Why small brands will thrive better in digital, than traditional space —Analyst

A brand analyst, Mr. Emmanuel Agu has described the digital space as offering more prospects for small businesses, than the conventional space, due to its affordability.

The Group Marketing Director, JOTNA Nigeria Ltd, made the remark at a webinar organised by the Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria (APCON), recently.

According to him, the digital space remains a leveler for businesses, since it provides them  the opportunity of an exposure at very minimal financial costs.

Agu further argued that the digital space, however, gives small businesses, with great contents, an opportunity to make  publicity exploits, which ordinarily would have been impossible in the conventional space due to the cost implications.

“As a small business, I can afford to put a sponsored post with a minimum amount of money online. But I can’t afford to put my commercial in CNN, a traditional media. So if you know what you are doing in digital space, creating good contents and the rest, maximising  the affordability the digital ecosystem offers  brands and consumers, you are likely going to overcome,” he argued.

He also charged businesses, desirous of making an impact in the covid and  post-covid eras, not to pay lip service to digital, since it is increasingly becoming a key ingredient for the survival of any brand.

“We all saw how digital ecosystem became an equalizer, for both small and  big brands, in 2020, especially during the covid period. But what now makes a whole lot of difference is your contents as a brand, and how you are able to drive virality of those contents to engage your consumers.

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“At La Casera company, we were fortunate or rather unfortunate to launch four new products in February, 2020, hoping to do our traditional brand- storming to create awareness  for the brands. But we couldn’t, because there was a lockdown. What we did was to migrate from traditional  space to the digital space;  online food vending channel. So we utilised the online food vending channel to drive sampling.

“So, instead of putting people on the streets to dance, we aggregated the online food vendors in Nigeria, starting from Lagos, Abuja and Port-Harcourt, and shipped our products to them using an agency. And when you order for a product, the food comes with a bottle of the new product.  It  was like in-house sampling and that was how we migrated all our activities into the digital channel,” he stated.

Agu, however argued that some bigger organizations that were not as flexible to adopt such strategy, and were not nimbler enough to do that migration suffered some setback.

“So if you are paying lip service to digital, then you are on the wrong side of the law because you need it to survive both  covid and post- covid periods,” he added.