Dispatch: three days at Nairobi Brand Week

What a market with cheap distribution and expensive trust builds instead of advertising.

The thing that does not travel from the case studies is how little of the work here is advertising.

Distribution is cheap and getting cheaper. Trust is expensive and moves almost entirely through named people. The consequence is a brand-building practice that looks, to a visitor, like community organising with better design.

Three panels in a row referenced the same problem: how to make an institution legible when every relationship in the market is personal. Nobody offered a clean answer. Several offered partial ones worth stealing.

The most instructive session was the smallest — nine people in a side room comparing what they had each stopped doing.