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Preface Preface: Consumer Safari

I have to admit that until a few years ago, I was guilty of overlooking Africa. My book on emerging markets, The 86% Solution, included only a few African examples. As a professor of marketing at the University of Texas, I have extensive experience working with companies in Latin America. I have traveled and lectured extensively in Asia and the Middle East. Like most scholars in the developed world, however, I saw Africa more as a charity case than a market opportunity. I was wrong, and this book is here to set the record straight.

It is particularly surprising to me that I failed to recognize the story in Africa because I remember when India was discussed in the same way. As Ramachandra Guha recently wrote in a book review in the Financial Times, “Western writers of the 1960s warned their readers that India was a losing proposition, the laboratory, as it were, of failed experiments in democracy and nation-building.”¹ He could be writing about Africa today. In fact, one of the reasons I started writing about opportunities in emerging markets was because of a conversation I had with a colleague for a panel considering how we could stop the developing world from “begging.” As the son of an entrepreneur, I found this shocking and insulting. I knew that entrepreneurship is alive and well in India. But when I told colleagues a decade or two ago that India would be an important global market, they were incredulous. They are incredulous no longer.

I have experienced the transformations in India firsthand. I was born in Jammu City in the state of Jammu and Kashmir a few months after Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated and India became a republic. I became part of a generation that Salman Rushdie called “Midnight’s Children,” referring to those who lived through the transformational time after the independence of India at midnight on August 15, 1947. In 2002, I had the opportunity to return to India as dean of the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. I saw how a country that had been written off as a charity case was now seen as a powerful emerging market.

Now I see the same view of Africa. Despite all the attention it has received for its social, medical, humanitarian, and political challenges, it is still undervalued as a consumer market. I set out to rectify my own lack of knowledge about the continent and to understand the market opportunity it presents—in all its rich complexity and wealth. I traveled thousands of miles across Africa and met with or interviewed leaders of major African companies, smaller entrepreneurs, and Asian and Western firms with long experience on the continent. I have had the opportunity to meet some truly extraordinary and creative business leaders. I feel blessed for the opportunity to do this in the autumn of my life. I learned important lessons from these many teachers, which I share in this book.

As I was finishing this book, President George Bush announced in February 2008 the launch of five funds through the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation, totaling $875 million, for investment in Africa. On the eve of his trip to Benin, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana, and Liberia, he stated a conclusion that I had reached in my own journeys through Africa in the preceding years. “This new era is rooted in a powerful truth: Africa’s most valuable resource is not its oil, it’s not its diamonds, it is the talent and creativity of its people.” The true wealth of Africa is its more than 900 million consumers, and its countless entrepreneurs and business leaders who are already demonstrating the wealth of the continent by building successful enterprises. If you look beyond the headlines, these individuals are propelling the rise of Africa. They are building businesses, economies, and societies. They are the hidden natural resource that may present greater opportunities than oil or minerals in the long run.

I am not a political scholar. I am not an economist. I am a marketing professor, so my focus is on the market opportunity. There will soon be a billion consumers on the continent of Africa, and this is one of the fastest growing markets in the world. Every day, they need to eat. They need shelter. They want education for their children. They would like to have soaps to wash their clothes. They desire cell phones, metal roofs for their homes, televisions, music, computers, movies, bicycles, cosmetics, medicines, cars, and loans to start businesses. They celebrate marriages, births, and religious holidays and commemorate death.

I have sought to learn as much as I possibly could about the African market—what it offers, how it is structured, and its potential. Others have looked at Africa through a political lens, some have engaged in economic analysis, some have examined its complex history, and others have looked at medical or social challenges. A few have even started telling the stories of specific African businesses. But my focus is on understanding the continent through the perspective of the consumer. What is the African market? What opportunities does it offer? How are companies recognizing and realizing the opportunities in Africa’s rising?

Many tourists come to Africa every year to see the big game there—the elephants, lions, and rhinos. But I came for a different type of big game. I was seeking out the successful enterprises that are identifying and capitalizing on the market opportunities, and seeking lessons from those that are not so successful, too.

In Nairobi, Maserame Mouyeme

of The Coca-Cola Company told me how important it is “to walk the market.” Then, in Harare, I first heard the term “consumer safari” in a meeting with Unilever executives. This is what they call their initiatives to spend a day with consumers in their homes to understand how they use products. Years after I started on this journey, I now had a term to describe the quest I was on. I was on a consumer safari. The market landscape that is Africa is every bit as marvelous and surprising as its geographic landscape. It presents as big an opportunity as China and India. On the following pages, I invite you to come along on this safari. I think it will change your view of Africa, as it has changed mine, and perhaps your view of where the future global market opportunities—and future wealth—can be found.

Vijay Mahajan University of Texas at Austin March 2008

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