by Masingita Mazibuko. In Sliding Doors, a woman’s love life and career both hinge, unknown to her, upon whether or not she catches a train. The audience sees her life play out both ways, in parallel. So, choices — they impact us upon personally. They also impact upon us as marketers.
Tag archives: Africa Style
Africa Style: No-one needs your brand
by Masingita Mazibuko. Wake up and smell the coffee, marketers; no-one really, truly, honestly, genuinely, absolutely needs your brand. That’s why the brand’s relationship with the intended consumer, as well as its product intrinsics, is such a crucial element of the marketing mix.
Africa Style: Fifty Shades of Marketing
by Masingita Mazibuko. For many book readers who are also movie goers, and many movie goers who are not book readers, watching such sexually explicit scenes as described in the book Fifty Shades of Grey could prove an uncomfortable experience in a movie theatre. Is this perhaps why the promoters appear to adopting Fifty Shades of Marketing?
Africa Style: Back to basics
by Masingita Mazibuko. Much as I hate to admit it, the awful truth of today’s marketing environment is that brands are no longer heroes. Instead, the customer reigns and dictates what brands should be.
Africa Style: Colouring outside the lines
by Masingita Mazibuko. Just like my soon-to-be six-year-old and her artwork, several brands have reaped the rewards of their custodians deliberately ‘colouring outside the lines’.
Africa Style: The emotion of marketing
by Masingita Mazibuko. It was only recently that a certain Armin van Buuren piqued my curiousity. While listening on the sidelines to conversations that were raw with emotion and desperate to share, I was struck by how useful emotion as a tool is for marketers.
Africa Style: Social and the lost art of conversation
by Masingita Mazibuko. How does a brand get noticed in a world where people are swamped by stimuli or, in another, where they have opted not to engage with devices and the media that they deliver?
Africa Style: Why leaner budgets could be good for adland
by Masingita Mazibuko. When it comes to marketing budgets, these are often financially ambitious and informed by the principle that, with more money, one can do that much more.
Africa Style: To put out to pitch, or not?
by Masingita Mazibuko. Six months ago, when I told a colleague-cum-BTL-agency-owner about my move from an agency to a client organisation, the conversation naturally evolved into a debate concerning how to tackle any new work that needed to be done; that is, to put it out to pitch, or not.
Africa Style: Inspiration from an unlikely contender
by Masingita Mazibuko. So, I’m stuck in slow-moving traffic when a minibus taxi tears past, missing my car by the smallest of margins, then screeches to a halt … before calmly and remarkably sedately reversing around me to pick up a customer hailing it down. It is not appropriate to pen down the thoughts that engulfed my mind at that specific moment. Relating this near-collision experience to a friend later, the discussion about the taxi industry took an unlikely turn.
One could argue that the minibus taxi is an evil necessity in South Africa, given our scarcity of public transportation. However, when one considers the yellow cabs in New York, the black cabbies in London or the mutatas in Kenya, it is obvious that the taxi as a form of transportation has endured for years, regardless of undulating economic conditions.
In fact, taxis feature in our songs and movies – there was Zola Budd in the 1980s by Brenda Fassie, and the iconic movie Taxi with Robert De Niro in the 1970s was remade in the 1990s, starring Queen Lafitah.