Are local brands missing the mark?

While the tone and style of local advertising and communications has undoubtedly become far more relevant to the average SA consumer in recent years, many argue that it is still largely coloured by a Western narrative.

Indeed, if one glances through magazines or spends time channel surfing, most advertising appears to depict a decidedly European or North American context – not a proudly African or South African one.

But, as local advertising professionals point out, the solution is not simply to ‘black-vertise’ and insert tired racial stereotypes into ads – it requires delving far deeper into realities that extend beyond race.

“It’s not so much that the narrative is Western, it’s just that it is profoundly uninteresting,” argues Kabelo Lehlongwane, deputy strategy director at ad agency FCB Joburg.

“When marketers ‘black-vertise’ they tend towards that which barely scratches the surface of who we are.”

According to Lehlongwane, local marketers thus tend towards stories that reflect “first-base observations”.

“This makes the work a little shallow – and therefore off the mark,” he adds. “It’s why it feels ‘not black enough’, which is different from it being ‘too Western’.”

In his view, local brands are attempting to tailor their work to reflect local contexts and realities, but end up working off miscalculated “and sometimes weird” ideas of what it means to be black.

“It’s all ‘black people are musically inclined and like to dance so we’ll sell them everything from chicken to cellphone contracts by showing other blacks dancing’ and so on,” explains Lehlongwane. “And I’m not at all suggesting that it’s wrong to show black people (or people of any race) dancing. It’s just that dancing blacks can’t be the beginning and end of the way we talk to people simply because we’ve got nothing else substantial to go on…”

Nicole Shapiro, associate director of brand at Added Value S.A., a marketing consultancy, agrees that many local brands are trying to be relevant by tapping into “cheesy, and often offensive, stereotypes”.

While she points to KOO and Castle Lager as examples of brands hitting the mark, she notes that “there are only a handful of brands” really getting it right.

This is an excerpt from an article that originally appeared in the 19 November 2015 edition of Finweek. Buy and download the magazine here.