Market insight, innovation to boost local brands in Nigeria’s N15trn consumer market

After assessing the N15 trillion Nigerian consumer market, primarily dominated by foreign brands, marketing communications’ practitioners advised local brands to leverage marketing innovation and consumer insight to play big in the market.

Owners of local consumer brands have overtime displayed withdrawn tendency in promoting their brands, which reduces their chances of tapping into the potential of the growing consumer market.

But the brand building experts believe that if the local brand owners would show enthusiasm, courage and creativity in marketing their brands they could  benefit from the large consumer market, which McKinsey Global Institute projected will grow to about N226 trillion in the next 15 years.

Kelechi Nwosu, president, Association of Advertising Agencies of Nigeria (AAAN), who recognised the growth of some corporate brands such as Glo and Dangote, says consumer insight should guide local brands in building their brands to international acceptance.

“It appears we are more interested in supporting established brands than developing our own brands,” he says, noting that though the environment is a challenge but others in other countries who develop strong brands also have challenges.

In his view, Emeka Maduegbuna, an expert in marketing communication, advises local brands to boost their marketing communication strategies, saying the immense opportunity in the consumer market assisted by the large population and the growing middle-class will continue to elude local brands if they don’t up their game. 

“It is for the brand owners to work to develop their brands. It is possible for local indigenous brands to grow, but a lot depends on the brand owners to have quality and good marketing mix approaches.

‘’Dangote is a Nigerian owned brand that has worked to develop its brand. Local brands should make sure that the quality of what they offer is good. Secondly, their marketing strategies must be right,” Maduegbuna says.

For some brand owners, branding is everything and they take it seriously and they also understand that is a guarantor of profitability and market share growth. President of Organisation of Advertising Agencies of Nigeria (OAAN), Charles Chijide, attributes the underground performance of local consumer brands to lack of government support.

“Nigerian local brands can only tap into the opportunity of growing consumer market if government supports the manufacturers by way of rebate on certain costs. There are much infrastructural challenges, they are running diesel and that is why they cannot compete favourably with foreign brands that have most of their infrastructure in place,” Chijide says.

 He believes that government’s quest for FDIs has left the local manufacturers un-encouraged and unprotected, as “government has allowed foreigners who have single-digit interest rate to come and meet people who have very high interest rate regime.

‘’All manufacturers are crying because government policies are not protecting them and this has allowed the foreigners to take over and repatriate all the money they have made in this country.”

Daniel Obi