Back in the
90s every American marketing textbook began with the view that the demand-side
of the consumer world has changed. The age of slow (demand-side) pace of change
has gone, so too has the age of fewer (supply-side) products and services.
Supply-side channels of communication and distribution are more pervasive as is
the sophistication (demand-side) of consumer needs. The books contrasted with the
salesman’s reign; when “marketing” had enjoyed prolonged periods of relative
stability while reaping maximum profits through "holding the customer
constant" and optimizing the other variables. Now, the age of choice had
arrived. The reasons are obvious. The shopping public has developed increasingly
sophisticated sets of defenses to the “salesman’s pitch”. Thus, the cozy world of
‘demand and supply’ has been caricaturized as a new terrain wherein each side demands
the other to change faster.
So challenged, the supply-side has responded
through greater search for "brand loyalty". "Keeping in
touch" has become the greatest challenge for all suppliers. Thus, buyers—generally
considered genuinely ignorant of their full needs and wants—are continually
bombarded with purchasing alternatives. This is done mainly through advertising
and other mindboggling gimmicks to reach into customers’ fast shrinking wallets.
People hardly have the time to savor their ‘purchase’ achievements—their
trolley full of purchases—before they go out again to buy even better and newer
goods and services.
In such a climate—the merry-go-round of
demand pushing supply which in turn pushes demand—the salesman has been the
main victim. He has since been dispatched to the museum. In his place, instead,
now installed is the Marketing Manager. This is the guy who talks of refocusing
away from ‘selling of products’ to ‘creating relationships with the customer’s
wallet’. He argues: in the ‘new world’ marketing now represents an ongoing
effort to keep the means of production—products and services—in touch with evolving
social and personal conditions: i.e. the willingness by a customer to open her
purse]. To the novice it is all mind tricks; after all salesmen were just as
good at getting rid of the widgets coming off production lines. It this Western
fad-ism all over again!
But this is all out there: possibly in the
West. Unfortunately, here in Africa—save for the rare islands of cell-phone
companies: doing their own funny bit—it remains largely ‘business as usual’. We
continue to argue in favor of the salesman. At least—when it comes to our
tobacco and other commodities—the salesman approach works. Who needs a
marketing manager to play “shrink” with the customer? “What is he anyway, but a
“shrink salesman?” we laugh as we watch the “poor” white Marketing Manager departs
empty handed.
Typical of everything, we remain married to
our old ‘salesman’ ways because we are ignorant. It’s in our cogitative nature—it
takes nearly twenty-years for us to seriously open a book and ‘catch up’ on
anything. Instead, we continue to exalt in our dismissive aloofness.
“Who can follow what the white man gets up
to?” We charge from behind the not-so-new velvety drapes in our State Houses. And
in reference to those failed IMF/ World Bank SAPs experiment we add: “When
Americans cannot control something with one tool they throw out the workable
tool as well as the ‘uncontrollable element’. In their place they install untried
but supposedly ‘better and workable’ protocols!”
Yes—have you noticed? What used to be
called ‘procedures’ and/or ‘approaches’ is now called ‘protocols’? But, school
science taught me that a ‘proto-whatever’ is something not fully refined: an
experiment. Yet, according to American-speak we are now supposed to refer to
serious things as ‘experiments’!
“Any wonder they are in such a financial
fix now?” Yes, I hear you Mr. African President.
But irrespective, our ‘marketing’ dilemma,
a sad African situation has been looming since the Oil Crisis in 1973. The Yom
Kippur War was a wake-up call to everyone; no less so to us in Africa. Associated
with disappearing cheap oil and ‘marketing’ upheavals, also emerged new ways of
doing business—goal-orientated approaches and meeting marketing [not sales]
targets. These were basically centered on new ways of contacting and
contracting to ‘exploitable quantities’ the mirage-like customer. She—because
the bulk of customers with serious purse strings are now female—is a mirage given
she is always right ahead but never to be caught and/ or compromised. How well
it has been done, the jury is still out there.
