Fast Lessons: rebuilding your company culture and strategy

Don't expect that, simply because she's black, your new account executive has anything in common with the township poor.

Taweni Xaba, first editor of South Africa’s version of “O” magazine and currently editor of “The Deal” declares of the new black elite: “Black Diamonds feel that they live in two different worlds. The “white” world where they work and feel they must conform, and the “black” world where their friends and family are. How many black people are in content production in the media? There is a lack of understanding as to how media messages will be perceived. For instance, black success is often portrayed as requiring political connections.”

“I don’t fully subscribe to the idea that the media is missing Black Diamonds, since they are adopting brands rapidly. One must remember that 70% of advertising is just bad. That doesn’t mean that Black Diamonds are being misunderstood, it just means that the communication is poor,” says Nic Bednall, managing director of marketing firm BBDO Cape Town.

The truth is much more complex. The new black elite go to private schools but their origins are still in the townships - they're becoming disconnected. They're no more able to tell you how a township economy works than any of your young university graduates.

Hindustan Lever, in India, expects all of its executive recruits to spend at least eight weeks living in the villages of India to get a “gut level” experience of the reality in Indian BOP markets. They must be involved in some project in the village—building a road, cleaning up the water catchment area, teaching in the school or improving the health clinic. The goal is to engage with the local population. - C K Prahalad

In order to do this you will require an extremely creative and effective HR strategy but - without it - you won't sensitise key people to understanding the nature of the market.

True horror story: In the late 1980s SABMiller (then SAB) introduced a competition for Castle - then their most lucrative township brand. The "We're changing the label, not the beer" competition was designed to get consumers behind designing a new label and involving them in its creation. It was a largely television-based campaign. In the 1980s there was virtually no penetration of television into the informal sector. When the new labels were introduced there was overwhelming incomprehension from the townships where semi-literate consumers simply assumed that Castle was no longer available. It took months to sort out the mess. Then SAB had the market to themselves. Now ...

Fast lessons for reconstituting and positioning your company to take advantage of the bottom of the pyramid:

• Bring the cultural hodge-podge of South Africa into your firms; key staff should spend time living in your target market to gain a greater understanding
• Encourage real cultural exchanges - not as a view to improving staff moral - but as a way of developing new products and distribution systems
• Engage directly with the communities you serve, not through the remoteness of television
• Recognise too that investments into informal markets grow the overall wealth of those markets and develop future clients for your more expensive products