have at the outset.

It’s a long road to marketing effectiveness. Yellowwood suggests a few simple steps to get you going:

Analyse people before data

Get to know your prospective customers at a personal level. Do the road trips and talk to hundreds of people to get a good enough feel for the different types of customers out there. Do it in less formal, ethnographic ways and take pictures for the team back home.

It sounds expensive, but it’s cheap insurance against poor decision-making in the future, and it allows you to add anecdotal colour to the data you find and recognise which sources of data to trust.

Focus on commonalities not differences

Most countries in Africa think they are unique, but digging into consumer behaviour reveals that we are all more similar than we think. Ask yourself how you can cluster countries together so that you can be more effective and efficient in your marketing efforts. Cluster in a way that makes sense for your business – whether by regulatory constraints or consumer needs, growth rates or competitive landscape, size or potential. 

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Inaccurate CVs are a perennial problem for recruiters -- but, savvy HR practitioners and recruitment consultants are increasingly turning to social media for a solution.

At last count, there were about 8 million so-called "smart devices" in South Africa – of which the overwhelming majoring are smart phones. This reflects an amount that has more than doubled between 2010 and 2011 alone, and it will continue to grow. Most of my clients are independent software developers and I can attest to the fact that the modern applications that are being developed are taking a mobile first approach. Businesses are scrambling for their share in a marketplace that is incredibly new and surprisingly lucrative.
Today, even though only 8% of mobile apps are paid for, they generate more revenue than mainframes and the expenditure on devices are growing more than 4 times as fast as that of PCs. But more important than the devices and applications themselves are their impact on business.
Think of retailers today. They are now not only able to detect all potential customers in a mall that come within 100 meters of their stores, they are also able to zone in on that person's preferences for certain items, for example – power tools. As soon as that person comes within the "marketing zone", the company can fire off a SMS letting them know about the in-store power tool promotion they are running. That customer can go into the store to purchase the item immediately – or better yet, pay for it using their mobile phone with Google Wallet – and then tweet about the experience or invite his Facebook friends to join in on the offer. (Which the retailer in question will, needless to say, track with some form of sentiment analysis software.)
In the United States, applications like OpenTable are enabling restaurant-goers to book tables via their mobile phones, invite their friends via Facebook and then tweet about the experience. Well known Fashion Retailer Zara conquered what many people thought was a closed community – the fashion industry. They identified that a fashion trend only lasted about 6 weeks and started sending their staff to runway shows with Ipads and Iphones, allowing them to start designing their new clothing lines before the model even walked off the ramp.
Then there is the "follow me" state of devices. Playstation owners can play a video game at home, pick up their PSP and then continue playing from where they've left off on the bus on their way to work. Again, mobility is key to meeting that need.
The days where mobile marketing was limited to irritating text messages or competitions are long gone. Mobility has come to mean connection, location-aware selling and tailor-made offerings. We tend to think of popular social media platforms as being well-established, but in reality they are still in their infancy. Facebook, for example, makes most of its revenue through advertising...which cannot be displayed on mobile devices, one of the primary means of accessing the site. One has to wonder where they will be in 2 or 3 years' time if they do not iron out those limitations?
Companies are already using geo-tagging to curb ATM fraud – if a person is further than 10 metres away from an ATM, they are unable to complete the withdrawal. Similarly, individuals are conducting transactions, using their cell phones as identification as opposed to credit cards.
The implications for technologists are equally staggering. The next generation of cloud is going to be extremely disruptive to technologists, as cloud and mobile increasingly intersects with on-premise and barriers to entry are lowered. New companies are renting the infrastructure and capacity needed to compete. Start-ups could very well usurp brand name companies within the next few years. The point is that everyone has to be on board with the new trends if they hope to survive.
There is a race to push out applications as a competitive tool to improve relationships, but there is a plethora of devices that need to be supported and a flurry of integration headaches and challenges. Apps will be fragmented, supporting more devices than ever. In fact, Android devices alone symbolise 400-500 different permeations, different manufacturers, operating platforms...yet they are the key to reaching customers.
In terms of technology, I believe that this mobility will drive the need for an ecosystem, a collaborative effort between software developers and platforms. The way we build apps will change fundamentally. It will be composed, rather than created. Mash-ups will drive the future because developers will not be able to build applications on their own. Gartner has already predicted that time-constrained ISVs will primarily chose their paths based on the popularity of the platform with users – and the ones who will succeed will the ones driven by the entire ecosystem. We can't be selfish with our ideas, our technologies.
Mobile devices are becoming computers in their own right and with that, we've unlocked the ability to use location, motion and context to speak and sell to customers. Let's just say that the game is changing. And we need to change the way we play it if we hope to emerge victorious.