Understanding
Do people know what it is, how it works, and whether it is for them? Not awareness. Understanding.
They form when the things stopping people taking part are removed. We find out what those things are.
For twenty years marketing became very good at one thing: helping people choose between products. Buy my drink. Switch to my bank. Download my app.
The questions organisations bring us now are different. How do we get people to invest? How do we move customers to digital banking? How do we get drivers to switch to electric or CNG?
Those are not advertising questions. They are adoption questions — and adoption does not start with a campaign. It starts with knowing which barrier is actually in the way.
Most of the money spent on adoption is spent on the wrong barrier. It is also rarely checked before the money is committed.
Every emerging market faces five constraints. Usually only one or two are binding at any moment — and effort spent on the other three is waste.
Do people know what it is, how it works, and whether it is for them? Not awareness. Understanding.
Do the rails exist, and can this person reach them — physically, legally and affordably?
Do they believe taking part is safe? Will they lose money, be scammed, be left without recourse?
What turns intention into action today — and what brings them back tomorrow without being asked again?
Does taking part become more valuable as others take part? Sometimes the product works perfectly and nobody else is there.
We sell diagnosis first. It is a paid engagement with a defined scope, because the diagnosis is the part that decides whether anything after it is worth doing.
After the diagnosis: design the intervention, build what it calls for, and measure what survives after the spend stops. We report that number.
At the time we thought we were running a promotion. Promotions then meant collecting crown corks, posting an envelope and waiting weeks. Mobile changed that — and we were helping millions of people adopt an entirely new behaviour.
You cannot advertise your way out of a memory problem. So we built a live show that ran every night at 9:45pm, tied to *945#. We were training people to be comfortable banking on a phone — without a branch and without a banker.
We didn't run a campaign that led to a bank. We built a behaviour that made a bank possible.
Entering or creating a category, where the problem is adoption rather than preference.
That need a population ready and able to act, not merely aware.
And public bodies, where participation is the policy objective.
Competitors who need a market to exist before they can compete inside it.
We don't just market what exists.
We help create what comes next.