Today I wanted to kick-off with a few dev updates from my Bluesky account.
This has a visual novel element to it (conversations are important), there needs to be character portraits that are pretty big and expressive. Today I did some work on the main character’s portrait.
The name of this game (right now), is Whiskerwind. I do plan to make a lot of changes to the characters, the graphics, etc.
While the protests in 2021 were expected to bring the Kasi economy to its knees, quite the opposite happened. Entrepreneurs who had cut their innovation ‘teeth’ during Covid faced the new challenge head on.
Township delivery networks sprang up, filling the gap that Mr. Delivery was struggling to fill. Spaza shops went from strength to strength. New eateries sprang up, mimicking those found in the affluent parts of Jo’burg. These, and many other innovations provided a foundation for big brands to partner with entrepreneurs in new and exciting ways.
However, the fairytale has been short-lived. According to a recent News24 article, since Eskom has stepped up its load shedding schedule, 66% of township businesses have had to cut jobs, with 60% unable to operate during load shedding hours.
The implications are massive. Not only does the township economy contribute 5.2% to South Africa’s GDP, but it also employs over 2.6 million people. Load shedding in real numbers is devastating.
The township economy is also built partially on a reawakened love of local brands. We’re not talking South African brands (although that’s a thing too), we’re talking hyper-local brands. As in, something your neighbour makes.
This serves to keep cash circulating within the township, which means that one transaction enriches a long line of people, all living around you. One of the measures of a community’s wealth is the lifespan of cash within that community before it exits into the world.
With a load shedding economy, township residents with money to spend will have to look outside the township for premium goods and luxury experiences. It’s a double whammy when load shedding and a fairly closed consumer ecosystem come to blows. Load shedding always wins.
One saving grace is that with an increase in internet availability and a high unemployment rate, many are turning to web-based businesses to generate an income.
According to the World Bank, a growing body of research shows that access to Wi-Fi has a positive effect on an embattled economy by providing access to global markets.
Are global markets hungry for South African products? The international success of Maxhosa Africa proves that.
With higher demand, stronger international currencies, and a hungry populace, the Kasi economy may be saved after all.
When it comes to things like fashion, we have the government to thank for where we are today. Nearly 15 years ago, the government instituted ridiculously high import duties on clothing in an effort to curb the influx of cheap brands from China.
The plan was to stimulate the local fashion economy and it seems to have worked. What needs to happen next is the cutting of export taxes to support township entrepreneurs. While it would serve the country to lower both these (and other taxes), there’s been no word as to whether this will happen.
How does this affect marketers? Well, should South Africa begin exporting locally made items (like fashion), in bulk, we may need to start understanding the international consumer a lot more. We live in hope.
I would like to apologise for contributing yet another AI article to a world saturated with AI articles, but everyone’s talking about it and I don’t want to be left out. My Linkedin feed is full of it. Maybe I just follow those sorts of people, but generally speaking it’s a popular topic.
A little obvious. I like it, I think it’s good, I think these tools are incredibly helpful. What I want to address is this idea that these AI tools are going to replace people.
I follow some creative folks on various platforms. They shift their focus a lot (as do many of us), so sometimes they’re posting photographs, sometimes they’re posting sketches, it varies. It’s not earth-shattering stuff, but I think that any kind of creative expression, whatever form it takes, is healthy.
However, as of late, these same people have become incredibly proficient in technique. What used to be scribbles have become exceptionally wrought pieces. I was suspicious, so after chatting to one of these ‘artists’ I got an admission of guilt, they’d used AI.
Shock and horror.
There are so many implications here.
Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that this is a bit of an evolution in search I suppose, but this is not the milestone that will revolutionise civilisation as we know it. I know that nobody has really made that claim, but just in case you were thinking it, stop that immediately. You’re being silly.
Finally, if you are using AI tools to generate art (whether it be image or writing), please credit the tool you’re using. You’re not Van Gogh, you’re just someone with an internet connection and a dream. Go down to PNA, get yourself some paint and a few brushes, and do it for real. The world desperately needs more meaningful contributions to culture, so go for it.
South Africans will spend R56.8bn on retail goods online this year, representing a year-on-year growth of 39%. There is a terrific opportunity here, but if brands and marketers plan to get a share of these billions from events like Black Friday, they’re not seeing the bigger, better picture.
Before you promote Black Friday in favour of other considerations, you need to know that price is not the most important thing customers want from you. If you can give them what they do want, you can unlock so much more than a one-hit shop-and-run. Give them the best customer experience and earn long-term loyalty from delighted customers who will become your advocates and spokespeople – and have not doubt that customers singing your praises carries far more weight than ever before.
