MARKET INSIGHT: Why should the kasi chicken have to cross the road for a bargain?

Corporate South Africa and global brands have been approaching the township economy through binary, oversimplified lenses for decades. On the one hand, the market is hyped as an untapped gold mine where billions in unrecorded cash circulate freely through an informal market. On the other, it is dismissed as a low-margin, impoverished sector where only bottom-tier pricing strategies can succeed.

Neither of these frames fits the full picture of the cumulative burden of money, time, labour, data and emotional stress required to simply maintain daily life when state infrastructure and basic services fail.

To win in this space, businesses must move away from generic marketing activations and permanent price discounting. Instead, they must deliver proven usefulness, operational availability and structural flexibility that lighten a household’s daily burden.

Explaining the township economy, Mongezi Mtati, Senior Brand Strategist at Sandton-based digital marketing agency Rogerwilco, said: “I always preface it by saying no two townships are the same. No two provinces are the same, either.”

He was highlighting some of the unusual findings from the agency’s 2026 South African Township CX Report on customer experiences, and how corporate plans routinely fail when treating township consumers as a singular demographic.

His words are validated across regional data in the report: monthly electricity interruptions affect 84% of township dwellers in the Eastern Cape compared with 72% in the Free State, and price-driven store switching hits 50% in KwaZulu-Natal versus 40% in the Western Cape.

What comes through quite strongly in the data is that the assumed financial binary dividing disciplined “savers” (stokvel members) from risk-seeking “bettors” (gamblers) is completely false. The report confirms that 55% of stokvel members participated in gambling over the past 12 months.

Rather than representing two distinct consumer types, the same household uses stokvels for disciplined, dated obligations such as bulk grocery purchases in December, while using low-stake mobile betting in a speculative attempt to increase scarce discretionary income.

Busting price myths

Outside Rogerwilco’s data set exists another common wisdom that needs reimagining: the township consumer is highly price sensitive, right? Not quite.

“A common misconception is that price drives consumer purchasing behaviour in emerging markets,” explained Google South Africa country director Kabelo Makwane, drawing on 11 years of global Ipsos research.

“The data proves otherwise: in 2025, price was only the sixth-most prevalent barrier to purchase in Africa, at 9.2%. Africa’s single largest barrier to purchase is accessibility, showing how physical availability, distribution and systemic exclusion halt consumers from getting the products they want and need.”

In other words, in the township context, an advertised price reduction is useless if stock is unavailable locally, forcing the customer to spend additional time and taxi fares to get to it.

And brands cannot expect to create value by merely showing face at the shisa nyama. High-visibility marketing campaigns without local economic investment or practical assistance are viewed as extractive – or sometimes outright rejected as “colonising”.

“People in the township are saying contribute more, bring something, don’t just bring your advertising and marketing, do something else,” Mtati said, reflecting on township sentiment towards corporate presence. “Stop being a coloniser, because you’re just extracting value. You’re not adding any value.”

This is mirrored in the report, in which 46% of residents say brands make little difference to their lives – 24% believe brands make life more expensive and only 20% feel brands help them cope with daily challenges.

Time tax

Highlighting the value and price put on time, Mtati said: “People are paying with their time quite a lot. A Saturday is spent going between shops looking for specials instead of spending time with family.”

He makes an important point that if you’ve gone to a shopping mall for a product advertised on special and find the supermarket is out of stock, you’ve wasted 15% of your income just travelling. This 15% is the average cost out of pocket that township residents are paying on transport, and “that makes it 30% when you have to go back without the thing you wanted to buy”, Mtati said.

So it makes sense that when choosing brands, 54% of the respondents cite price, but 53% cite quality. Township consumers are not engaging in a race to the cheapest product; instead, they demand dependable value and meal yield.

Dr Semona Pillay, senior lecturer in marketing management at the University of Johannesburg, said of this household calculation: “Affordability isn’t just about the number on the shelf. It’s the probability that a purchase feeds everyone it’s meant to... Running short here isn’t a private inconvenience, it’s a social one.”

And even in this microcosm there are two distinct evolutions of buying habits, because spaza shops and supermarkets do not compete for the same basket.

“The supermarket is for the big monthly shop, the stock-up trip... while the spaza serves needs such as tonight’s cooking oil, tomorrow’s bread or a R10 airtime voucher when your data runs out at 10pm,” explained Brian Makwaiba, managing director of Vuleka, a business-to-business e-commerce and fintech platform.

Global brand playbooks traditionally assume that building emotional brand affinity drives purchase adoption. In Africa the logic is reversed, and the kasi is an extreme version of that.

“The foundational premise [of brand marketing] is that product adoption will follow an established emotional connection,” Makwane said. “Here on the continent, delivery and practicality unlock emotional connection – not the other way around.”

A practical example is MTN’s micro-voucher ecosystem. Rather than pushing lifestyle campaigns, MTN created 50-cent airtime vouchers and deployed 1.3 million local agents (its “Army of Yellow”), solving both the cash flow constraint and physical accessibility at scale.

The telecoms sector is fertile soil for ingenuity in addressing township market needs. Traditional fibre expansion fails when operators demand rigid monthly debit orders from salaried household templates.

Frogfoot Rise rewrote connectivity economics by allowing a landlord operating a multi-unit property to take a single R265/month fibre line and divide it among tenants, adding R35 to each one’s rent. Beyond affordability, it solved a critical physical hurdle: informal metal shacks act as Faraday cages, disrupting cellular signals. Wired fibre bypassed this interference instantly.

As Sandile Mkhwanazi, Frogfoot Rise’s head of community relations, put it: “In the beginning, fibre success was defined by speed; now it is defined by the lived value it delivers to people in areas that need connectivity to thrive.”

The quicker brands and businesses learn that a promotional campaign created in Sandton that fails to reach the local spaza or supermarket shelf actively destroys brand trust, the faster they can build real-life solutions to customer problems in the township.

“Presence is being seen, while usefulness involves solving real problems in ways that are authentic to a brand’s purpose and capabilities,” was the parting wisdom of Sydney Mbhele, Group Chief Brand, Marketing and Corporate Affairs Officer at Absa Group – making it clearer than someone who has never had to take a taxi to find out the chicken special is sold out. DM

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