There is a particular kind of confidence that shows up in a deck titled "Global Strategy, Localise as Needed." It is the confidence of someone who has never had to explain load shedding to a media planner, or why a billboard that works in Frankfurt will die a quiet death in the Northern Cape.
I was speaking recently to a friend at an international B2C brand actively trying to break into the South African market. No marketing department on the ground. No brand manager who has ever set foot here. The person steering strategy for South African consumers sits in another country entirely, building plans off research that rarely goes deeper than a market report and a few slides of cultural context. And this is not a new story to me. I have sat in that exact seat before, on the other side of a call, watching someone confidently present a strategy for a market they have never lived in.
The billboard test
Here is the simplest way I can put it. If a billboard works in Germany, that tells you nothing about whether it will work in South Africa. And that is not even the interesting part. A billboard that works in Sandton will not automatically work in the Northern Cape. That is how layered this market is.
South Africa has 12 official languages, and English, the language most brands default to, is the home language of fewer than 10% of the population. Roughly 23% of South Africans speak Zulu as a home language. 16% speak Xhosa. 13% speak Afrikaans. McKinsey's research on winning in African consumer markets is direct about this: linguistic diversity alone means companies need to deliver their marketing messages in a plethora of languages, and that differences in consumer behaviour run far deeper than language. Even South Africans researching an unfamiliar province will do some homework. But most of the instinct is already there, absorbed simply by living here. That is the advantage a market like ours gives you when the people building the strategy are actually in it.
"Localise the strategy" is a warning sign
When a global team hands over a finished plan and says localise as needed, what they are really telling you is that they built something without understanding the market it needs to work in. It is not a starting point. It is a patch job waiting to happen.
The clearest proof of this is what happens when the same category enters South Africa twice, once as a copy-paste, and once as a genuine rebuild.
The same industry, two different strategies
Dunkin' Donuts and Baskin-Robbins entered South Africa in late 2016, backed by Grand Parade Investments with plans to open more than 250 Dunkin' stores and 70 Baskin-Robbins locations across the country. By February 2019, Grand Parade had filed for voluntary liquidation of both brands after sustained losses and a failed attempt to find a buyer. Eleven Dunkin' stores had opened, all in Cape Town. Five Baskin-Robbins locations followed. Neither brand ever made it to Johannesburg. The rollout did not fail because the product was bad. It failed because the strategy behind it was never actually built for this market, only exported to it.
KFC took the opposite route in the same industry. Rather than treating South Africa as a smaller version of an existing playbook, it rebuilt pricing and product around how South Africans actually eat and spend. The Streetwise range, chicken paired with pap and gravy at a price point built for township and budget-conscious consumers, is not a menu tweak. It is a different strategy, built from a different starting question. KFC went further, repositioning its brand identity around South Africa's post-apartheid Rainbow Nation moment when research showed that was the emotional register the market was responding to. It is now one of the biggest fast food brands in the country, with a presence described as seemingly never more than a few blocks away at any point.
Same industry. Same country. Same category of foreign brand entering a market it did not originate in. Two completely different outcomes, because one strategy was localised on paper, and the other was rebuilt on the ground.
Proof it works beyond fast food
Vaseline's Heritage Day campaign, created by VML South Africa, centred on the deeply familiar South African ritual of a caregiver rubbing Vaseline into a child's skin before school, a daily act of love that generations of black South Africans carry into adulthood. The campaign went on to win two Clios, a Silver Pencil at The One Show, and a Shortlist at D&AD. It travelled internationally, not because it was built for a global audience, but because it was specific enough to be real first. Nobody built that ad by starting with a global brief and localising downward. Someone who understood the South African cultural moment built something true, and the recognition followed.
A fair counterpoint
I want to be honest that localisation on its own is not a guarantee, and global input is not automatically the enemy. Brands with strong global systems, supply chains, quality standards, proven operational models, have real advantages that a purely local build cannot always replicate on day one. KFC did not throw out its global brand entirely. It kept its core identity and operational backbone, then handed the market-specific decisions, pricing, menu, positioning, to people who understood the market. The lesson is not "ignore global expertise." It is "do not let global expertise make the calls that only local understanding can make."
Not a discrimination argument. A competence argument.
I want to be precise about what I am saying here, because it is easy to hear this as gatekeeping. It is not. It works exactly the same way in reverse. I have no business building a strategy for the American market. I do not live that culture, I do not carry its instincts, and no amount of surface-level research changes that.
Success comes down to how intentionally a brand adapts its communication and its commercial model. Transcreation, not translation. Native speaker validation, not Google Translate. Pricing and product decisions made by people who understand what this market can and will spend, not people extrapolating from a market report. This is not about where someone is from. It is about whether the person making the calls actually understands the audience they are speaking to.
When international brands move into South Africa, particularly ones selling to the mass market, the message is simple: hire local. Not as a compliance checkbox, not as a token seat at the table, but as the people actually shaping the strategy and the idea. That is where the impact comes from, as Dunkin' Donuts, Baskin-Robbins, KFC, and Vaseline all prove, in different ways. Everything else is a strategy in a costume, waiting for someone who actually knows the market to make it real.