Congested and Overpopulated Nigerian Markets, Lessons for Marketing Professionals
Look at an ant. Watch it closely; let it teach you a thing or two.
(Proverbs 6:6)
No lazy fool is reading this post and this is why I’ve taken out the beginning of that popular part of the Bible but it is very significant to this writing today.
I have spent the last 90 days visiting open markets in Nigeria. For the records, I have visited 20 open markets and I have carefully taken notes, made observations and reacted to some key lessons that are quite apparent from the way and manner these market men and women carry on with their trade.
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From Ojuelegba market to Araria market to the popular Onitsha market to the market in Ile Ife. There are popular and common themes that shape the way products are being sold, customers are being acquired and customers are being retained.
I would be talking about very common and identical themes that I observed in my sojourn to understand market cultures in Nigeria.
Saturated markets but people still position themselves outside the market
These open markets are very very saturated, you would discover that in many cases, you would find people who sell the same set of products having a stall or space side by side with each other, however, people have learned to position themselves properly outside the markets using affiliates who drive traffic to their stall or using attractive and most in-demand products as the bait to drive visitors to stay at their stall and look at other products.
I have always believed and preached that marketing principles are the same from time immemorial and they are woven into the cultures of the target audience. The people who visit these markets often have come to know and recognize the affiliates who are popularly called “Baranda” because they add their service charge on this service. So these regular and frequent visitors would rather go to established stores or stores they have built a relationship with when shopping at the market. As a new business, you would be doing yourself a disservice offering regular, undistinguished services that everyone else is offering in the marketplace because it does not help you win against your market competitors. These market people have mastered the art of using distinct products or creative ways to make their stall stand out.
See this video below:
FOMO is a very popular feature and they use it when creating store awareness
It appears that Nigerian consumers are very drawn to the fear of missing out when making purchases. Now I decided to dig deeper and I realized that among the global consumer base;
60% of people make purchases because of FOMO, mostly within 24 hours.
This is incredible data to understand how Nigerian retailers use the fear of missing out to drive the purchase of their products. In local Nigerian terms, FOMO means “I no want to carry last”. This is a behaviour many exhibits when making a purchase and that is why you would find people going into a stall that has quite a lot of people in it already, go select your own from the man who has quite a lot of women selecting their bra from him already, walk into a food joint that has quite a lot of people already purchasing from them.
I find that quite strangely, these local retailers hack the number of people who are staying in front of their stalls to drive this same FOMO from my observation.
Think about the last 10 purchases you have made, there’s every possibility you made one of them out of FOMO
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So I changed my mind and eventually completed the article, I am way behind schedule for my publishing of this article.
Merchandising is a thing and it works all the time for the store owners
If you enter a typical Nigerian market as a first-time visitor, you would be met with varying people who would run up to you, asking to guide your market experience and also offering you the best of products, but guess what, they do not even have any store of their own. They just take unknowing people to other people’s stores and the store owner markup the price of the product. This is what we refer to as affiliate marketing, it is actually a gold mine that is fully taken advantage of, although the customers bear the cost of these affiliate efforts. The interesting is that this affiliate or merchandizer takes you there and leaves you there in the hunt for another potential customer. This action is popularly referred to as "Baranda".
Partnerships are a distribution channel
Everybody is a potential partner in this market. One sparking feature is how everyone knows the stock of some partners of theirs, so when they run out of stock, you are told that the item would be brought from the second shop - there is no second shop, hahaha, it is just a partner store. These market people have mastered how to distribute their own products with other people in the same market, a potential opportunity for everyone who looks to take a key lesson from these markets.