This week I’ve been working on a connections strategy for a global brand struggling in Ghana.
Strong global equity. Big budgets. Established markets.
But locally, low salience. Weak pull. Patchy distribution.
At first glance, it looks like a media problem. Spend more. Increase visibility. Push awareness.
But when you step outside the deck and into real contexts, conversations, stores, and media habits, a different pattern shows up.
People are not rejecting the category.
They just do not see this brand as part of their world.
One detail made that clear.
People were using the product category in ways that fit their routines, budgets, and social settings.
Casual. Shared. Flexible.
But the brand’s communication and even retail guidance centered on a “perfect serve” scenario.
Controlled. Idealised. Slightly removed from how consumption actually happens here.
So the brand was not only culturally distant in tone.
It was distant in behaviour.
Meanwhile, smaller or culturally closer brands showed up naturally in local language, familiar humour, real price realities, and the places people already move through.
The issue was not communication pressure.
It was cultural distance.
And that changes the strategy completely.
This is where strategy actually lives.
Not in slides first.
In patterns of behaviour.
Brands do not grow by forcing relevance. They grow when they align with how people are already living, expressing themselves, and making meaning. That alignment is not just messaging.
Because here, three things were happening at once.
- Culture
- The brand wasn’t embedded in local moments, meanings, or social cues that signal belonging.
- Narrative
- Internally, the brand understood itself one way. Externally, people didn’t experience that story in their daily lives.
- Systems
- Even when interest existed, distribution gaps and availability made the brand easy to ignore and hard to choose.
No amount of better ads alone fixes that.
The shift was not “say more.”
It became:
Show up in contexts people already move in.
Tell a story that reflects how life actually feels here.
Align media, retail presence, and brand behaviour so the experience is coherent, not just visible.
This is not a messaging tweak.
It is a systems alignment exercise.
What this means for strategy
A lot of organizations jump straight to “What should we say?”
A better starting question is
“Where and how does life already move, and are we built to move with it?”
Relevance breaks when culture signals one thing, your narrative says another, and your systems make both hard to experience.
Strategy is not just planning activity.
It is learning to see the forces shaping behaviour and designing brands that can live inside them, not outside them.
That is the real work.
