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What’s The State Of Marketing In Africa? It’s All About Local vs. Global

What’s The State Of Marketing In Africa? It’s All About Local vs. Global

Brands in Africa suffer from lack of reliable data, infrastructure and investment, and African solutions will likely be more effective than Western approaches in overcoming these and other advertising and marketing challenges, according to new research by the World Federation of Advertisers.

The federation based its conclusions on the state of marketing in Africa on 82 responses from marketers working for well-known local and global brands, according to a report in MediaUpdate.

Research was organised in co-operation with advertiser associations in Cameroon, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe; and New York-based Millward Brown, the world’s second largest market research organization after Nielsen Company.

All brands in Africa need more data on retail performance, media consumption and the progress that marketers are making in doing what they do, according to the report.

Research also showed that global marketers do not understand consumers in local African markets.

But there’s also common ground, the report said. This is especially true in key priorities such as brand positioning, integration, consumer insights and marketing analytics. Global WFA members identified core concerns in a recent survey of marketer priorities with digital marketing and integrated activity planning as top priorities, MediaUpdate reports.

In addition to lack of data, lack of infrastructure and investment in advertising are key barriers to effective market research. The inability to accurately measure return on marketing investment is a problem.

Tools used to measure return on investment are still evolving in Africa. Of 82 respondents, 72 percent use brand tracking, 60 percent use media tracking and 52 percent apply direct response analysis, according to MediaUpdate. Econometric research/media mix modelling is being used by 25 percent of respondents and attribution modeling is used by 17 percent.

Forty-one percent of respondents said there weren’t enough young talented people coming into marketing in Africa and 35 percent said the best and brightest employees were being wooed by other countries.

But the entrepreneurial spirit is strong in Africa’s advertising and marketing industries with 62 percent of respondents saying there are plenty of exciting new agency start-ups.