There’s a genre of WhatsApp group chat unique to event planning committees – half admin, half hostage negotiation (if you know, you know). Ours required décor for a friend’s bridal shower, but on a budget that ruled out full-service suppliers (with their ‘full service’ price tag). We opted for a more DIY approach, which demanded more time, decision-making, and patience than any of us possessed. While hunting for individual décor items, I stumbled across an online “event in a box” provider: you pick a theme, add a guest count, and they deliver a kit of parts ready for a fully styled tablescape. I didn’t use them, but I just stood there thinking: why did nobody tell me this existed?
That’s the feeling relevant market creation gives a consumer – something they didn’t know they needed, but absolutely did. This kind of thinking shows up at every level of life on this continent, from stokvels to fintech unicorns. When the options on offer don’t fit, someone eventually stops choosing between them and builds a third path instead. There’s a real difference between fighting for a slice of an existing pie and baking one nobody’s tasted yet. Fighting for a slice in highly penetrated markets can cap growth, as you’re contending for a thin sliver against a competitor defending just as hard as you are attacking. Market creation, however, is slower to start and harder to get right. But when it works, there’s no ceiling on growth because you’re pulling in new demand and spend, rather than splitting an existing market.
Nothing here was built to fit
eatbigfish Africa’s white paper last year, Africa’s Beautiful Constraints, includes a chapter on “imported answers to local questions” highlighting the arrogance of assuming a strategy built in London will simply succeed in Lagos or Johannesburg. But strategy isn’t the only import. Imported answers – be they products, services, solutions, formulations, pack sizes, payment terms, or credit models – rarely work effectively when applied to African problems. While established market norms can sometimes persist unchallenged for years, more often, and more excitingly, Africans forge new paths around them instead.
That instinct shows up at every scale, even if the stakes are nowhere near the same: a bridal shower committee working around a decor industry that only offers two extremes; a spaza shop working around a supply chain that never reached it; a stokvel working around a bank that never extended it credit. Constraints aren’t rare here, and neither is the instinct for working around them.
Most people’s everyday ‘workaround instincts’ never become businesses. Yet, it is the reformulated recipe, the extra tissue oil squeezed into a bottle of body lotion, or the financial system aunties run entirely out of a notebook, that represent insights waiting to be turned into opportunity.
That’s where market creation actually starts: observing and noticing what people are already improvising, and building solutions that remove the need to improvise at all. Do it well, and you don’t just serve an unmet need; you reset what the whole category is expected to deliver, and everyone who follows has to catch up to a standard you’ve set.
When instinct scales
In the banking sector, the well-known fintech M-Pesa didn’t beat banks at their own game. Instead, it made an entire population visible to a financial system that had previously ignored them.
In the retail sector, long before sustainability became a boardroom topic, spaza shops and township trade had already been operating with the logic now seen in Skubu – the South African refill-grocery model in Diepsloot, where customers bring their own containers and pay only for what they need.
When it comes to savings, stokvels and Ajos have pooled resources for generations, precisely because formal credit was never designed with their participants in mind. PiggyVest and Cowrywise didn’t invent community-based saving, despite what their pitch decks might claim. They simply observed what our mothers and aunties already knew how to do and provided an app for it.
None of these businesses had superior data compared to their competitors. I imagine banks had more data on more people than M-Pesa did at its launch. What these businesses did have was the ability to pay attention. Nobody ran a spreadsheet and discovered people were already swapping airtime as a stand-in for cash. Someone noticed it happening and built a solution that addressed what was already occurring. That is the fundamental skill underpinning every example above.
For marketers, it’s about getting out from behind our desks long enough to observe how people are already solving the very problem we are paid to solve for them.
Build for people, not off them
Lastly, irrespective of whether you’re creating a market or competing in one – you can build a product that’s better for African consumers, or you can build one that extracts from them. Always choose to be better for consumers.
I still don’t know why nobody told me event-in-a-box suppliers existed. But I know the value of that feeling. For marketers, the message is to observe more, and build for the continent instead of off it. You’ll win more than a customer, or a slice of the pie, you’ll get to decide what a whole new pie tastes like from there.
By Nomonde Keswa, Strategy Director at Delta Victor Bravo (representing eatbigfish in Africa)
