Digital Business in Africa

Digitalisation is transforming economies and societies around the world, including Africa. More and more people and businesses in Africa are connecting to the internet and using a wide range of digital technologies. Africa’s digital economy is expanding at an unprecedented speed and scope, thereby creating huge opportunities for enterprises on the continent. Digital platforms, an omnipresent phenomenon, are at the heart of the digital economy, creating robust and dynamic marketplaces where suppliers, customers, service providers collaborate to carry out business transactions. Africa is uniquely positioned, and digital platforms offer a wide range of market opportunities and value creation potential for agile, innovative, and highly adaptable African enterprises. Surprisingly, the phenomenon of digital platforms, especially social media platforms and related technologies, is yet to receive sufficient academic attention in Africa. This book is among the few to explore how African businesses utilise social media platforms and related digital technologies in the design, process, and delivery of goods and services to increase efficiency as well as effectively respond to customers’ demands.

Consumer perception of ethical standards in the use of social media marketing determines trust and loyalty. Social media marketing in Africa is a dominant marketing channel and, thus, must be guided by ethical marketing practices. However, ethical standards relating to social media marketing pose new challenges. To understand what ethical issues should be considered when using social media in marketing, this chapter reviews the pertinent ethical issues organisations and practitioners must incorporate in their marketing efforts. Some of these ethical concerns include fairness, avoiding deception, maintaining dignity and respect, information security and privacy, empathy, transparency, and verifying the source of data. This chapter also acknowledges the role of legal requirements across many African countries that may guide ethical social media usage. The authors identify some professional ethics that can guide organisations in the conduct of social media marketing. The chapter contributes to understanding the state of ethical issues in social media marketing in developing economies. 

With the advent of the internet, Social Media (SM) has become an alternative platform for marketing products, especially for small-scale and rural-based entrepreneurs. With its diverse communicative abilities, SM provides more opportunity for small-scale and rural-based entrepreneurs (whose capital, manpower, and technical know-how are often limited), to reach audiences outside their communities. This chapter critically discusses such opportunities. It also discusses the corresponding challenges associated with using such platforms, drawing from data drawn from in-depth interviews of small-scale entrepreneurs from a selected district in the northern part of South Africa. While product exposure to a wider audience, access to the target audience, low-cost and effective marketing, and deeper customer interaction emerged from the analysis of the data as some of the salient opportunities; poor internet connections, lack of access to adequate resources, and limited sender-receiver relationship were found to be among the significant challenges small-scale and rural-based entrepreneurs face in the use of SM. Based on the above, the study recommends the government’s subsidisation of internet costs and aggressive efforts to upgrade the internet network coverage in rural areas. These recommendations, among others, will make access to SM platforms easier for entrepreneurs operating in rural areas.

Leaning on the concept of social capital as the theoretical foundation, this study examines the effect of employees’ Facebook activities on organisational performance. By employing partial least square and independent sample t-test methods, findings reveal that Facebook usage significantly influences financial and non-financial performance. The results also show that the performance of organisations that encourage salespersons’ social media service behaviour differs significantly from organisations that do not. The use of Facebook for customer service and marketing activities is limited but significant in improving both financial and non-financial performance. The study contributes to marketing literature on social media usage and organisational performance by providing empirical evidence on the influence of a salesperson’s “extra-role” defined by social media behaviours, and by expanding the body of knowledge on salespersons’ Facebook usage within a developing country context.

This chapter articulates the theories of self-concept and symbolic interactionism within the domains of social media and corporate reputation and introduces the self-concept interactionist model to capture the relationship. The chapter fuses the theoretical underpinnings of diverse viewpoints within existing models of social media and corporate reputation, thus paving the way for the emergence of ‘customer engagement’ as a dominant concept permeating these models. The concept of ‘interaction’ was found as the main theme in the influential definitions of customer engagement, leading to the development of the self-concept interactionist model of social media-reputation. The authors expand the framework of the self-concept theory by adding the notion of 'experience' - as experience is pivotal to customer engagement. Although this is a conceptual chapter, nevertheless, it expounds on how corporate communication activities, through repeated interactions, crystallise the relationship between social media and reputation. We expect that the newly introduced model will help social media managers, particularly in the African continent, to understand how a combination of society, self-concept, and the formulation of social media policies impacts the management and development of corporate reputation.

Social media is a powerful advertising tool in today’s competitive business environment. Though social media advertising is helping businesses reach out to consumers through numerous channels, research into this phenomenon is still scarce in the African marketplace. This chapter fills this research gap first by exploring how businesses in Africa use social media marketing to engage with customers in a way that drives buying behaviour, builds loyalty, and enhances brand reputation. Second, it examines the use of creative, informative, and emotional appeals as critical antecedents to positive user responses in the context of social media advertisements. The chapter concludes with recommendations for marketing practitioners in Africa.