Reliability and delivery are more important to your customers than price when shopping online. This detail comes from our fourth annual South African Digital Customer Experience Report, which surveyed 2,000+ people to understand their attitudes towards the brands we engage with online.
Reliability topped their list of most wanted attributes at 72%, followed by delivery at 66%. Price was only the third most important attribute, at 63%.
What’s even more interesting about price’s role in the buying decision is that it was the most important attribute in our CX study last year. The fact that price has shifted in importance shows that customers will only buy from you again if they have a satisfactory online experience with your brand.
It’s worth paying attention to the other attributes that encourage shoppers to make repeat purchases from the same brand online. Ease of use came in at 59%, and trust was at 50%. So now you know that four of the top five qualities customers want when shopping online are about having a good experience; it’s time to revisit Black Friday.
Any big, concentrated sales day will always be fraught with variables. There are so many “ifs” to deal with: if customers have to queue, if they end up ordering something they don’t want because their preference is sold out, if their order is bungled because staff are too inundated to get every order right, if delivery or returns are compromised – I could go on but you get the picture.
Any of these things going wrong makes for a poor customer experience that ultimately costs you the customer, and for what? A comparatively small return. If you take nothing else from our survey, take this: above all, customers want you to stick to your promises. This is what reliability and good delivery mean to them.
Rather than a frantic Black Friday scramble to acquire one-off customers, a more considered and intelligent strategy is to invest in providing great experiences. Your primary goal should be to migrate once-off shoppers into repeat buyers.
The fact that it costs you less and earns you more to retain existing customers than acquire new ones will become increasingly important through 2023.
With rising inflation and the likelihood of a global recession, economically this is not the time for Black Friday thinking. As tempting as a discount day seems, you’re better off looking beyond the short term and focusing on consistently improving how your loyal customers experience your company.
Regardless of what next year holds, there is room for growth in the online retail landscape. Online shopping is now an integral part of South Africans’ lives. Almost 90% of respondents to our survey had made an online purchase in the past year. And it’s not just particular types of customers either – it’s everyone. Online shoppers transcend income, age and geographic location, giving you a wide-open market to serve.
A final word to the wise: keep sight of the fact that your customers evolve, and they do so quickly. Their wants and needs change all the time. Your job is to keep paying attention so that you don’t lose touch with what is important to them.
Marketing has long clung to the notion that a brand is mostly composed of the communications it puts out into the world. We do our due diligence and develop these lovely brand strategies. We sit and work out our brand DNA, or our brand eggs, or our brand onions, or our brand keys.
These multi-levelled multi-faceted documents filled with jargon and acronyms that the consumer never sees and the brand team barely touches after the initial presentation.
These things are necessary, of course. When you’re crafting the next big campaign, referring back to the original brand documents is an important starting point.
However, the consumer doesn’t care.
Your latest omni-channel masterpiece slips right through their awareness. They don’t see the connection between the billboard and the Facebook page. They don’t care about your metrics, your reach, your engagement, your conversions.
What they care about is their customer experience. In short, customer experience is the brand.
This changes things dramatically because first and foremost it’s a space that many agencies don’t play in.
Most agencies are pretty good at the big campaign, some even fairly good at collecting the all important first-party data. Those campaigns certainly do contribute to customer experience, so their role is not negated. But still, there’s a bigger picture.
There are some agencies that are beginning to test the waters of customer experience. They do the big campaigns, but they also look beyond that, at the entire journey.
The relationship with a brand may begin on Google, but what about the rest? Marketing often stops at that moment. We got them to notice you, maybe even smile at you. Maybe we even got them to go a bit further. Our job is done.
But the real magic of the relationship doesn’t live in the first kiss, it’s much more and much longer than that. What happens in-store? What happens during purchase? How did the sales clerk treat you? Did you get the item in a nice box? What happens if it breaks?
A brand like Apple doesn’t have to do a lot of marketing because it has nailed down customer experience.
Say what you will about the hardware, the experience of purchasing a Mac is really cool. The reason is simple, Apple has mapped out the entire journey with the customer at the centre of it. Sounds a bit obvious doesn’t it? Well, for a lot of brands, it isn’t.
Marketing conversations usually focus on two different, but overlapping things, the brand objectives and the marketing objectives.
Our number one priority should be the customer’s objectives. Once we start talking about those experiences, then questions like what we do with all this first-party data answers itself.
A new type of agency requires their clients to think about their brand differently and to open themselves to conversations not just about that first kiss, but how big should the wedding be, and how many kids you’re going to have.
