Media & Marketing By Clive Simkins
KEEPING a finger right on the pulse of market change is vital. Here are two more of Ogilvy & Mather’s seven recently researched trends, unique to South Africa, that fly with joyous abandon in the face of Faith Popcorn’s American “future”:
Informalism: The sheer inability of economic growth, as forecast, to absorb entrants into the job market will create a new market dynamic. The informal sector and small business will flourish. Added impetus will come from a governmental lead in deregulation of trading conditions, training and awarding of contracts to small operators.
Marketers currently distributing to small traders, businesses and shebeens will have to alter tactics to benefit. Revisions of credit policies, distribution methods, packaging and even signage will be demanded.
The informalism trend exposes phenomenal resourcefulness and entrepreneurship, especially among people who have started small enterprises with little training, capital finance schemes or the traditional security of property ownership.
A new spirit of co-operation is forecast. Inter- group and, significantly, inter-race efforts will be harnessed to launch projects, perhaps in a belated flowering of our much-vaunted Ubuntu, without ethnicity. There is a strong belief that businesses operating in townships or black areas should contribute to the community. My recent experience in encounter groups with affirmative- action management appointees supports this: there is a firm sense of being “owed” some support at least and some action or effort at best.
Incongruously, despite limited access to formal structures, trends show a sophisticated grasp of financial matters, coupled with invaluable street smartness. There is a new professionalism and attitude to doing business, as well as tremendous pride in the achievements of people who have cracked it themselves, often with limited education and opportunity.
Piggy-backing on enhanced communications, cellular phones and computers, the small office/home office concept is burgeoning. An example: the black entrepreneur supervising the motorising of my office gates has converted his souped-up bakkie (bullbars `n all) into a mobile office. Electronics and office-equipment manufacturers are taking this growth seriously.
Community-ism: Despite high-profile, vociferous union activity and labour’s flexing of muscle, the latest black MRA Sociomonitor research study confirms that “pro-stability” and “community” trends form a bedrock of urban black society.
Organised community emerges third out of 36 measured trends. It’s a wave of group-think and support, a surrogate spawned by the migrant-labour system and the fragmentation of normal family structures. Together with chronically unstable childhoods, it has generated “alternative” support structures involving neighbours and the community. Escalating divorce rates will require a unique variety of family formations, like collective child-raising and single-parent child-care facilities.
However, community versus individual needs create a clash. Group security is wanted, needed and given, but there is a desperate need to achieve personal goals. E la Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, as fundamentals are taken care of, it’s predicted that materialism and hedonism will prevail. To quote the bard in As you like it: “We shall be the more marketable.”