Financial inclusion refers to the proportion of a country’s population with access to affordable, convenient, and appropriate formal financial services. The ideal situation is to have all the citizens open and operate bank accounts. However, this is practically impossible, especially in developing countries where the banking infrastructure is poor, and income levels of a large proportion of the population may be too low to attract the attention of commercial banks. Digital financial inclusion can be used to reach the financially underserved or excluded segments of the population with affordable and sustainable formal financial services that suit their specific needs. Mobile money services offered by telecom firms like Safaricom Plc in Kenya have been instrumental not only in achieving digital financial inclusion but also in stimulating economic growth. This chapter examines M-PESA (M for mobile, Pesa for cash in Swahili language) with emphasis on its origin, adoption, operation, services, contribution, and challenges. The chapter provides suitable recommendations for Africa based on the lessons learnt from the M-PESA experience.

This chapter aims to explore the prospects of fintech, cryptocurrency and blockchain technology in promoting a digital Africa. The chapter explores three key drivers of the digital technologies in the region. These include the large population as well as high levels of mobile phone usage and internet penetration. We show that there has been a significant increase in the number of fintech and cryptocurrency startups since 2017, and this prospect provides an avenue for development and financial inclusion within the continent. The chapter also highlights some cybersecurity risks associated with digital technologies and the nature of the regulating environment of these technologies. Policy recommendations and suggestions for future research are outlined at the end of the chapter.

This chapter focuses on the critical success factors of Big Data solutions in marketing, particularly in assisting decision-making and optimising business processes. In the information age, such solutions may help a company gain a competitive advantage by utilising Big Data to understand customer needs, increase the efficiency of the entire decision-making process, and improve marketing activities. Discussions in this chapter highlight the characteristics of Big Data which include value, variety, volume, variability, veracity, velocity and valence, and the major critical factors of Internet of Things (IoT), statistical applications, business intelligence, amongst others. The application of Big Data in various areas, challenges as well as the benefits to contemporary organisations are  also uncovered . Recommendations are included for effective utilisation and management of big data to improve marketing activities in Africa.

This chapter develops a framework for the Customer Value Management (CVM) function within the marketing practice of firms with a large customer base. A one-to-one marketing campaign involving a data set of 60,000 mobile customers from the Business Intelligence (BI) system of a mobile operator in Nigeria was experimented. The data was prepared along customer value, lifetime, and other variables. Marketing campaigns were developed, deployed, and experimented on below-the-line (BTL) digital channels. The experiment explored the effectiveness of these digital channels in driving CVM campaign activities within a large customer base. The results show that while all the experimented channels performed well under the CVM framework with respect to customer adoption and incremental revenue, the digital tag notification performance was exceptional. The implication is that the digital tag notification channel can be well-positioned as an integral channel of CVM operations in large consumer firms with a real-time one-to-one marketing capability. This study demonstrates the value and ease of a CVM framework application in a large customer base in driving business revenue. It also shows customers’ practical responses to offerings across digital channels, which has implications for the effective optimization of digital channels of firms with a large customer base.

Learning today is a complex endeavour that has moved away from the old traditional settings to a more complex setting mediated using learning technologies. Because of the complex interactions taking place within the learning environment, a new generation of learning technologies is needed to harness and manage the digital learning ecosystem. Digital learning platforms, as a digital service delivery system, have permeated educational systems in African countries for the past decades. Some societal drivers have pushed the move towards the adoption and utilisation of learning technologies because of the potential digital learning has in resolving some of the challenges faced in the educational system. Successfully implementing digital learning ecosystems is hinged on strategically thinking through creating, adopting, and implementing new digital learning ecosystem solutions. The ecosystem, made up of different biotic and abiotic components, is geared to effectively and efficiently deliver on learning outcome expectations. Addressing the new ecosystem’s challenges will bring us closer to making the components of the ecosystem work optimally while pushing the envelope on improving and extending the functionalities and utility of digital learning platforms.

The African market offers enormous opportunities for business digitisation and a shift from the brick-and-mortar model that has defined her business operations and processes. Despite an increase in the number of start-ups taking advantage of the digital space to launch new businesses, the African market is still underserved. This concluding chapter emphasises the importance of digital tools and platforms in improving service delivery and positioning service offerings beyond geographical limitations. By identifying the value of digital tools and platforms, the chapter suggests that digitalising businesses in Africa should not merely follow global trends but understand the unique needs of the African market, correctly identify the target audience, and adopt optimal technology to deliver the service. This chapter identifies the key findings from authors’ contributions in the book and offers recommendations to businesses in Africa, on effective leveraging of digital technologies.