Yet, in this new world African commodities must
also be sold [or is it marketed]?] The question is how: when they want
Marketing Managers to do it when we are still stuck with our ‘Global Commodity Salesman’.
The latter is the guy who is generally informed by the commission-bit that
falls before him. He who talks commission gets his attention. Relationships—what
relationships? Is easy seed money is involved, is the right question! In Africa
the salesman is the revered way of doing international commodity trade. By way
this includes those blocks who visit Malawi once a year—to ‘steal our tobacco’
right in our presence! But, take your tobacco at nearly no cost to him is the
way he makes his commissions once back home with your free sweat!
Surprisingly, we take pride in dealing with
him. Worse—instead of ‘brand loyalty’ we have stayed with the African way: love
the man first [man loyalty], business second. So, we cheat ourselves that—like
the influenza in 1914—the ‘Marketing Manager Fever’ will pass. The trusted
salesman—offering under the table deals with even ‘ready-to-use’ Swiss bank
accounts—will return [for various salesman tricks see J.C. Levinson—Guerilla
Marketing, 1999]. Patience—especially in the face of Western fads—is what has so
far made Africa ‘resilient’!
But, mark my word: if ‘tobacco stealing’ is
done openly, the worst cases—since Kamuzu used to ‘forward sell’ peasant maize
and then he and ADMARC would siphon the sales price differences [see Adams,
Cavendish and Mistry circa 2002]—take place out of sight. The Malawian way of ‘selling’
commodities still largely involves getting commodities into some silos or
warehouses in Southampton. Thereafter, we take a prolonged and ‘deserved breather’
while the commodity salesman do his ‘usual tricks’. That is the traditional way
since the Farmers’-Marketing-Board [FMB] model of the sixties. Besides, how
would one know the backstreets of Southampton to start hawking around one
Malawian commodity or the other?
But, in this new ‘marketing world’, that is
just one does not do; especially if your whole national wealth depends on it.
Yet, listen to this: who in his right mind sends his precious agricultural
commodities to Southampton when the grain trade hub has since shifted to Felixstowe
and the European Channel Operations? We still do. So, Malawian
commodities—unattended [gathering mold and all the bacterial rot] sit—waiting
for the salesman to find us some buyers who happen to be cozily sitting on the
other side of London! So, much for creating ‘brand loyalty’ for Malawian
commodities! And all the time, we make it a political sport to accuse the guys
in this or that industry of externalizing forex. Given the high percentage of
rot, in-line product destruction and their supply chain ignorance, they can’t
externalize what they haven’t sold yet or unlikely to ever sell!
And time marches on while we avidly await
the “return of the salesman”. Meantime, African commodities pile up in those
foreign ports and warehouses because the demand-side—the customer—has moved on
without us. The commodity markets are now demanding more and more quality products
and refined suppliers’ relationships—the kind of things we are not geared to
do. Even the industrial market that uses African commodities also want to be courted,
serenaded and feted in order to buy what—during FMB and Kamuzu days—they had bought
with little or no ceremony. The problem is that while we mulled in self-entitled
pride—unknowingly refusing to chase after their wallets—foreign buyers have
been moving on. The ‘poor’ Marketing Manager we once laughed at has since “spied”
the stranded and “orphaned” customers for African commodities and is having a
field day splitting the rough-cut market; piling it with “substitutes” that are
capable of customizing by design, service and variety.
Oddly, the same “choosy” western market—that
had earlier resisted cheaper substitutes for ‘genuine African alternatives’—is now
readily accepting these substitutes on the pretext that African supply chains are
‘increasingly inaccessible’. The latter is said with ‘good’ justification too:
was it not their cousins in IMF and World Bank who introduced the SAPs that ushered
in the ‘pothole age’—and thus poor commodity delivery systems—into post-colonial
Africa! Meantime—as original and organic African alternatives disappear from Western
supermarket shelves—“substitute pushing” has become Sunday afternoon on the
beach. The only thing they are yet to introduce—in the coffee range—is a
“self-brewing” line of products!
