Customer density

Thoughts On Customer Density

OCT 30, 2013

   There is one property I have noticed in African markets, it is difficult to have a market that is collected and dense enough to make particular products viable. The reason has to do with the diversity of African communities. In general, in a country or city like Nigeria, if one were to map the relationships between the people, there would be a lot of strong distinct clusters of relationships, with weak connections between those clusters. Those clusters could be based on tribe, social class, educational background, etc. In addition to this, there is no unified media or method through which most people consume adverts. As a result, even if a solution takes off within one cluster, it has difficulty moving from there to the next cluster, and so has difficulty gaining traction. The effect of word-of-mouth is greatly weakened because of this clustering behaviour, and there is no mass media that can be used to bypass this and break into each group.by Mark Essien