12 Marketing Secrets to Break into the African Market

There is only one thing Africans care about — price

Cape Town, South Africa (source: Pixabay)

Africans primarily care about price. Everything else is secondary. Whatever strategy you are bringing to the African marketplace must offer a better value for money. And there is more to this.

I have witnessed a lot of companies try to break into the African market. Those who continue to be successful are those who have been on the continent for a long time. Many of them paid a tough price to achieve their first success.

You can consider this a hack to avoid catastrophic failure in Africa. Today, I see some companies venturing into Africa like it were North America. They are currently hailed as successful but I know they will fail woefully very soon.

To understand how to do business in African countries, you need to learn the culture, lifestyle, and attitude of the people. You need to understand what makes them buy. Just as an example:

A new company launched in Nigeria a few months back. It is a transportation initiative. I believe some investors backed it up with $120M. They are subsidizing transport fares to ridiculous rates. And they are having serious traction.

Here is what they don’t know. When their “promo” stops and the fares go back normal or slightly higher, the traction will drop like it is under the influence of gravity. Africans don’t get used to a mechanism or system, price makes them change. They don’t get used to anything.

There are 12 strategies that can guide you into success in the African market. If you choose to ignore them and learn the hard way, that is fine. But get to know them first:

1. Sell Necessities

If you are going to sell luxury or non-necessities, start with a necessity. Except you have a ready market begging for your product, do not go and launch a non-necessity for starters.

I would strongly suggest selling only necessities. If your product is not a necessity and you want to be successful, then you must structure your marketing to make it sound like a necessity.

Necessities sell in Africa because most of the people are barely getting by and hence buy…