Brenda Atkinson
MARKETING THROUGH MUD AND DUST by Muzi Kuzwayo (Ink Inc)
One would think that the advertising industry in South Africa would be at the frontier of research into selling products to black South Africans, the so- called “emerging market” of the post- apartheid era. But a pervasive cultural ignorance lingers and plays out, either through indifference, or through cringe- worthy attempts at “getting it” that amount to decorative lip-service.
I know of a medical aid company, for example, that briefed its ad agency to come up with new names for the company’s umbrella brand, as well as for its subsidiary insurance categories. The directive they gave was that they wanted names with an “African flavour” (they loved “Simunye”, but it was taken). This even though their core target market consisted of financial directors and company CEOs, the majority of whom are, in South Africa, overwhelmingly white.
I discovered that this company, which intended to relaunch with a new name and hence reposition itself in “the market”, had undertaken no research at all into what that market was about, nor did it brief its ad agency to do so. The resulting brainstorming session was ludicrous: five white ad agency employees sat in a circle with a Zulu-English dictionary trying to come up with names that would somehow communicate “Africanness” to white senior executives. There they were, in Disney territory, all because it’s become saleable to to be African.
Thankfully for clueless white South Africans, former Ogilvy & Mather man Muzi Kuzwayo offers guidance to the culturally challenged in his timeous new book, which sets out to correct misconceptions about what it takes to make brands succeed in the “black” market.
Currently the director of his own marketing and research consultancy, Kuzwayo is a refreshing voice in the lily-white wilderness of brand-speak. As the self- appointed “marketing tour guide” on a journey through South Africa’s complex urban landscape, he is as forthright as his approach is simple: reconstruction and development, he proposes, are “not a function of government but a function of marketing”; ignorance of “other” lifestyles must be banished in order for brands to succeed in the emerging market; and the ignorant or “ill”, as he puts it, “must be prepared to use something as uncomfortable as an enema up [the] bottom” in order to be cured.
Marketing through Mud and Dust is not quite the literary equivalent of an enema: it’s more like a cold shower to speed the cultural metabolism, grown sluggish on a stodgy diet of die-hard clich. Kuzwayo’s tour begins with a look at black urban lifestyles; proceeds to case studies of brand failures and successes, and concludes with some comments on how to communicate effectively without being patronising or offensive, but also without falling prey to insincere political correctness.
The journey is interesting and entertaining, but all too brief: I read and closed the book in an hour and a half, hoping that Kuzwayo might already be working on a follow-up that charts this new territory in all its meaty detail.
Kuzwayo’s explicit agenda in Marketing through Mud and Dust is to provide largely anecdotal, subjective observations of the South African marketing terrain through his own experience, both as a marketer and as a black South African. To this end he is witty and perceptive, as well as broadly helpful. He deliberately avoids the “science” of facts, figures and statistics, preferring instead “the wisdom of custom, instinct and culture” which help us to understand “those irrational and sometimes accidental factors that elude scientific analysis … and yet affect business.”
He’s absolutely right about this, but there’s no doubt that “means and averages” pack an effective punch: Kuzwayo’s opening paragraph in his introduction notes that in 1996, mainstream supermarkets who refused to stock black hair-care products, believing that they would not move off of shelves, in fact closed the door on a market then valued at over R500-million.
The point is that, despite touching on some fascinating stuff about marketing opportunities and socio-economic particularities, Marketing through Mud and Dust leaves many questions unanswered – perhaps an inevitability given the complexity of race, class, cash and culture in post-apartheid South Africa.
On the whole it’s an engaging read (marred, it must be said, by numerous irritating typos) that demands a follow-up. There’s a tome in the making in this mustard seed, one that might balance the informality of breezy anecdote with the kind of number-crunching that is more likely to rouse CEOs to action.
Whatever the omissions of Marketing through Mud and Dust, the scarlet-lettered statement on its back cover speaks the truth: if you’re in marketing, advertising, or simply trying to make money in this country, you are going to need this book.