Do Consumer Brands In Kenya Care About Being Disintermediated When It Comes To Digital Marketing & E-Commerce?

I have noticed something that I think could be dangerous for consumer brands in Kenya when it comes to how they execute their digital strategies and more specifically around the area of e-commerce. To be specific, I have noticed many well known local and international consumer brands have opted to approach digital marketing and e-commerce by not doing it themselves, at all, which is worrying to be honest.

In a nutshell, what I see happening, especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic is that many brands and businesses had to become digitally transformed to stay relevant. Pre-COVID, many hardly ever used digital marketing or e-commerce as a means of marketing and selling their offerings.

Therefore, in order to move fast, and hopefully, not break things, many consumer brands opted to partner with intermediaries who had the logistical, technology, and marketing capabilities to do digital marketing and e-commerce for them. One area where this is very evident is in the food delivery space in Kenya where Glovo and UberEATS are doing so for many local and international brands.

For me, what triggered this post is how many digital ads I am increasingly seeing for well known consumer brands in Kenya but when you click on them you are taken to Carrefour Kenya’s e-commrce platform, for instance. What’s interesting is that the ads initially have no co-branded elements to suggest that you are going to Carrefour’s e-commerce platform so it does feel a little suprising and unexpected — almost jarring to be honest from a customer journey perspective.

This brings me to the whole point of this post. My view is that whilst its good for consumer brands in Kenya to have a digital presence via strategic partnerships for digital marketing and e-commerce, the risk is that the the very same consumer brands are progressively being disintermediated. This means that, over time, consumers will gravitate to, and be more connected to, the reseller brand, and not the brand being sold itself!

This is something that has happened globally with the likes of Amazon who are a dominant consumer brand for almost everything, and as a result brands there have very little leverage as Amazon ultimately calls the shots. The solution to this scenario can be to explore a direct-to-consumer or DTC model. This would entail doing digital marketing actitives as well as having a bespoke or white label e-commerce platform that make a branded end-to-end customer journey experience possible.

As more and more consumers in Kenya adopt digital-first behaviour at scale, this will become essential so that brands are not completely disintermediated from their existing and prospective customers.A key benefit of going the DTC route, even if its a small part of a consumer brands overall sales volumes, is that it gives them first-party data insights on how consumers are engaging with their brand offerings from initial awareness, to conversions, retention, and eventually advocacy.

This simply isn’t possible in a scenario where an intermediary platform holds all the keys to these insights as they are essentially the touch point from digital ads, to sales, and beyond. Therefore, consumer brands in Kenya should consider having their own DTC platforms to stay relevant and connected to their customers. As a starting point DTC would simply be a complement to what they are doing at the moment but over time could become a very channel for their future success.