Marketing Brands in Africa

Sydney Scott Sam is the founder of Workspace Global, a Ghana-based tech-oriented brand communications company and a 2019 Forbes 30 under 30 successful entrepreneur in Africa. He is a branding expert who focuses on start-ups and entrepreneurs. In this interview, Sydney discusses the prospects of Africa’s start-up space, current start-up branding approaches, success stories and offers concrete advise for African start-ups to build and grow their brands to become global success stories while staying authentic to their African roots.

Sustainable business practices are now a non-negotiable way of conducting business globally. We set out in this chapter to investigate sustainability marketing practices in Ghana’s oldest University given the fact that universities around the world are striving to forge symbiotic relationships with their numerous stakeholder constituents for survival and growth. We employed a qualitative research approach to examine sustainability marketing practice in Ghana, using University of Ghana (UG) as a case study. Face-to-face in-depth interviews were conducted with key administrators of the university who were selected purposively to address the research objectives. This was complemented with a review of documented secondary information sourced from UG. Thematic analysis was employed in analyzing data collected. Findings of the study indicate that UG has operational structures in place that enable the implementation of Sustainability Marketing. Notwithstanding the numerous benefits associated with it, the study identified several challenges that the UG brand needs to surmount for effective implementation of its SM programmes.

The oil and gas sector is one of the most important industries in many African economies. Businesses in this space vary in size and operations but they all face the challenge of negative brand image due to the controversial nature of their operations, notably their impact on the natural environment. How can oil and gas businesses use branding to negotiate these negative images and engender brand appeal in a competitive but controversial market? This chapter addresses this question by examining how some oil and gas brands build and market their brands in Africa and advocate more strategic effort in this regard.

The overall thrust of this chapter is to explore promotional approaches and practices of religious organisations, more specifically, how churches adopt social media to foster brand engagement and brand promotion. Based on a descriptive content analysis of five digitally driven churches located in Nigeria, this chapter demonstrates how churches can sustain their place in the community through brand promotion and particular communication practices. This is achieved by incorporating several social media channels such as YouTube, Facebook, mobile apps, Instagram, and Twitter in church promotion. These practices enable churches to fully achieve their goals whilst attaining member needs for spirituality and community. This chapter supports the premise that churches are brands that should consistently and continually seek to adopt better marketing and communication approaches to meet the ever-changing needs of their religious consumers.

Ghana’s political brands are maturing with its democracy along the lines of global practices. Emerging evidence suggest that political parties in Ghana are managing political brands architecture of party, candidate and policy brands in a far more sophisticated manner in order to meet the growing complexities of the political market. This chapter focuses on the party brand, where the traditional approach has been that ideology is at the centre, has given way to a modernised party brand responsive to contemporary voter needs. The modernised party brand also reflects the needs of other electorally relevant stakeholders. Using in-depth interviews of party officials, media analysts and academics in the subject area, the chapter looks at how the case party in Ghana, the New Patriotic Party, adapted its ideological positions to issues, and in the process moved into and took ownership of the policy terrain of its competitor party. The party used its heritage and ideological identity as anchor to underpin its engagement on democracy and good governance and deliberately reduced its voice on hard core neoliberal economic policies. In addition, internal discipline was enforced as means to regulate leadership attitude, behaviour and communication in order to steer a shift towards the centre of the Ghanaian political market.

Contemporary capitalism has facilitated a blurring between culture and the economy and between the self and the market. The self can now be branded, marketed and consumed in the marketplace like a commodity as punctuated by the rise of influencers and internet celebrities. Whiles there is a growing discourse about self-branding in Western consumer culture, less is known about how self-brain is enacted in non-Western contexts. This chapter examines the self-branding practice of one of Ghana and Africa’s biggest artistes, Shatta Wale, and how he creates and communicates his ‘Shatta’ brand through spectacularization. Contrary to assertions in prior research, by maintaining a consistent dissonance between his brand and person, Shatta achieves self-brand authenticity as real and genuine.

Branding is storytelling and great brands are those that tell emotive and compelling stories that reinforce or challenge cultural norms and practices. The author examines how businesses in North Africa can leverage relevant local cultural narratives to develop their brand positioning and communication.

The informal economy’s importance in Africa is demonstrated by its significant contribution to the national economies of countries across the continent where informality is more of the rule than exception (ILO, 2020b). According to the International Labour Organization, the informal economy in Africa accounts for about 60–80% of employment on the continent. There are various actors in the informal economy inclusive of micro-enterprises that act as channels for distribution of branded and unbranded products. This creates a foundation for a better understanding of branding in the informal sector in terms of challenges and benefits, missed opportunities and prospects to develop a roadmap that can be used to accelerate and improve brand building in the informal economy in Africa.

What comes to mind when you hear about Africa? Not surprised most people perceive Africa as a country, oblivious to the fact it is made up of several sovereign nations. The prevalent perception about Africa is that of poverty, war, pestilence, and primitivity. However, with many opportunities being presented about the continent, especially its impending contribution to the global economy there is a need to question whether the prevalent perception is accurate and if not, how to ensure that the opinions and thinking the rest of the world has of Africa and her countries needs to be changed. In this regard, this chapter aims to discuss Africa’s context as a brand and recognise the inherent challenges and the existing perception that has shaped the brand. This chapter contributes to existing knowledge on place branding, especially from a continent perspective and presents practical implications relevant for practitioners, policymakers and place branding researchers.