Justin Tochukwu
The Nigerian banking industry remains extremely attractive with a pool of value estimated at $9 billion dollars according to McKinsey. Irrespective of tight competition among the players, alot of the consumers are undeserved. With issues ranging from lack of access especially within rural areas, affordability, and poor user experience.
This have created opportunities for fintech startups to build valuable solutions across the value chain addressing different pain points of the consumers.
Nigeria has over 200 standalone fintech startups solving problems around payments, savings, lending services, and accounts.
So far, Nigerian fintech startups have raised over $1.37 billion dollars out of $4 billion dollars raised by African startups according to FintechNGR.
With the payment subcategory of the Nigeria fintech industry producing 3 unicorns (companies valued at a billion dollars).
This obvious growth is largely contributed due to mobile and internet penetration, along with young upward mobile consumers in Nigeria and Africa at large.
At the base of this, is the proliferation of the e-commerce industry sponsored by the tug of war between Jumia and Konga which affected the market dynamics and the value chain that made e-commerce viable in Nigeria.
Its impact began changing consumers behaviour about buying and paying online positively.
Nigeria’s e-commerce industry is worth $7 billion dollars according to ecommerceDB. The biggest payment services in Nigeria have began integrating an online store within their infrastructure. Although the aim is to aid SMEs sell their products online without stress, at the core of the strategy is to generate huge volumes of payment transaction to be handled by their infrastructure and of course sustain their market share.
Opay, Flutterwave, Paystack, and Remitta have all built and integrated online stores within their system.
Even within the payment subcategories they are niches.
Selar is an eCommerce platform that creates a space for African Creators and Entrepreneurs to sell their content, products, and services across borders without stress.
A bootstrapped team of 9 with over 60,000 customers and have paid out more than $1 million dollars to creators. Their major competitive advantage is focusing on creators and meeting every need they have with selling their digital products and services online across different countries and currencies.
With Giants like Paystack making it possible for their merchants to now sell digital products and Flutterwave acquiring Disha in other to penetrate the creators niche, Selar needs to redesign her marketing campaigns.
Switching her payment product from functional service to an emotional service through purpose driven marketing Aka marketing 3.0.
The modern world of marketing has progressed through three distinct phases.
Marketing 1.0 was product-driven, focusing on the merits of the company’s product or service.
Marketing 2.0 was customer-driven, harnessing the power of data to focus on the needs of the company’s target market.
Marketing 3.0 is purpose-driven. Selling a product is no longer enough. To be competitive, companies today must connect with their customers’ values in a meaningful way. This is where purpose-driven marketing comes in.
Why is this Important?
In a 2015 survey by Deloitte, 91% of millennials prefer to buy from companies associated with a social cause and 60% said that a sense of purpose is an important part of why they chose to work for their current employer.
In Edelman’s 2012 Good Purpose Study it was found that 72% of consumers would recommend a brand that supports a good cause over one that doesn’t.
To remain relevant today and get emotional buy-in from consumers amidst stiff competition within the fintech industry, Selar must integrate a strong social cause within its overall strategy and marketing campaigns.
TOMs is a casual shoe brand that integrated a One for One Model where for every pair of shoe sold, another pair of shoe is given to underprivileged children around Argentina, Haiti, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Rwanda, South Africa, and United States. This strategy has inspired massive patronage of the brands products spanning across shoes, clothing, eye wears etc. They attracted people who share the same values with them and believes in their vision and humanitarian cause.
Ecosia search engine is a non-profit Bcorp that makes a big impact by planting trees when you make searches, so far Ecosia has planted 140 million trees using the profit generated from searches.
I moved some of my searches to Ecosia and I have planted a couple of trees. An average of 45 searches is what you need to plant a tree.
It’s fast, easy, a lot more private and most importantly, it’s carbon-negative!
If Ecosia were as big as google, it could absorb 15% of all global CO2 emissions. That’s enough to offset all vehicle emissions, worldwide!
Their purpose and cause is the reason I considered the switch.
Now, what must Selar do?
It is glaring that Selar’s core purpose is centred around making life easy for creators in Africa. However in addition to that I recommend that they align a strong societal cause to it. One that directly and indirectly aligns their products focus.
Gender equality is Goal 5 of the UN global sustainable goals. Even with the boom in African startups, industry women have benefited less.
In a survey of tech firms conducted by the ONE Campaign and the Center for Global Development, only about 30 percent were owned by women, mostly concentrated in e-commerce and enterprise solutions.
Of women-owned firms, the median share of ownership is 20 percent. Tech firms do not employ many women either—31 firms in the survey sample employ no women at all. The median value is two female employees per firm.
Male dominance of the Nigerian tech sector is also revealed by the very small number of female top managers. Of the 93 tech firms surveyed, only six had a woman in a top management position.
The underlying reason for this could be lack of access to funds, lack of requisite skills and expertise needed and the obvious bias of the industry towards women.
Selar should position as a brand that drives and supports inclusion and empowerment of female creators in Africa.
They can achieve this through the following;
— Having a goal to empower and produce 500,000 female creatives by 2030.
— Employ more women within their workforce and management positions.
— Organize seed grants and funding of about $1,000 – $3,000 to support female owned SMEs and creators periodically.
—Partner with Ingressive for good, Udacity, Coursera or any other proven agency to train female creators on digital skills like, programming, product design, graphics design, digital marketing, content development etc.
— Design an internship program that absorbs the best of female creators providing them with work place experience and access to growth.
The Possible impact of the above when implemented,
—Increased social and good will towards the brand.
— Most likely attract investors that have similar values.
— Increased word of mouth marketing among creators.
— More patronage and access to new audience and customers.
— Will compliment marketing efforts which increases the ROI spend on brand marketing campaigns.
— Could attract seed equity free funding from non for profit organisations like UN and Bill and Melinda gates foundation to sponsor the cause.
— Could give Selar both national and international recognition for actively engaging towards actualization of UN SDGs goal 5 which is focused on gender equality in Africa.
If implemented Selar should do the following:
— Intentionally build communities around the brand and their epic strategy.
— Get their high profile users like Steve Harris Jimi Tewe , TriciaBiz , Eva, Nelly Agbogu (Naijabrandchick) and Chioma Ifeanyi-Eze to do a video ad endorsing the brand and their cause.
— Run on all cylinders when it comes to marketing and Brand campaigns from Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Tiktok, leave no stone unturned including Billboards, fliers and any other relevant means of traditional marketing.
This is necessary and important to spread the word about the brands purpose, mission and their products which will get the awareness of their audience that share the same values with them.
We recommend that this should be done swiftly in other to retain their market share while working towards expanding market dominance in the creative industry.
Selar: Ecommerce tool for creators & businesses Milton Tutu.
Justin Tochukwu is a Brand and Business consultant with over ten years of experience in Branding, Strategy and Digital transformation and Principal Consultant ,Kedrus Consulting
