My Dollar and I are not easily parted...

I am a proud Zimbabwean through and through, I love Zimbabwe but you will be fooling yourself ten times over if you think I am going to part with my hard earned United States dollar to buy a product simply because it is “made in Zimbabwe”. It’s not enough for Zimbabwean companies to hide behind a buy Zimbabwe campaign and continue to churn out half-baked products and think that I (or anyone else) will take it from the shelf to my home simply because it was made in Zimbabwe.

I don’t care how long you have been in business or how many of my fellow countrymen you employ, if I have better options; be they from another African country or another continent, I will take them if our product is “weak”. The world we live in nowadays has eliminated alot of the barriers that inhibited the flow of products and information across borders. We are no longer desperate consumers reaching out for whatever products our local producers are offering us. For this simple reason, local companies must accept and act based on the fact that they are now (voluntarily or involuntarily) competing in a global market.

You have companies come up with excuses and escape plans that do not tackle the real reason behind the low uptake of their products. For example, I recently had a conversation with an employee of a local FMCG producer. His rationale behind their failure to produce a quality product was that the land redistribution exercise had affected the availability and quality of one of their key raw materials. So their solution is to buy whatever quality of this raw material is available and try to make it work. A whole load of bullocks if you ask me, I offered three possible solutions on the spot (imagine what other solutions their management could come up with more time and information):

-          Backward integration; grow  our own raw material

-          Contract farming with these “new farmers”. this will allow you to dictate the quality and ensure product availability

-          Import the required quality raw material

Then you have this or that industry associations trying to get the government to block the entry of this or that product into the Zimbabwean market because of this or that reason. Instead of confronting competition industries resort to crying foul and make efforts to stop imports of competing products.

The long and short of It is - Your 4 Ps (Price, Product, Promotion, Place) must come together and a produce a package that addresses my needs, then maybe I’ll give you my United States dollar.