Max Alexander

by No City: An African Adventure Bright Lights

  “I’m not surprised,” said Whit. “Isidor Buchmann, the battery expert, told me that all carbon-zinc batteries will leak if you run them all the way down, which is what people do here. It’s the nature of the chemistry. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a question of when.”

  “So Burro can definitely own the phrase Doesn’t Leak,” Jennia continued. “Another negative feature of Tiger Head was the child-safety issue. Several customers told us they had seen children putting discarded batteries into their mouths. One subject told us how a child she knows had sucked on a battery and was taken to the hospital. Because Burro batteries are not thrown away, and possibly also because they don’t leak, Burro is perceived as safer for children.

  “But Tiger Head also has many positive perceptions,” she went on. “The first is huge familiarity; people seem to trust the brand, despite the leaks. And many customers perceive them as lasting longer or being more powerful than Burro.”

  “And as we know from our tests,” said Whit, “Tiger Head is slightly more powerful at first, and it does last longer, albeit at very low output levels.”

  “Because of that,” said Jennia, “we think Burro can’t really own the phrase More Power, because it isn’t always more powerful, depending on the device. It’s also a bit vague: does it mean Lasts Longer or is it Brighter-slash-Louder?

  “In addition, the phrase Do More did not elicit any response. In all of our interviews, the idea of doing more never came up. It made me wonder if that is a Ghanaian value, at least expressed in that way.

  “However, we did identify a phrase that we believe Burro can own: Stays Strong. People liked the fact that Burro batteries are not constantly getting weaker and weaker like Tiger Heads.”

  “I love Stays Strong,” said Whit.* “As far as Do More goes, it’s important to keep in mind that we are delivering productivity enhancements. Every Burro product has to either enhance income earning potential, or substitute for something else they already spend money on. So we need to get people excited about doing more. It may not be a pithy tagline to sell batteries, but in terms of overall brand positioning, I don’t see us backing away from that. However, we do need to figure out how to make money from the battery offering. The throwaway battery market in Ghana alone is fifty million dollars. And beyond that is the low-hanging fruit of devices like lanterns and phone chargers that showcase our batteries. Near term, that’s where we’re headed.”

  A few days later, I sat in on a meeting Whit called with Andrew to discuss his own project, which involved some follow-up on ideas raised by Tara and Jennia. Andrew said he wanted to pick four villages and see if he could raise the reseller exchange rate with Nkansah.

  “I’m for this,” said Whit, “but I’d go bigger. Let’s identify one or two zones we want to test in. Then you can work with Rose and Nkansah and try to speed those interventions with multiple resellers. That would have a multiplier effect, and it will help us test this idea of zoning and the division manager organization.”

  “So you mean we should be training zone managers?”

  “Yes, picking people who have at least five resellers under them, making sure they’re selling effectively, identifying new territory effectively. Rose is already working on that, and you could jump in. So you guys train the trainer. Then you’ve really made an impact.”

  The next day they met again, with Rose. After reading a lengthy written plan that Andrew had drawn up, Whit said, “You’ve gotta keep it real simple. Remember there’s not a big tradition of reading here; it’s all about oral interaction. There are cognitive studies showing that humans can process like five plus-or-minus two concepts at a time. I think we should err on the lower side. Keep these training materials to chunks of three or four things with at most three or four layers under them. It’s gotta be really crisp, something they can completely memorize in one setting. Distill it into brief, bulleted stuff—three things you need to do this job; under each of those, three or four things you need to do for each point; under those, three or four things you need to do to achieve those goals. It’s gotta be that simple.”

  7. A Weird Nexus

  Meanwhile, Justin was organizing a business plan that would help Whit present Burro to potential investors. He was a bit older than the other interns—he had a wife and baby daughter back in Utah—and came with real-world experience executing business valuations. He met with Whit one afternoon to talk about the plan. “What’s the exit strategy for an investor?” Justin asked. “Would they take dividends? How much of the company would they get for a million dollars?” He was asking the right questions.

  “Well,” said Whit, “I’ve got a quarter million of my own in this company, so I’ve got some skin in the game; I wouldn’t give up control of the company. But I’m also comfortable putting more of my own money in if revenue continues to grow. My financial guys would say I’m out of my mind, but if things look good I’m willing to roll some pretty big dice. As for exit strategies, I know dividends are less attractive to investors than going public, or a strategic acquisition. Maybe I have people invest in starting a branch, and they get convertible three-year notes.”

  “If Burro were acquired, do you have any companies in mind?” Justin wondered.

  Whit shrugged. “I could see P&G, Unilever—some monster consumer goods company. Or I could see a major Chinese manufacturer being a strategic investor, but they’re so shitty at brands. For me, I’d want someone who understands the value of the brand.”

  Justin asked how Burro would use venture capital.

