by MarkLives (@marklives) Launching today, Monday, 3 February 2020, is Retailing Africa (@retailingafrica), a new B2B news site focusing on the retailing and consumer goods industry in South Africa and Africa, with Louise Burgers (formerly Marsland) as founding editor and publisher.
Burgers has launched and steered some of South Africa’s biggest media brands in the marketing, media, advertising and FMCG retailing industries. She holds an MA in strategy and was editor of various industry trade publications, including Bizcommunity.com and AdVantage, Marketing Mix and Progressive Retailing magazines.
Journalism & research-driven content
RetailingAfrica.com promises journalism and research-driven content, providing strongly independent, exclusive news, opinion and analysis on one of the fastest-growing and most-sophisticated business sectors in Africa. It will focus on retailers, brands and consumer insight across Africa, including the rise of ecommerce, m-commerce and the middle class, an infrastructure boom to aid logistics, the rapid adoption of technology, and much more. Industry sponsors already on board include Ogilvy South Africa, Apex Visibility, and DUKE.
Comments Burgers, “There has never been a better time to launch a journalism-driven retail-focused new media brand, with the Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) promising to be a gamechanger on the African continent over the coming new decade, bringing down trade barriers and creating the biggest trading block in the world. Retail is one of the fastest-transforming industries in the world and Africa has its own unique challenges and opportunities for brands and is, in fact, leading global innovation in many areas through necessity, such as m-commerce, financing and logistics, in particular.”
The new media brand is a partnership with media and marketing industry veteran and award-winning editor, Herman Manson, the founder of MarkLives.com. Manson and Burgers have been colleagues at different media brands for more than a decade; both believe that journalism-driven news is the most-trusted model for the media industry going forward to claw back the credibility of media in this era of ‘fake news’. The success of MarkLives.com is what has spurred them on to launch RetailingAfrica.com.
“Old-school”
“Our experience with MarkLives has proven that media projects practicing old-school journalism can achieve commercial success, contribute to the health of the broader industry it covers and do so in a commercially sustainable way, without compromising its promise of editorial independence to readers, or resorting to click-bait,” says Manson.
“Trade journalism has been left for dead by much of the media industry. We all thought the beat was dead. Now we know it’s not. Expect Retailing Africa to shake up the sector — it is here to disrupt the B2B media landscape. Initial feedback from sponsors and industry players have been overwhelmingly positive and we enter the market at a crucial and transformative time for retailing in Africa.”
As a sister site to MarkLives, Retailing Africa will be promoted to the MarkLives’ readership of 40 000 marketing and advertising agency executives.
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