My son is three years old. He’s already built a brand relationship with our local Woolies that most CMOs would envy – and they don’t even know he exists. Meanwhile, a brand I’ve been loyal to for a decade still doesn’t know why they keep losing me, or what they could do about it.
Author: Nomonde Keswa, strategy director at Delta Victor Bravo
Let me explain both.
A few months ago, I began stopping at our nearby Woolies on the way home from school pickup. My son figured it out quickly – the direction we turn from the school gate, where I park, the little toddler trolleys at the entrance, and the fact that despite walking in there for spinach, he’ll get a snack every time. Then there’s the first gondola when you walk in: blueberry muffins. His favourite thing in the world. Now, every pickup day, there’s a small but very determined three-year-old pointing left when I turn right, whispering “this way Mommy, let’s go shop". Woolies became easy to think of and easy to find (for him anyway) and they earned that entirely by accident.
Now for the other story. Decent middle-class earner, image-conscious, lives in the northern suburbs, takes care of herself. On paper, I’m exactly who a premium nail bar chain believes they have safely in the bag. And yet, there I am on a Tuesday at a no-frills, unpretentious local nail spot that gets the job done at half the price, sometimes further from my house than the chain. Definitely not relaxing, but absolutely worth it for reasons that would probably surprise even the best trained brand manager.
On my birthday, I’m back at the chain – for the champagne, the cappuccino, the theatre of being treated. But the rest of the year? I am considerably more complicated than my demographic suggests. Nobody 'lost me'. But if they’d asked better questions, they might have found a version of me worth far more.
'Where' is the wrong question
When we talk about meeting consumers where they are, we tend to think geography. Which channels, platforms, stores, and suburbs. It becomes a distribution question, a reach question, a media-planning question.
But meeting consumers where they are is first and foremost a mental exercise, not a physical one. Before you can reach someone, you have to understand them in context, in the moment, at the point of their need. And that requires something many brands aren’t very good at – suspending their assumptions.
Most marketers are familiar with the idea that brands win when they’re easy to think of and easy to find. We apply it too literally, though. The physical side gets plenty of attention – the shelf, the channel, the platform. The mental side gets flattened into awareness and reach metrics. What gets lost is that 'easy to think of' is deeply contextual. It shifts by mood, life stage, and the particular chaos of a Tuesday afternoon.
That nail bar chain knows my demographic. What they don’t know is my life stage, my shifting financial priorities, or how differently I relate to their brand on my birthday versus a regular Tuesday. And here’s the more interesting question: what could they do with that knowledge if they had it? A flexible membership that rewards frequency without punishing gaps. Re-engagement timed to life events – a new baby, a milestone worth celebrating. The insight locked inside my 'disloyalty' is actually an innovation brief waiting to be written.
The constraint brands keep hitting – themselves
One of the recurring themes we found in the research we did for a recent white paper, is the danger of imported answers to local questions. The assumption that what worked in one context will simply transpose to another is one of the most expensive mistakes a brand can make. But the more stubborn constraint usually isn’t a road, a data signal, or a distribution gap. It’s a mental one – the story a brand tells itself about who its consumer is, and the rigidity with which it holds onto that story even as the consumer quietly evolves.
As one of the marketers we interviewed put it: “A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.”
The good news is that constraints, taken seriously, tend to produce better answers than comfort or blue-sky thinking ever does.
Take Coca-Cola in Morocco. Roads too narrow for trucks in parts of the country. Another brand might have written off those communities as unreachable. Instead, Coca-Cola distributed via donkey carts and camels – not as a stunt, but as a genuine solution born from the constraint of infrastructure. They removed the assumption that distribution had to look a certain way, and found their consumers on the other side.
Sanlam faced a different kind of constraint. They wanted to reach consumers who needed funeral cover and financial literacy support, but these were people who weren’t ready to engage directly with topics like death and financial planning. Too heavy, too formal, too far from the texture of daily life. So Sanlam met them inside a WhatsApp drama series. Episodic storytelling, relatable characters, difficult topics woven naturally into narrative. Not a product brochure dressed up as content, but a genuine entry into the world their consumers already inhabited, on terms those consumers were actually comfortable with.
Both examples start from the same place – stop assuming consumers need to come to you on your terms. The physical answer and the mental answer look different. But the thinking that unlocks them is exactly the same.
The harder question
The temptation, reading all of this, is to reach for a channel strategy – WhatsApp dramas, hyper-targeting, informal trade, last-mile logistics. And yes, those things matter. But the more productive starting point is less comfortable: interrogating your assumptions about who your consumer is right now, in this moment, in this season of their life.
I am not the same customer I was at 20. My son will not always turn left from the school gate wanting blueberry muffins. Consumers are not fixed points on a demographic map, they are people in motion, with shifting priorities, shrinking budgets, growing families, and changing moods. The brand that understands that version of its consumer, not just the profile, is the brand that earns a steady seat in the consideration set.
Meeting consumers where they are isn’t a distribution problem – it’s a curiosity problem. The brands willing to ask better questions, to suspend judgment, challenge assumptions, and go looking for the micro-reasons behind the decisions their consumers make, are the ones who will find them – even on the way home from preschool.