Stop having one-night stands and grow up.
In the good ol’ days, you’d make something useful, and then you’d put it on a shelf in your shop and somebody would come and buy it. You’d more than likely know that person as well. You’d be the supplier, distributor, shopfront, marketer, and customer services person all in one. You’d do all this and you’d still be home in time for dinner.
Nowadays, things are a little more complicated. The process of getting your goods into a customer’s hands involves several teams. In my experience, very few of these teams are talking to each other.
If you’re looking for a way to get alignment with your teams, there’s nothing better than doing an alignment workshop. What follows is a bit of an instruction guide to get you going.
First things first, this is supposed to be fun and interactive. Everyone needs to participate, so if you see someone sitting back, invite them to give ideas or get their opinions. The fun part is that for the purposes of this kind of workshop, there’s no budget and no mandates. In other words, ideas don’t necessarily have to fall within each team’s discipline and this allows for participants to bring new perspectives to each other’s daily grind.
You will need some A2 blank page workbooks and a bunch of post-it notes.
Begin by creating teams. To run an interactive workshop with a group bigger than five is a nightmare of dominant personalities and ‘under-the-radar’ coasters. So, break them up a bit. Try to split the teams so that there is a good spread of expertise and personality in each one.
There are two approaches to dominant personalities – put them all in one group and let them fight it out, or put one or two in each group. They both have their pros and cons, but I prefer option one because dominant personalities often become groups of one without input from others. Make sure each team has a designated scribe, a workbook, and post-it notes for ideas.
Once your teams are figured out, it’s time to begin creating personas. Personas are basically the archetypes of the kinds of customers that you serve. At the end of the day, every business is about serving a customer.
The scribe needs to split a page up into three columns, titling them who, challenge, and opportunity. Let the teams make up people with rich personal lives, work lives and challenges, fitting all of these under their relevant columns.
Once you get to the opportunities section, let them come up with some very broad ideas. Don’t get into detail here. You don’t need mechanics. If the idea is “a Facebook competition with a car as a prize”, that’s fine. No need to break it down further.
At the end of the process, each team presents their personas to the rest of the room. This is for debate and crafting. This is not a competition to see who made the best personas. Keep it light.
The next step is customer journeys. Come up with three situations that a customer might find themselves in. Maybe it’s buying supplies. Maybe it’s looking for more information. For each situation, come up with what your customer may be thinking or doing. Are they stressed out? Are they phoning a lot of suppliers? Are they googling something?
Then the ideas, as the name suggests, are where we come up with a few tactical ideas to help this customer with their thinking/doing or situation. This needs to be done for each persona and can be quite time-consuming. Gauge how many breaks are required here.
Finally, there are six in 10. Six in 10 is coming up with six ideas in 10 minutes. This is a solitary activity. Each person sits with an A4 page to do this. Once they’re done, they converse with their team about their ideas and pick the top three. They then present those to the broader team.
And you’re done. A workshop like this can take up to five hours, so make sure you can clear diaries to get it done.
The next step is to take those personas, user journeys, and ideas and look at how feasible everything is. Compile everything into a document that you can share. By the end of the day, your teams will have understood the customer better, understood each other better, and you’ll hopefully have a few ideas on how to improve your customer’s experience.
Last week I had the pleasure of attending the CEM Africa 2022 summit, the must-go event for anyone who puts customer experience (CX) at the centre of their business. The talks were at best inspirational, at worst informational, and I believe that anyone who attended will have found it beneficial in some way.
A talk that stood out for me the most happened on the main stage on day two of the event. Rashid Toefy, deputy director-general of the Western Cape Government Department of Economic Development and Tourism, gave a talk on CX in government. He explained how he did not see us as the faceless constituents of the Western Cape, but rather, as his customers.
What an incredibly novel concept – that we are the customers of our government, and as a result of voting for them, we should have a good customer experience. In fact, it’s so novel that there are only two places in the world that have employed a customer-centric approach to their citizens, Estonia, and the Western Cape.
Toefy and his team began their journey by mapping out the milestones of their citizens. Birth, marriage, new business, death – the experiences that require some kind of governmental participation. They then asked: how do we make each one of these engagements a positive one?
With the mandate of creating jobs first and foremost, Toefy and his team realised that one of the more important milestones to tackle was starting a new business. Government cannot create jobs, but they can enable its citizens to create jobs.
That statement drove the creation of the Red Tape Reduction unit, their maxim, “Less red tape, more red carpet”.
