Walk into most boardrooms in Eswatini and you’ll find a marketer with a neat calendar of campaigns: the annual golf day, the December billboard, the Trade Fair stand, the “back-to-school” promo. It’s tidy, predictable, safe. But let’s be honest—this isn’t strategy. It’s habit.
Many of our biggest companies would survive just fine without their marketing departments. They’ve been around for decades, with guaranteed customers and stable markets. The marketer’s contribution is often a matter of repeating what was done last year, with the same suppliers, the same playbook. Businesses do need marketing—desperately—but marketers themselves have bought into the illusion that what they’re doing is enough.
The Comfort of Templates
Too many marketers in Eswatini are scared to rock the boat. To present disruptive, iconic ideas is to risk failure, and failure feels career-limiting in a small corporate circle. So they stick to templates—until someone else tries it first. Then it becomes “safe,” and only then does it get adopted. This is not bravery; it’s bureaucracy masquerading as marketing.
When asked to invest in something new—say, E10,000 on an experiential activation that connects directly with customers—marketers hesitate. But the same marketers won’t blink at signing off hundreds of thousands for a glamorous Trade Fair stand that exists more to win an award than to grow sales. It’s easier to justify the shiny, the traditional, the board-pleasing, than to defend the gritty work of moving markets.
When Disruption Makes People Squirm
I remember a campaign we ran around 2015 or 2016 that showed me exactly what disruption can do.
A colleague of mine had just joined the client company. He was the type of marketer every industry needs more of—restless, disruptive, unwilling to settle for the ordinary. He pulled me aside and said: “Let’s do something they’ll never forget.”
And so we did. We designed a campaign that broke every mold they were used to. It was loud, it was fresh, it cut through the static. People were talking about it in taxis, in offices, in bars. It was marketing that actually moved.
But success came with discomfort. The campaign shook the walls inside that company so much that operations called for internal investigations. Payments to us were frozen. I was summoned to their fraud department, treated not as a partner but as a suspect. A Manager who has been instrumental in enabling the campaign was dragged through the mud as though innovation itself was a crime.
Yati came out clean, of course. There was no fraud, no wrongdoing from our part —just the shockwaves of genuine disruption. Still, the fallout was real: resignations followed. My colleague himself, even though never called for a formal DC, eventually left the company, disillusioned by how allergic they were to boldness.
That’s the kind of disruption I’m talking about. Marketing that rattles nests, that unsettles people, that forces conversations no one wants to have. And yet, as long as we are clean, as long as our motives are pure, that kind of disruption is not only safe—it’s necessary. Which is exactly why I struggle with local marketers today. Too many prefer the comfort of silence over the chaos of growth.
Operations Over Strategy
This culture has also reduced senior marketers into coordinators. Too often, the marketing manager is the one unpacking branding at an event, arranging chairs, or even taking food to promoters at a mall stall. These are not unimportant tasks, but they are operations. Strategic marketing—the kind that designs growth pathways, unlocks new markets, and creates value for customers—gets crowded out by event logistics and daily firefighting.
Of course, the problem is partly structural. Many companies in Eswatini don’t have full marketing teams. The “marketing department” is often one or two people expected to do everything. But shortage of staff should not become a shield for mediocrity. Strategy does not need a large team; it needs courage, clarity, and conviction.
Why This Matters
The result of template marketing is that businesses are losing opportunities to grow. Marketing has been reduced to a cost center instead of a growth engine. Budgets are cut in areas that matter—data, insights, customer engagement—and diverted to what looks glamorous on a report. Sponsorships worth millions get approved, but subscriptions for real-time consumer data at a fraction of that cost get declined.
The irony is hard to miss: marketers are meant to be the champions of change, but in Eswatini they’ve become custodians of comfort. Instead of leading their organizations into the future, they spend their time defending the past.
A Call to Marketers
This is not written out of bitterness. It is written out of urgency. Eswatini needs marketers who will stop hiding behind templates and logistics, and start fighting for strategy. Who will have the courage to pitch the disruptive idea, even if it risks rejection. Who will insist on data over gut feel, growth over glamour, customer impact over board applause.
Our economy is too small, our challenges too large, for marketing to be treated as rinse-and-repeat. If you call yourself a marketer, ask yourself: are you building growth, or just keeping your chair warm?