What a mechanic in Lagos taught me about where value went
Ten thousand naira to look at the car, before he would open the bonnet. The part was worth almost nothing.
Markets don't emerge by accident. They form when the things stopping people taking part are removed — and almost none of those things are a shortage of advertising.
For twenty years our profession got very good at helping people choose between products. But the questions arriving now are different. How do we get people investing. How do we move customers onto digital banking. How do we get drivers to switch fuel. Those are adoption questions, and the honest answer to most of them is that no campaign will fix it.
What fixes it is knowing which barrier is actually in the way. Understanding, access, trust, momentum, coordination — usually only one or two are binding, and the money is almost always spent on the others.
I think that is a discipline, not a slogan, and I am spending the next decade trying to prove it.
I also think this continent is the right place to do it. Not because people here are different — human behaviour is remarkably universal. But because so many of our markets are still being formed, the conditions are visible here in a way they simply aren't in economies where everything was settled generations ago. Mobile money wasn't born from abundance. It was born from constraint. The world watched, and then it followed.
For decades we built campaigns. Increasingly, we will be asked to build markets.
Chief Executive of Sponge, a market formation company, and of Sponge Media, which makes factual programming about Africa's transformation.
Twenty years of national campaign work for Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Diageo, MTN and Wema Bank — and the author of the Five Constraints of Market Formation.