This past weekend, Spotify rolled out an activation for Kendrick Lamar’s new album; Mr. Oklama and the Big Steppers. The activation caused quite the ruckus on social media. Especially amongst the players in the music industry and some influencers. The campaign itself begs a lot of question, chief amongst them being why is Spotify promoting Kendrick’s project in Ghana? But in this article, I want to discuss the simple genius behind the marketing campaign and what Ghanaian Marketer’s can learn from it.

In Unilever (and a good number of other big multinational corporations) there’s the concept of “The deep human insight” when it comes to crafting marketing campaigns. Every campaign should be based on some deep human insight. This is important for a few reasons. For these multinationals, they need to create marketing strategies that can transcend cultures because they need to roll them out to different markets. Sure, the implementation of these campaigns can be localized for respective markets, but the insight that drives the concept behind the marketing campaign needs to ring true with the core audience wherever they are. Hence the human in that statement. But I think there’s a second reason why there’s an emphasis on starting with strong insights rooted in the human experience. It makes strategy easier and the campaign more potent

It is tempting to want to create novel ideas, and do things that are otherworldly in other to push a marketing campaign. Sometimes that works. But other times, asking very simple questions about what insights already exist in the market you’re trying to advertise in is a much more powerful approach. Even if you want to create something that is otherworldly, starting from a truth/insight that already exists is a potent approach.

Putting messages on Trotros isn’t anything new in Ghana. It is something we see every single day. But using that same medium intentionally to communicate a specific message is the genius. I bet most of the people sitting in those Troskis didn’t even understand what was written on the buses they were sitting in. But it got enough people talking online. I’d argue that’s another layer of genius; doing something offline that drives a conversation online is the ideal feedback loop that most marketing campaigns wish for. And this activation did that.

This kind of activation isn’t the first of its kind. Social Ghana did something similar with Twitter’s launch in Ghana. Where they use tweets containing jokes and other statements that the typical Ghanaian tweeter will recognize and relate with and turned them into billboards all around the city. We’ll most likely do a separate post on why that marketing campaign was great and how it may have even inspired “the tweet it into existence” campaign the twitter did in the US a few months later.

The lesson here is simple; Look within the environment you’re trying to market in. It most likely holds within it insights that can help set your marketing campaign off in a good way.