Back in
Africa results have been coming. African commodity sales are down.
Alternatively, they may jump in one sector and crazy ideas about forex hedging
are suddenly bandied around. However, the general trend remains downwards.
“Where is
the salesman?” every African President and his henchmen are wondering from
behind now really worn-out velvety curtains that in these ‘hard economic times’
cannot be easily replaced. “Why isn’t he pushing our commodities into the
markets that are traditionally “ours”?”
As more
dismal sales figures arrive, the wait for the “missing” salesman is turning into
visible despondency and the usual African “witchcraft” blame-games. Everyone
argues:
“The
Americans are once again up to their hegemonic and protectionist games. They
are closing off their markets to African commodities because they take comfort
in seeing belly-shriveled African kids on their TV-screens.” What a self
kidding lie because last time I checked were performing dismally on the AGOA
log sheet.
But, the lie
is good story book copy. The last WSSD (World Summit for Sustainable
Development)—in Johannesburg in 2002—even included a resolution that read:
“Recalling
the mandate for the new trade round agreed at Doha, we underline the need to
ensure that further trade liberalization should… lead to better access for
developing countries to world markets…” (Mail and Guardian; August 23-29: 2002:
p. 4).
And some people—names deliberately
withheld—seeking cheap popularity proposed “new” solutions in defense to the
African self-annihilation implied in the above failure to understand the
centrality of marketing. They are calling for ‘localization’—as opposed to
wholesale—‘globalization’. This they propose should be achieved through control
of movements of corporations and multinationals in the process protecting local
economies—so separated—to “maximize their local production.”
But, how does stopping the leftover sales
offices of MNCs located elsewhere in the world begin to protect Malawi? The
danger with such thoughts is that they plant even more stupid thoughts in
locals. Here in Malawi we actually nurse the false hope—witness our great
antipathy for the local vendor—that somehow these ‘sales offices’ will one
morning transform into the Schumpeterian ‘small is beautiful’ sources for
growth and actively support our export strategies! But, how can a Coca-Cola
sales outlet in Malawi export into Zambia where another Coca-Cola outlet is
already busy doing the same? So there has to be other motivations designed to
postpone the need for Africans to learn how to market—because it is only if you
know what your market wants that you design an export-oriented industrial base
to exploit that demand. Coca-Cola realized that and hence their ‘sales’ or is
it ‘marketing’ office is firmly developed in Malawi.
Admittedly, not all Africa-North
interactions are equal: with some looking like putting a village boxer in the
same ring with Mike Tyson—while the WTO umpire visibly dozes off in a corner!
But, rather than have the village boxer defend his hard-earned wealth against the
unequal Tyson—and possibly knock him for six!—these experts would prefer
Apartheid-like “separate development” enclaves for Africa. But, knowing how
Africans take advantage of any form of ‘free coupons’, these enclaves would
increasingly look like some Darwinian zoo or autarkies where Africans will be
accorded the opportunity to economically atrophy at leisure.
The home truth is that localization is not
new around here. We once had a state-sponsored vendor system called ISI—import
substitution industrialization. It failed because it was made up of
over-protected and inefficient State-Owned Enterprises that—due to lack of
product comparability—served more to rip off their own locals. Now, we should endure
similar waste simply because Africans are lazy to internalize the strictures of
‘Global Marketing’!
Instead, of the one-way sieve model—designed
to stop hemorrhaging of money by ensuring that “local” money stays in one
country—we should be realistic and avoid ISI model in sheep clothing. How does
an ISI-based economy of any design acquire its raw materials and “products that
Africa does not have” unless it markets its commodities and maximize the
revenues from what it has already produced?
Whatever we do the Marketing Manager is
here to replace the salesman [see my blog ‘I dreamt I was the National
Marketing Minister’]
Please
leave your comments below and/ or contact the author at zivaiclaude@gmail.com
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