In Africa, the competitor you’re not watching is often the one beating you
In Africa, the competitor you’re not watching is often the one beating you.
The reassuring benchmark
When a brand enters a market, it usually starts by looking at its competitors. The leaders, the challengers, market shares, prices, media spend, campaigns. It is logical, reassuring, structured. And sometimes not enough.
Because in Africa, your real competitor does not always have a website, a brand book or a marketing department. It may not show up in studies, it does not present its figures to analysts and it does not buy advertising space. Yet it sells. Sometimes a lot.
So the problem is not analysing the competition badly. It is often defining it too narrowly.
What the market really does
In many African markets, real competition goes far beyond the visible players. A bank does not only compete with other banks. It also competes with cash, mobile money, the tontine, the family, or simply the habit of getting by without a bank. An insurer does not only compete with other insurers. It sometimes competes with the belief that, when something goes wrong, the family network will always find a solution.
The same goes for commerce. A delivery app may think its main rival is another app. On the ground, it sometimes finds itself up against the neighbourhood courier, the seller who delivers in person, or a simple WhatsApp message sent straight to a shop.
And in retail, the decision can still be made very far from the big dashboards. A brand can invest heavily in awareness, build preference and optimise its shelf presence. Then, at the very last moment, a salesperson simply says: “Take this one instead.” The sale changes sides in a few seconds.
This is where many benchmarks become misleading. They perfectly answer the question “Who sells the same thing as us?”, when the real question is often “How do people solve this problem today?”
The difference is huge. Because your competitor is not always a brand. It can be a habit, a middleman, a parallel channel, a network of trust, or a solution simple enough that nobody would think to call it competition.
In Africa, real competition often begins where the dashboards end.
What if your real competition was somewhere else?
Understanding a market is not only about identifying those who look like you. It is about finding the right insight: everything that can take your place in the consumer’s life.
Want to understand what really moves your market?
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