  “Well, first, we’d beef up our training and marketing materials, deepen the team more quickly, show that we can spool on growth more rapidly, and of course move towards a first trial of replicability with a second branch,” said Whit. “We’d also invest against medium-term technology to better support growth—especially a low-budget IT solution that integrates all our current operational needs more robustly than the Fodder program Jan and I hacked together in Access. We probably need a more industrial-strength charging capability as we scale up. It might also make sense to invest in a proprietary battery design that could get costs per cycle way down, provide better performance for clients, and protect much better against fraudulent charging. More product development definitely makes sense. People want better entertainment and information solutions, better communication solutions, more versatile lighting solutions, maybe even battery-operated tools. Expanding the line of efficient, battery-powered appliances makes sense so long as we stay focused on things true to the brand—creating new income capabilities or displacing existing expenditure. We need to demonstrate that we’re building assets far more valuable than a battery store. Hell, who knows, maybe I’d even pay myself a salary.”

  Justin asked if Whit would be interested in smaller stakeholders who are as passionate about the company mission as making a buck.

  “I’ve definitely thought about it,” said Whit. “We’re operating in a weird nexus of social enterprise and creative capitalism where the reality is, even if you’re just barely sustainable, you could probably get people to underwrite and subsidize and help roll out additional branches. I’m not terribly interested in that, but I wouldn’t rule out keeping the baby alive that way. It would mean getting donor support of some sort to play the role of a central corporate structure that manages the whole thing and rolls out new branches. So the branches stand alone and are sustainable, but there’s not enough fat in the system to make it scalable. You’d have somebody who’s driving the opening of new branches and who is advising and training new branch teams; they would need donor assistance at their level, but they’d be creating viable and sustainable small businesses on the local level that deliver energy and increased efficiency to poor communities. I personally would see that as a failure, but many people involved in social capitalism are aiming for exactly that. In other words, you could design a template that puts donor money to work on a rollout that could be a screaming economic success, or barely sustainable.

/>   “So yeah, I could see angel donors where you say, look, for fifty or a hundred thousand you can provide power to these rural villages. We’ll manage the whole rollout and operation for you, we’ll keep you posted on agents and clients, and you’re gonna feel real good about it while earning some modest return on your investment. I mean, I think it’s pretty impressive what we’re doing here. We’ve got close to a hundred semiliterate agents out there, selling batteries to hundreds of customers, advising them, counseling them, getting information on them, building a business model that has never been tried before in this country or continent. And people are saving money on batteries and doing more for their money.”

  Outside, as if on cue, a cheer erupted across Koforidua and floated up over the streets and into our windows like smoke from the charcoal braziers of the snack sellers. But they weren’t cheering Burro; the Ghana Black Stars soccer team had just scored a goal in a lead-up match to the World Cup.

  Whit continued. “I think right now we’ve got a pitch that a lot of donors or socially minded investors would love. But we’re driving instead to demonstrate truly attractive unit economics—you know, like a branch spinning off fifty or seventy-five thousand dollars a year in after-tax profits. That would be huge. Then it’s like the McDonald’s model. But you can’t franchise something that loses money; you’ll just lose money faster. So we have to demonstrate that running a branch is a good business. Then maybe, if we go for outside money, you can sell branches to investors for a hundred or two hundred thousand dollars once you prove that within a year or two you can get them spinning off substantial nets. That’s going to be attractive to a lot more people, real investors. Like me.”

  8. They Like the Sound

  Burro also had a Ghanaian intern—another recent graduate of Ashesi University, named Priscilla Osman, who had been a classmate of Rose’s. Priscilla—quiet, very dark, with a wide face and high cheekbones—was from Bole, a town in the country’s dry and sparsely populated northwest. She was a member of the Gonja tribe, of whom there are about a quarter million people. Their language (also called Gonja) is a subset of the Guang linguistic group; many people in her remote region don’t even speak Twi, let alone English, but Priscilla was fluent in both. She told me she learned English by listening to the Ghana News radio broadcasts as a child. “Many Gonja do not speak English, but they listen to the news anyway,” she said, “because they like the sound.”

  Rose and Priscilla were teamed up writing scripts for a Burro pitch that could be played over the loudspeakers on the truck—the pitch Whit was hoping to have created by MMRS Ogilvy in Accra. Despite many email follow-ups, Whit had been unable to get any commitment from the global agency, and he couldn’t wait any longer. Burro was a do-it-yourself operation, and Whit was not exactly a marketing neophyte; he and Richard Tait hadn’t waited for permission from any multinational corporations to start Cranium, and he wasn’t going to wait now. Besides, Adam’s brother knew a small recording studio in New Tafo, a town about an hour north of Koforidua, that said it could handle the physical production. The cost would be only a few hundred cedis; it was worth a try.

  The plan was to create two pitches—a short, thirty-second teaser that could be played from a moving vehicle, and a more detailed one-and-a-half-minute pitch for stationary events like gong-gongs. “Make them like testimonials,” Whit told Rose and Priscilla, “so we hear other voices, not just the narrator.”

  After lunch, Whit asked me to help review the drafts that Rose and Priscilla had put together. Since the actual recordings would be done in Twi, Ewe, and Krobo—the three languages commonly spoken around Koforidua—the English-language versions were really just for the benefit of Whit and me, a common base to work from.

