The single story is alive and well in South African boardrooms

Earlier in my career, I worked in marketing for a large global FMCG company. I eventually left, and looking back, one of my biggest frustrations was the single story that drove decision-making. Strategy for our brands was decided elsewhere and imposed on us. Variants that had done well in Brazil were assumed to work in South Africa because “it’s also an emerging market.” New products, tested in a central innovation hub, were launched and simply expected to succeed in Africa. The local story rarely got a seat at the table.

Marketing has become more sensitive to local nuance since then. But I’ve been in boardrooms recently where the efficiency of a global insight still wins out over what would work in hyperlocal contexts, because it makes more financial sense to produce something that can be lifted and shifted around the world. Every time the economics wins, a single narrative is told at the expense of a more complex, more accurate truth.

In her TED Talk, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warned that “the single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” She was talking about how the world sees Africa. But the single story is just as dangerous inside a boardroom, and it costs businesses far more than they realise.

And it isn’t only head office that tells it. A senior client recently had to defend his decision to invest in research, because his exco colleagues were of the opinion that “after decades in this industry, the research tells us what we already know.” This at a company that struggles to deepen its share in large parts of the South African market. The single story is alive and well in our own boardrooms too.

Start with the market that exists

The most persistent single story about Africa is the deficit narrative: that the continent is defined by what it lacks. The challenges are real, and our Africa’s Beautiful Constraints white paper deals with them in detail, but this framing produces a specific kind of blindness. Companies that see only gaps import solutions designed for the gaps they imagine, rather than building for the market that actually exists.

The white paper calls this path dependence – defaulting to familiar grooves under pressure. The result is business models copied from developed markets, and the first thing to break is usually the route to market. And in South Africa, so much of the economy is informal. Parmalat didn’t take its cheese slices to township consumers through supermarkets. It built its own database of informal food outlets and found its way into the humble kota.

What the failure stories leave out

When businesses fail in Africa, the explanation is reliably external: political instability, corruption, currency volatility. These are real, but they also make a convenient shield for a harder truth. The strategy was often designed for a market that doesn’t exist here, built on an insight that was never quite right.

Research from Mozambique, cited in the white paper, shows how easily that happens. Most shoppers named mango as their favourite juice, yet tutti frutti was the best seller by far. People weren’t buying for themselves alone. They were buying the blend that would keep everyone happy. A brand that took the research at face value and backed mango would have been left wondering why it wasn’t moving, and the economy would probably have taken the blame. A Western framework, built on individual preference, would never surface that. The single story says African consumers buy the cheapest option. The reality is shaped by generosity, community and a collective rationality that individualistic models can’t detect.

Change who’s in the room

The single story persists because of who’s in the room and how far they are from the market. A team that has never spent time in a township will reach for data dashboards when the real insight lives in a conversation with a spaza shop owner. It will ask “how do we scale?” before it has asked “what does this community actually need?” And as that exco shows, being local doesn’t mean you’re close to the market.

Breaking it takes two shifts. The first is cognitive diversity: people with lived experience of the markets being served. The second is a commitment to leaving the desk. As John le Carré wrote in The Honourable Schoolboy, “A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world.” Amanda Manchia, one of the paper’s interviewees, makes a related point: marketing is both an art and a science. The science gives you the data. The art gives you the meaning. In Africa, meaning is where the opportunity lives.

Hold more than one story

Africa is not a single story. It is 54 countries, hundreds of languages and, by 2050, a quarter of the world’s population. It is formal and informal, urban and rural, ancient and leapfrogging. The businesses that thrive here will be the ones that resist the seductive simplicity of a single narrative and do the harder, richer work of understanding complexity on its own terms.

Often, the first constraint a business needs to reframe is the story it tells itself. As Adichie put it, “Stories matter. Many stories matter.” In business, they also show up in the numbers.