By Manuel Veiruapi Ruhapo | The Brand Paradox | The Botswana Gazette
I was watching television when the procession appeared on screen. And then something happened that stopped me completely. People along the road sat down. Not in an organised way. Spontaneously. Without instruction. Strangers on the pavement. A man lowering himself onto a low wall. A woman pulling her children down beside her.
It was the funeral procession of former President Dr. Festus Gontebanye Mogae.
I had not seen that in years. The practice of sitting when a funeral procession passes is one of the oldest expressions of communal dignity in Botswana’s cultural vocabulary. Somewhere in the noise of the last two decades, it had quietly disappeared from the daily life of the country’s roads and streets. Mogae’s procession brought it back.
And in that return, it revealed something every brand operating in Botswana, local or foreign, needs to understand: culture does not disappear. It waits. The brands that understand what it is waiting for earn something no advertising budget can buy.
The Paradox
Here is the counterintuitive truth this article is built on.
The brands with the most resources, the widest reach, and the strongest global reputations are the ones least likely to win deep loyalty in Botswana. Not despite their power. Because of it. The very scale and confidence that makes them globally dominant makes them culturally arrogant locally. They arrive assuming their formula works everywhere. It does not. The market that appears easiest to enter, small, aspirational, English-speaking, exposed to global media, turns out to be the hardest to truly win. Because beneath the surface familiarity is a communal cultural logic that rewards presence, humility, and relational warmth over product superiority and budget size.
The foreign brand that sits down when the procession passes beats the foreign brand with the bigger campaign. Every time. That is the paradox.
What Foreign Brands Get Wrong
Most foreign brands arrive with a playbook that worked elsewhere and apply it here with minimal adaptation. The product is the same. The strategy is the same. The only thing that changes is the language of the tagline and, occasionally, the faces in the advertising. This is not cultural adaptation. It is cultural substitution. The result is a brand that looks local and feels foreign.
Two failures are consistent. The first is communicating transactionally in a relational market. Botswana’s consumer culture is built on relationships. The brand that speaks only in product features and price is understood but not felt. The brand that acknowledges the relational context, that treats the customer as a member of a community rather than an individual transaction, speaks a language the market responds to.
The second failure is showing up only when there is something to sell. The brands that disappear when the community is grieving, celebrating, or deliberating are correctly identified as extractive. In a market where communal belonging is a primary value, being extractive is a position from which recovery is very difficult.
What Getting It Right Looks Like
The foreign brands that have earned genuine loyalty in Botswana share specific behaviours. They show up during cultural moments without a commercial agenda. They give culturally literate people decision-making authority, not just execution roles. They adapt their service model to relational expectations: warmth is not optional in this market, it is the service. And they learn Setswana at the level of meaning, not translation. The proverbs, the forms of address, the vocabulary for communal obligation carry meanings that no English equivalent captures. The brand that demonstrates that understanding earns credibility that is immediately legible to the market.
The Mogae Moment
The revival of the sitting practice during Dr. Mogae’s procession demonstrated, in real time, that the value of communal dignity was not gone from Botswana’s cultural life. It was dormant. Waiting for an occasion significant enough to call it forward.
The brands paying attention had access to information no research report could provide. A brand that understood what it was watching would have asked: what cultural practice, communal value, or shared meaning could our brand activate, honour, and sustain? Not as a campaign. As a practice.
The brands that ask that question, and answer it honestly, will still be in this market in twenty years with loyalty no competitor can buy away. The brands that do not will keep spending more to earn less.
Culture is not a barrier to entry. It is the entry. The funeral procession is passing. The question is whether you know to sit down.
About The Brand Paradox
The Brand Paradox is a weekly column by Manuel Veiruapi Ruhapo that explores the counterintuitive truths behind building great brands in Botswana and beyond. Manuel Ruhapo is the founder of Blacmarc Group, a brand strategy consultancy that helps businesses solve their most complex brand challenges.
Contact: manuel.ruhapo@blacmarc.co.bw / ruhapo@gmail.com