  I read the first draft. The opening line was: Attention all battery users, Burro batteries have broken barriers and status quo! To my ear that sounded a tad wooden, but I had to remember that the advertising culture in Ghana, while pervasive, was untainted by the jaded irony that characterizes current Western salesmanship. In Ghana there were no TV commercials with wise-guy babies pitching brokerages, no cavemen selling car insurance. Billboards and TV commercials—we did occasionally watch TV in restaurants—generally featured smiling, happy people embracing the object of their desire—a naïve enthusiasm that, for me, evoked a lost world of postwar optimism. “You are too known,” Africans would often say to us—a polite Ghanaian way of calling us uptight honkies—and when it came to advertising, they were dead right.

  So I read on: Thanks to Burro, no longer will we pay more for expensive, leaky and fast-failing batteries.

  “Doesn’t that imply that now we will pay less for expensive, leaky, and fast-failing batteries?” I asked.

  “I see what you mean,” said Priscilla. She changed it to read: Thanks to Burro, no longer will we buy expensive, leaky, and fast-failing batteries.

  We read on, and Whit weighed in: “This is really close and very strong, but I would just jump right into the Burro battery is better, somehow. I don’t know the word in Twi, but Priscilla, I would just encourage you to take the first two sentences and make the point very explicit and as crisply and quickly as possible. You mention how other batteries expose your children and the environment to danger, but I wonder if for the short version we should just focus on the no-leak guarantee. So I guess where I’m headed is, what’s our overall positioning and what are the three things behind it? I just want to hammer those three points as quickly as possible. So the overall message is it’s a better battery. Then the three things are the no-leak guarantee, stays strong, and more value for less money. I don’t know the tightest and most impactful way to get at more affordable in Twi—you guys need to tell me—but that’s the kicker. So it’s a better battery, no-leak guarantee, stays strong, and—you’re not gonna believe this—but it costs less.”

  “Should I add something about how you get the batteries?” Priscilla asked.

  “Good question,” said Whit. “I don’t think in the short pitch. This is definitely a case where less is more. I wouldn’t even mention the coupons. But certainly in the longer one.”

  To make sure we could better understand what the actual African scripts were saying, Whit asked Rose and Priscilla to translate the final revisions into Twi and then “reverse translate” them back into English from Twi. It was sort of like a game of telegraph, but it worked. After a few more revisions, here was the final script:

  MAN’S VOICE:

  Attention all battery users, there is a new battery in town called Burro! Burro batteries do not leak, stay strong, and the best part is that they cost less.

  WOMAN’S VOICE:

  Thanks to Burro, I will no longer buy leaky batteries that do not stay strong and cost more!

  MAN’S VOICE:

  Try Burro too, and you will testify to it. Burro! Do More!

  As artificial as the dialog sounded to us, we had to remember that a lot was getting lost, or garbled, in the translation from an African tongue that has no etymological correlation to Western words and phrases. And Rose and Priscilla were not professional translators. So it was natural that the English version of their script (which no one would ever hear) sounded a bit like something from Google Translate. Rose promised that the Twi version sounded completely natural, and there was no reason to doubt her. Nkansah translated both the short and long pitch into Krobo (from Twi), and Adam handled the Ewe versions. Priscilla and Rose drove up to the studio in New Tafo to start work on the rough cuts. The next day, Whit, Priscilla, and I went up to watch some of the voice-overs be recorded.

  Quayem Productions was located in a nondescript stuccoed hut no larger than a standard garden shed. We pulled into the dirt yard under an oil palm tree and were greeted by the owner, an easygoing young man whose name, Stocky, adequately described his athletic build. Sitting around a wooden table outside the studio were several other young men, all of them appearing to be weight lifters, who would be performing the voice-overs in the various language
s. For now they were handfeeding small chunks of dried fish to a ravenous kitten no wider than one of their wrists. Stocky explained that he and his colleagues had a rap act called DNA. “It’s short for Drugs ’n’ Alcohol,” he explained matter-of-factly, although I couldn’t picture any of those guys taking drugs, except maybe steroids.

  The studio itself had barely enough room for a battered wooden desk covered with computer equipment, a small electronic keyboard, and a couple of plastic chairs. The walls were draped in woven sisal fabric to deaden the sound of car horns outside. A bare compact fluorescent lightbulb hung above. In one corner was a phone booth–sized recording chamber with a stool and a microphone. Stocky sat down at his desk as several of us squeezed into the room. Then the light blinked out: power failure. We moaned and filed back outside. Whit called the office and reached one of the interns. Power was out in Koforidua too. This could be a while.

  We sat around the picnic table and watched Jah, a tall member of DNA who would perform the male Twi voice-over, feed the kitten more dried fish while we talked. Stocky, it turned out, was an ambitious young man. Besides his Accra-based band and his recording studio in New Tafo (where he grew up and still had family), he was also studying supply chain management at Koforidua Polytech, where he had met Adam’s brother, a fellow student. Before deciding to pursue college, Stocky had spent three years in Guangzhou, China, exporting clothing and footwear for the Ghanaian market. It was not an experience he held fondly. “The Chinese are racist,” he said. “They spit on the sidewalk when a black man walks by.”

  “Are you serious?” I asked.

  “I am serious. Especially African blacks. They always thought I was American because I’m big, so they didn’t hate me as much.”