Big Money

Now I’m working purely on instinct here, but I would say that when it comes to the wider electronics category (from fridges to cookers to toasters to mobiles), nobody comes even close to spending on advertising what Samsung does in this market.

From billboards to building wraps, from the papers to TV, Samsung ads are everywhere. I must admit I was beginning to get a bit annoyed by the over-use of Drogba to sell everything in Africa – the fact that Didier’s wife apparently has a Samsung fridge really isn’t going to sway anything in my house, plus the ad in question always ran around the football, and Mrs. Nyagah don’t watch football, and Mrs. Nyagah controls the fridge budget, so all in all that one wasn’t really working (neither was the weird one with Mikel and Essien advertising air conditioners…)

For me marketing is very much a form of warfare. This mentality runs right the way through the game, which is why we use words like ‘Target’, ‘Objectives’, ‘Territory’, ‘Strategy’, ‘Execution’, ‘FUBAR’ and the likes.

The great general Napoleon once said something along the lines of: (in a French accent) “an army marches on its stomach…” The point he was (kind of) making was that, at the end of the day, military success very much boils down to the ability to raise funds – to fill said stomachs, to put boots on feet, bullets in guns and diesel in tanks.

Marketing is no different. What it comes down to, whether you’re selling Samsung Note 2’s or sukuma wiki, is the Budget. You have a hundred bob, or a thousand bob, or a million bob, and you need to use it to the best of your ability to sell as much of whatever you are selling as you can.

In this town there are basically two types of brands r.e. budgets: the ‘big boys’ (Safcom, Coca Cola, P&G, Samsung etc) who have apparently (and relatively) bottomless pockets, and then you have everyone else, for whom one shilling spent is one shilling felt.

Now as in every other field of life, money is power, and big budgets give the big brands the power to build strong and dominant positions in the market. Big budgets mean you can be on TV, and radio (national plus vernacular plus niche), and out-door, and in-store, and in the papers, and sponsor a football team, and build schools for CSR, and print a million T-shirts, and and and…

This power allows big brands to essentially become ubiquitous within their category, in other words, it allows them to be everywhere. If you are everywhere, you are going to sell big. Your ads don’t need to be especially interesting, or entertaining, or informative, they just need to be all over the place, constantly. Humans are busy, we have other things on our minds, we don’t really have the time to be thinking about what to drink, Coke are everywhere, they have inveigled themselves into my sub-conscious mind, just give me a Coke damn it!!!

That’s basically how it works…

But what if you can’t be everywhere? What if your HQ isn’t in Seoul or Zurich or Atlanta? What if your HQ is on Kimathi Street, or Dakar Road, or in Naivasha? What if you’ve fought tooth and nail for every shilling in your marketing budget, and you still don’t think that it’s anywhere near enough, and a full page costs pretty much 600k, and you just wish you could even come close to being on Citizen TV, and you’ve got compe from Egypt, SA and God knows where, and you’ve got targets to meet, and a mortgage to pay… What to do?

Museveni started the NRM with 19 soldiers, including himself – it is debatable as to whether they even had 19 guns between them. They barely had any ammunition (budget) and they all wore flip-flops. They didn’t have much, but what they did have was an intense focus and a strategy, which could quite simply be summed up as ‘one village at a time.’

So they captured the first village, added a few soldiers, raised some ‘taxes’, bought some more ammo, and then captured the second village, from where they added a few more soldiers, raised some more ‘taxes’, bought more ammo, and so on and so forth until Kampala.

The Museveni strategy is one that I preach to a lot of my clients in this town, especially to Kenyan brands that are fighting against big ‘conventional’ armies, and it’s not just because I like his taste in hats.

Because you see the thing about budgets is that it’s not the size that matters, as they say, it’s what you do with it that counts. Even if you only have 100 shillings to spend to push your product, how can you maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of that 100 shillings? What can you do to turn that 100 not into 200 or 400 but into 800 shillings worth of sales?

The secret to achieving this is iron-willed focus, a la Museveni. You need to decide ‘this is what I’m going to do’, and you need to stick to your guns. The mistake I’ve seen over and over and over again in Nairobi is the attempt to do everything with a budget that will really only let you do something. The result of this is that you spread your budget to thin and end up doing everything badly instead of something well.

If Museveni had tried to blow up a dam, and mine some roads, and take over the radio station, and steal a Mig fighter jet, and launch a spy satellite, and build a navy of canoes on Lake Albert and train crocodiles to be suicide bombers, tell me where would he be now?

I’ve said it before, but one of the best ways to judge an agency is to look at how focused they are with their recommendations as to how you should spend your money. One may promise you 360 degrees of nothingness, but the one that says that you should spend every last shilling sponsoring girls’ volleyball tournaments in Vihiga may be on to something… and therefore maybe the one you need to be listening to.

As for Samsung, let the Big Money^TM roll, but please, there is a lot more to Africa than football…