Wake Up, Shake Up

Socio-economic forces, mostly related to the aftermath of the recession, have resulted in seismic shifts in the local marketplace. A new study by the UCT Unilever Institute of Strategic Marketing, entitled Wake Up! Shake Up!, shows that marketers will have to rethink their tried and tested strategies if they want to stay ahead of the game.

Wake Up! Shake Up! represents over a year of quantitative and qualitative research and integrates the expert analysis of 70 of South Africa’s leading economists, academics, financial analysts, industry specialists, as well as business and marketing forecasters.

 The marketplace has now changed significantly, and perhaps irrevocably so, over the last 15 years. On the back of 100 golden months of growth, South Africa experienced a massive downturn which hit like an economic tsunami.

 The tsunami analogy is useful in the sense that the causes of the global recession happened far from our shores, but gathered momentum before hitting South Africa. Just as it happens in natural disasters of this sort, those on the lower ground were hit very hard, while those higher up were hardly impacted at all.

 Similarly with the recession – those towards the upper end of the socio-economic spectrum rode out the downturn largely unscathed, whilst others who were lower down on that spectrum were hit very hard and are still dealing with the ensuing fallout – such as debt repayment and job losses.