Feyi Olubodun offers deep insights on African consumer in his new book
The last few weeks have been pretty hectic one for Feyi Olubodun. His tight schedule has not just been about his plum job at Insight Publicis, where he is MD/CEO, rather it’s been about his new book, The Villager. The newly minted book is an unprecedented expose on the Africa consumer. And from the day it rolled out from the press it has inspire a frenzy of excitement and curiosity among entrepreneurs, investors and brand and marketing experts in Africa and beyond.
Mr. Olubodun has been fulfilling promotional obligations in South Africa and Nigeria to drive publicity for his book and satisfy readers’ inquisitiveness.
The excitement about The Villager is understandable, because for the first time, someone is taking the bull by the horn, to provide rare insights into the socio-cultural DNA of the African consumer, in a way that provides an homogenous answer to the challenge of marketing across the length and breadth of the continent.
The book is a brilliant attempt to solve the age-long mystery of the African consumer and why many brands have failed to find success on the continent that is full of opportunities. In this book Olubodun offers business leaders, marketing practitioners and brand owners lenses through which they can accurately view the African market profitably. “Everytime I have talked about this subject to different audiences, it’s almost like the scale fell from their eyes and they can see finally,” Olubodun said in a recent meeting with journalist in Lagos.
The Villager is a journey down memory lane, to the roots of how the behaviours and social cultural nuances of an average African are formed. Therefore for any business owners to make a lasting impact on the minds of these consumers, the author said, he must first understand this journey.
Olubodun says the African consumer begins his life’s journey by moving from the village, his rural dwelling, to the city, carrying with him not only his own dreams but also the dreams of his community. He is a highly aspirational consumer, motivated to succeed, and he becomes the economic portal for the rest of his community back home. But although he may be exposed to global influences and technology, his essential identity remains largely intact.
He noted that the reasons why foreign brands have failed to succeed in Africa despite its allure and promises was because they fail to see the African consumer from this perspective, rather they import western lenses which give them a flawed picture about the African. “The Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs does not apply to Africans, it’s a western construct. It applies to a Western society that is individualistic in nature, the African society is a collective society. “We are a ‘we’ culture, we are not an ‘I’ culture,” Olubodun explained.
In writing this book Olubodun has been helped by his time at Medical School. Though he dropped out after four years, to obtain a degree in Psychology, he has succeeded in transferring his interest in humans from the anatomical to the psychological. This has provided the foundation needed to pursue his curiosity about human behavior. Drawing on his wide experience and astute wealth of observations, he provides a highly readable and indispensable guide to the mindset of the African consumer today. Yet it is true to say that his insights apply, albeit in a more nuanced way, to consumer behaviour across the globe.
The book is also a challenge to Nigerian brand and marketing operators to tell the brand story from a cultural perspective. Olubodun says the African culture offers an ocean of opportunities that Nigerian agencies can ride on to produce marketing campaigns that will attract international commendations and fascinate the global audience.
The Villager will be launched in Nigeria on Thursday 19, April 2018 at the Wheatbaker Hotel Ikoyi, Lagos.
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