In a nutshell, if you are starting a business and you need permits or licences, the Red Tape Reduction unit will assist you with getting those documents in a far more timeous fashion.
I don’t want to specify any time frames here (I cannot speak for government), but Toefy did have a few case studies on hand which demonstrated a greatly reduced turnaround time.
Finally, Toefy spoke about an app in the works that will allow you to connect with government in matters of documentation and information with ease, and from your couch. No queues required.
I found the talk inspirational on two levels. Firstly (and I think many would agree here), to see a charismatic and passionate government employee pushing through initiatives to make our lives easier is very heartening.
Toefy is exactly what a politician should be: a servant of the people. When the person I was with couldn’t get his question answered because of time constraints, Toefy bounded off the stage, handed him a card and said he would answer the question offline.
Secondly, to see customer experience being taken seriously by government institutions (notorious for outdated methods and processes), shows that every one of us should be taking customer experience seriously.
In this hyper-connected world, a poor (and good) customer experience will spread like wildfire. While it is slightly more difficult to change your government, it’s a lot easier to change the people you’re buying your goods and services from.
In closing, do yourself a favour and download the latest CX Report (it’s free). Secondly, the next time you see a CX event, attend it. They’re well worth your time.
Do a quick Google search and you’re going to find many articles with conflicting opinions.
When I did a quick poll on my Linkedin page, I got a similar response. Some say that their businesses are fully remote and they’re happy about it, some say that they don’t trust their workers enough to keep them remote, noting dips in productivity.
On the side of the workers, there is a lot of conflict too. Some miss the interactions they had with colleagues, others find the home office environment a more productive space. There are a lot more factors, but that isn’t the crux of the matter.
What is the crux of the matter is that because remote work is so prevalent internationally, overseas businesses have recognised South Africa as a market ripe with cheap resources.
To give you an example, a community manager earns around $50,000 p/a in the US. In South Africa, a similar resource will cost you R180,000 a year.
In other words, if you’re working from home for a US business, you’re earning R800,000 a year. US businesses can pay a South African somewhat less and get the same level of competence. It’s a no-brainer.
The ramifications are obvious. Local businesses are losing resources to international companies. It’s just impossible to compete with those kinds of salaries.
This creates a scarcity of local staff resources, making recruitment a protracted process, putting pressure on existing staff to fill the gap.
This in turn drives existing staff to also look for international remote work as well. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle.
Let’s recap, you’re earning triple your salary, you’re working fully from home, and in many instances you are working shorter hours. Why would you keep working at a South Africa business?
Fortunately, there is one reason, and it’s a bit of a nasty one: fear of the unknown. People are less inclined to make dramatic changes when there is very little drive to do so.
What this boils down to is that the happier your staff, the less inclined you are to lose them. A no-brainer, right? Why is it so difficult for local businesses to get right?
This research may be a little bit old, but in 2019 CareerJunction published a piece of research highlighting why most South Africans quit their jobs.
Trust, approachability, favouritism, and taking credit for work done by others were just a few of the reasons given.
Granted, compensation played a role, but it was dwarfed by the softer, more relationship-based variables.
What is the perception that we’re so bad at people management? Is it a lack of access to cost-effective managerial courses?
Is it the assumption that when you reach a certain age you’ll have the wisdom to lead people effectively? Perhaps it isn’t a problem that’s native to South Africa.
I can’t tell you. What I can tell you is that if you’ve been punting the ‘people first’ narrative in your organisation, now’s the time to walk the talk.
If you’ve been following trends, you’ll know that CX has become a concept that gets thrown around a lot. Customer experience is undoubtedly important, with a poor experience being the make or break of any etailer’s success. Developing a great CX is a lot of hard work. The customer’s profile must be interrogated, user journeys are built, and websites and advertising are created and adjusted accordingly. Everything needs to be designed to fit into a tight ecosystem that keeps the customer engaged.
However, there is something far more powerful. Independent research over the last few years has demonstrated that South Africans put recommendations from friends and family over any other kind of recommendation. If your friend recommends an etailer, you’re more likely to go to the site and make a purchase, even if the site isn’t great. While customer experience does play a large role, there are so many other factors to consider. An absolutely broken user journey can be absolved by just one helpful sales representative. “The website sucks, but if you send an email, they’re incredibly helpful,” can be all a potential customer needs to hear.
In a country ranked 82nd for convenience in doing business, is a good website experience enough? If you’re sitting in a situation where your site doesn’t have a great user experience or your overall digital customer experience is lacking, how are you mitigating that?
