Markets don't emerge by accident.

They form when the things stopping people taking part are removed. We find out what those things are.

Sponge is a market formation company.

The problem

Awareness was never the whole story

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.

2 years
M-Pesa launched in Tanzania in 2008 and struggled for roughly two years. Not a comprehension problem — a fragmented agent network and pricing that did not fit.
IFC / World Bank, M-PESA Tanzania channel distribution case study.

The method

Markets don't fail for one reason. We find out which one.

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.

01

Understanding

Do people know what it is, how it works, and whether it is for them? Not awareness. Understanding.

02

Access

Do the rails exist, and can this person reach them — physically, legally and affordably?

03

Trust

Do they believe taking part is safe? Will they lose money, be scammed, be left without recourse?

04

Momentum

What turns intention into action today — and what brings them back tomorrow without being asked again?

05

Coordination

Does taking part become more valuable as others take part? Sometimes the product works perfectly and nobody else is there.

Read the full method →

How an engagement begins

Start with a diagnosis, not a brief

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.

Method
Twenty fixed checks across the five constraints. Each requires named evidence rather than an opinion.
Duration
Two to four weeks.
Output
The binding constraint, identified and evidenced. The intervention we would recommend, and what it would take to relieve it.
Registered
A written prediction: what should change, by when, and what result would prove us wrong.
Obligation
None. Sometimes the answer is that no campaign will fix this. We would rather tell you that than sell you one.
1 or 2
Constraints that are typically binding at any moment, out of five. The diagnostic exists to find which — not to grade all of them.

After the diagnosis: design the intervention, build what it calls for, and measure what survives after the spend stops. We report that number.

Work

We have been doing this longer than we have been calling it this

Coca-Cola

Buy a Coke. Get airtime.

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.

20m
People who took part. Not interactions — people. Facebook in Nigeria had 3.5m users at the time.
Campaign records. Figures held by Sponge.
Wema Bank

A USSD code nobody remembered

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.

ALAT
Nigeria's first fully digital bank. The behaviour we built became its foundation.

We didn't run a campaign that led to a bank. We built a behaviour that made a bank possible.

Who we work with

Organisations trying to make something happen that has not happened before

Brands

Entering or creating a category, where the problem is adoption rather than preference.

Institutions

That need a population ready and able to act, not merely aware.

Regulators

And public bodies, where participation is the policy objective.

Coalitions

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.