Thoughts on AIG’s re-branding and its battle with Facebook for users in Africa

Africa Internet Group (AIG) or Rocket Internet’s arm in Africa has undergone a major re-branding exercise for all its digital platforms in Africa. Chances are that you don’t know what AIG or even Rocket Internet is even though you have used one of their products. That’s relatively expected.

The internet economy in most parts of Africa is still fairly nascent. Most people haven’t gotten past thinking that Facebook = internet or that Whatsapp is just another application that rides on a much bigger layer. This fact — in part engineered by Facebook and telecoms — is why some internet activists have vehemently opposed Zuck’s Internet.org/Free Basics project.

Facebook’s dominance of the internet in Africa isn’t at all good news for newcomers such as Rocket internet/AIG.

Users have gotten used to flocking to Facebook as their first and maybe only online destination. Facebook in particular has managed to created a wall-garden of vast content and services that keep users within its strongly guarded walls. Users barely click on links these days especially when they’re incentized by Zero-rated free browsing experience on Facebook.

The social network has invested alot to improve on the user-experience of its core products. Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram are so easy to use you would think they are not running on the same technology stack that powers the rest of the web. Users have a way of quickly recognizing terrible websites, poor user-experiences and avoiding them.

I’ve often asked some friends why they for instance choose to publish their thoughts on Facebook as opposed to running their personal blogs. They often say that “it’s easier to do it on Facebook”.

Mobile networks’ revenues have plunged because of easy-to-use OTT products such as Whatsapp, Messenger. Every startup that sets out with a new product must be aware of big blue’s influence or else they die a painful death of a thousand cuts.

Now we know Rocket Internet/AIG isn’t maladroit in these waters. Rocket has a handsome portfolio of successful internet-driven companies across the globe. Rocket is known to strategically replicate internet products that have worked in the developed world in emerging markets. I’ve preciously written how Rocket has strategically side-stepped big Silicon valley bigshots with a plethora of products that stand higher chances of success.

They have wisely not created another “Facebook-for-Africa” or “Google-for-Africa” and instead opted for geographically-based products that the bigshots have failed to implement or scale in Africa.

E-commerce in particular has been a big attraction for Rocket/AIG which sees itself as being the “Amazon of Africa” and other emerging markets. So Rocket isn’t your ordinary Startup swimming with the big sharks in a vast ocean.

It has the technical prowess of hard-core developers based in Berlin, Europe’s startup capital. It has the cash that can sustain online infrastructure required to run its not-yet-profitable ventures. It has the cash flow it needs to overcome logical nightmares associated with Africa’s under-developed offline infrastructure. Plus it has a network of venture capital firms, investors such as MTN Group, Orange Group, Tigo and Axa who are willing to share the investment risk associated with Africa’s sloppy business environment. AIG is valued at about $1 billion so far.

Over the last month, Rocket or more precisely AIG has chosen to bring its bevy of products under a common name of Jumia. Over 10 products including Jumia, Hellofood, Kaymu, Everjobs, Vendinto, Lamudi, Carmudi will now share a common name of Jumia with slight variations. For instance Hellofood, the online food ordering site will become Jumia food under food.jumia.country-tld. Carmudi, the automobile car marketplace will become Jumia car under car.jumia.contry-tld. The reason for the re-brand was for AIG to have a more stronger brand that resonates consistently across their products to their customers.

“Operating under the same brand name reinforces the legitimacy of proposing other services to our customers and to our sellers.We want to have one strong brand that is trusted and loved by our customers across Africa” ~ Sacha Poignonnec and Jeremy Hodara.

Big companies grow by horizontally scaling their product category. That’s includes Apple too. As a result, the inevitable happens; there’s a lot of fragmentation and consequently branding issues follow.

We have known AIG to be thorough as implementation of their products across the markets they operate in. AIG flies in product managers, CEOs, PR and marketing executives at different stages of the product lifecycle with each management team tasked with clear deliverables.

AIG’s re-brand might be well-intended but poorly executed this time. Having a strong brand for mass-market products is key to its success of course but how you do it for online products might be drastically different from offline or physical products.

In the digital space, the URL or rather domain — that something.com — is your brand. Get it wrong and you’re screwed. Its the sole reason Facebook coughed a cool $200,000 for Facebook.com while changing from theFacebook.com and a whooping $8M for fb.com. That domain should be short (preferably less than 8 characters), sweet and memorable.

Subdomains on the other hand are often long and not memorable. For instance hellofood.ug might come off a lot effortlessly than food.jumia.ug. Picture a conversation with a friend who needs to order a quick lunch. So you tell them that you can now order food online in Uganda. They ask how and let them know about an online food ordering website. You tell them go to food.jumia.ug! What are chances that they’ll first of all correctly remember the right subdomain with all the dots in the browser? How easily would they remember hellofood.ug vs food.jumia.ug the next time they want to re-order their favorite lunch?

The likes of Facebook have opted for discrete product branding. Upon acquiring Whatsapp for instance, it didn’t become whatsapp.facebook.com. Likewise Instagram remained Instagram. Messenger Facebook’s in-house product has domain messenger.com, not messenger.facebook.com.

You see, it’s easier to remember and type the former rather than the latter. The other Facebook products you probably don’t know are Rooms, Paper, Mentions, Slingshot although they are mostly mobile Apps.

Now I know you are going to ask about Google or Microsoft. Yes, both Google and Microsoft have spin-off products branded after the main brand. But that was only after establishing a strong brand.

Google instance has Google docs, Google search, Google drive, Google photos, Google images, Google home, Google-something. Most of these products either have a subdomain or directory for instance drive.google.com or google.com/adsense. But we must remember that Google started with one core product — search — and making it so successful it became part of our vocabulary today. Therefore the brand stuck and after sticking, its easier to ride products on it. Microsoft too started with one core product — an operating system Microsoft Windows — before delving into spin-off products.

Rocket/AIG on the other hand hasn’t yet arrived at a place where one of its brands has penetrated the mainstream market in Africa. While Jumia, the online store has had some success in some markets, it’s still far from being the norm when it comes to online shopping.

For those reasons, I think it wasn’t such a good idea for AIG to rebrand its online products under on umbrella.

AIG is no-doubt interesting company to watch as far as the internet space in Africa and emerging markets is concerned. They are excellent at execution and therefore are a good model for many Tech startups in Africa. They are many lessons we can learn fro Rocket/AIG and for now am simply a student.