• Friday, March 29, 2024
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BusinessDay

The enigma of destinations

journey to success

You’ve probably seen that advert with the caption: Own your journey to success. The young man with a crew cut and luxuriant beard wearing a maroon turtleneck shirt and navy blue jacket with a sidelong stare; the blurry background is gold and reddish brown.

I found in the caption echoes of self-help books on how to succeed hawked in Lagos traffic. It’s an expansive version of the Nigerian aspiration to arrive, to blow. The words sounded like an imperative to act, despite perceived haters, enemies, obstacles. Pursue your destiny; own your destination; seize your future. It’s an imperative that resonates in Lagos, the City of Hustle.

Later, it occurred to me how the caption contrasted with the lines from Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem “If” – “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/And treat those two impostors just the same”. If success is a destination, a place where one is journeying to, what is failure? That’s not my portion, I imagine, would be the immediate response of many.

Initially, the caption only reminded me of an essay Zadie Smith wrote in 2014, “Find your beach”, a critique of the American individualism lived out in Manhattan. But when I read Feyi Olubodun’s The Villager: How Africans Consume Brands I understood there was much more to those five words. “Success is defeating the enemy,” writes Olubodun. Most times the enemy is that uncle who said you’d never make it. Achieving the unexpected, success, is how the enemy is confounded.

The primary objective of Olubodun, former CEO of Insight Publicis, an advertising firm, is to demystify Africa and show how sophisticated the market is. Africans are not westernizing but modernizing, he argues, and this is crucial for local and international brands that want to make it in Africa.

Olubodun draws on his background in Psychology, uses economic data and his marketing experience to make a bold claim: the Nigerian is the model for understanding the African consumer in general, thus The Villager. Africa isn’t a country, but he contends: “While each African country has a variant of the Nigerian story, each is on some journey similar to Nigeria.”

Many multinational businesses make a similar case: if you can make it in Nigeria, you’ll succeed anywhere in Africa. Nigeria, they argue, is a microcosm of Africa where you’ll find all the paradoxes that inflict the continent: a history of military rule; resource-rich but desperately poor; crumbling infrastructure; scarcely stable business environment; regulatory bottlenecks; high cost of doing business etc. Yet it has an ambitious young population and the largest economy in Africa which is home to some of the fastest-growing economies in the world.

Besides Nigeria’s size and economic potential, the continent is listening to and watching Nigeria; Africans are hooked to Naija music and movies.

Olubodun goes further. He makes a case that Nigeria’s ethno-linguistic diversity is a lens into Africa, and takes a long view, when the largest consumer market will be in Africa. The book thus serves as a pair of lenses with which to see the African consumer, a compass for brands to map their journey on the continent.

The village, Olubodun asserts, is a psychological construct made up of 8 components – acculturation; community affirmations, sanctions and rituals; herd mentality; enemy complex; religion and signaling the journey, i.e., the need to communicate one’s life journey.

A savvy brand strategist and storyteller, his book is peppered with African proverbs and anecdotes from his vast experience working with some of Nigeria’s biggest brands. Each chapter begins with an epigraph. Chapter two titled The Myth of a Global Brand begins with a quote from The Global Brand by Nigel Hollis: “…few of today’s global brands were originally meant to travel.”

In other words, relying on data alone won’t win the market; that’s like travelling with a compass without a map. This is the lot of brands that want to stay true to their identity while ignoring the socio-cultural context of the market. Stubborn brands do so to their peril while others, those who pay attention to the village where the villager comes from, prevail. Of all the proverbs in the book my favourite is, “If you want to travel fast, you travel alone. If you want to travel far, you travel together.”

Travelling with Olubodun, filtering the caption, Own your journey to success, through his constructs, I began to see that there are as many journeys as there are travellers. Many embark on a journey due to herd effect (ascribed aspirations or “my mates are doing it”); others because they merely want to signal their arrival or prove an enemy wrong. And destinations differ. One person’s success is another person’s failure. Better still, treat both as impostors whatever your destination. Nevertheless, we can agree that commuting to work in Lagos is a journey. Arriving safe, sound and in time is success.

The Villager: How Africans Consume Brands (146 pages) is published by Ouida Books.

 

Tayo Fagbule