In most of the dev projects I’ve worked on, the customer feedback loop is often overlooked, de-prioritised in favour of content dissemination and reasons to believe. While most etail solutions come with rate and review functionality built-in, there is usually no definitive strategy to encourage people to leave reviews of their experience of products and services. When there is no feedback loop provided, South Africans turn to third-party sites like Hellopeter to vent. The worst is when the customer remains silent about their negative experience on digital platforms. You can be certain they’re talking about their experience somewhere and it’s likely going to be with friends and family.
To change a poor customer experience isn’t something you can do overnight. As I’ve mentioned at the start of the article, it’s a long road. Determining what’s wrong is only a small part of the journey. What should be done is look at what the long hanging fruit is and then work towards making that an absolutely excellent experience. In the example I cited above, additional training for a call centre operative is far more cost effective than a website overhaul. Optimising a process is far easier than re-thinking an entire user journey. If your customer has just one positive thing to talk about, you’re in a good space.
There are always clear goals when it comes to business. If one of your goals isn’t, “get my customer to tell his/her friends and family about how great my product/customer service is”, you’re going to spend a lot of money on marketing, with very little ROI.
Changing the way a customer perceives your business takes a long time, and it really should begin at customer touchpoints. I was workshopping with a representative from a large multinational corporation a few weeks ago. When I asked for a peek into their customer data, she told me there wasn’t any. I nearly fell off my chair. Your customer is the reason you exist, customer data is the key to unlocking more profit. With that in mind, collecting customer data is a good place – no, the only place to start your journey to a better customer experience. It’ll help determine your roadmap, it’ll tell you where your low hanging fruit is, and it’ll be useful for a long time after you’ve perfected the experience.
Should brands trend on popular social media platforms? Should their campaigns even need to go viral to achieve brand objectives? It’s time to look at brand strategy and brand values.
Like a mosquito buzzing around society’s collective ear, special interest groups are at it on the socials again. In the latest buzz, a firm named ‘Targeted Victory’ has implicated Meta (Facebook) in allegedly trying to undermine rival TikTok. The grievance is a series of articles and content claiming that TikTok is dangerous to children, originating from our beloved platform for the aged, Facebook.
The only thing we know for sure is that Targeted Victory has indeed lobbied nation-wide media (US) to undermine the ByteDance owned platform and depict it as a danger to kids. There have been several innocuous trends like the #peeyourpantschallenge (self-explanatory) which have only served as an illustration of how boring lockdown can be. However, lunacy and idiocy prevail. When brands say, “let’s trend on TikTok”, I’m a little sceptical. Do you really want to trend alongside things like #poopchallenge (self-explanatory)?
Let’s come back to brand KPIs
I’m going to loop back to these things, but in order to do so, I’ll need my soapbox. While I’m fetching it backstage, please take the time to think about what your brand’s KPI’s are. Back. Firstly, ‘make it trend’ is the new ‘make it viral’. Agencies hear this all the time and while the phrase has changed a little, the sentiment stays the same. The sentiment being, I want a lot of people to see me, but I don’t want to pay for it. It’s a dream. Let go of it.
Trending alongside ‘peeing your pants’ is not a strategy – creating an effective marketing-based intervention is. If you want something to trend, if you absolutely need something to trend, consider the strategic imperative here. There are ecosystems on each platform and if it makes sense to trend within these ecosystems, then do it. Otherwise, stop and make compelling communication instead. Agencies, stop promising the trend on TikTok. Brands, stop asking for the trend on TikTok.
Take first-party data seriously
Secondly – and this is where I climb on my soapbox – take first-party data seriously. We have put the fabric of society, our culture, our intellectualism, into the hands of tech giants. Every time you pay for an ad campaign you’re funding them. Every time you click ‘like’, you’re making them more powerful. I don’t want to come across as a heretical, social-media is-trash type person, but seriously, look at the politics. And actually, I do want to come across as that person, somebody needs to. There’s millions at stake here and they’re employing every nasty trick in the book to control their commodity. Their commodity is you, their commodity is your customer. First-party data is your liberator. When you get it, your customer has bought into you, you’ve got a direct line of communication. Sure, you’ve still got to use some of these platforms to get them there, but once they’re there, they’re there. All you need is a compelling reason for people to buy into your brand. A value exchange, something that will matter to them. Sometimes it’s just your product or service, sometimes it’s something a little more like a bit of useful content. Whatever that ‘thing’ is (and I don’t care, as long as you do), get that first-party data!
Alright, I’m stepping off my soapbox. I’ll finish with a plea, please stop empowering the bad guys.
craighannabus.com 