The long way around: why good products deserve good marketing

South Africa has no shortage of good coffee, handsome furniture, thoughtfully made clothes or guesthouses that become part of the reason for visiting a place, yet the businesses behind these things are often expected to survive on a peculiar romantic idea: that if the product is good enough, people will eventually find it, understand it and tell enough of their friends for the enterprise to grow.

Sometimes this happens, although usually more slowly and less reliably than anyone admits. More often, good work remains closely held by the people who already know where to look for it, while the business itself depends on passing trade, returning customers and the occasional burst of attention from a social-media post that happened to land at the right moment.

This is not a small corner of the economy, nor is it a trivial problem. A South African government funding policy published in 2025, drawing on FinScope research, estimates that 2.6 million entrepreneurs operate approximately 3.2 million micro, small and medium enterprises, with more than half classified as micro-enterprises; the same policy identifies access to markets as a challenge for 32% of surveyed business owners, placing it behind access to finance but well ahead of many of the obstacles that tend to dominate conversations about entrepreneurship. (South African Government Gazette)

Statistics South Africa offers another view of the scale involved. Its 2023 Survey of Employers and the Self-Employed counted 1.9 million South Africans running businesses that were not registered for VAT, while informal-sector employment accounted for 19.5% of total employment in the final quarter of 2024; importantly for anyone working in marketing, 34.3% of the businesses surveyed said that they needed marketing support, an increase of 6.8 percentage points since 2001. (Statistics South Africa)

These figures cover a wide and uneven landscape, from survivalist enterprises to ambitious owner-led businesses with employees, premises and plans for expansion, but they point towards the same truth: South Africans are already making, trading and serving at considerable scale, while many of the businesses doing this work remain constrained by how they reach customers and enter new markets.

A coffee shop in Montagu

Consider a coffee-shop owner in Montagu, a little more than two hours from Cape Town, who roasts her own beans, keeps an eye on the books, bakes bread with the help of one of her three employees and still steps onto the floor when the café fills up at lunchtime.

The problem is not that she is unable to speak about her product; it is that most of the business’s knowledge still lives with her, and marketing has to compete with everything required to open the doors again tomorrow morning.

Realistically, she can still post on Instagram, update a story and photograph the first tray coming out of the oven, but the work is likely to happen in the gaps, which is why the typeface changes from one story to the next and three energetic posts in a week are followed by silence during a busy month. None of this makes the business unserious, because it merely reflects a sensible order of priorities: the coffee must be roasted, the bread must rise and the customer waiting at the counter must be served before anyone can think about a content calendar.

Those occasional posts may still be useful, particularly in a town where weekend visitors often decide where to eat while they are already on the road, but visibility by itself does not constitute a strategy. It can bring another table through the door on Saturday morning without answering the more consequential question of what the business could sell, to whom and through which channels once the weekend has ended.

Having digital tools is not the same as having a digital strategy

South African small businesses are not as digitally absent as the usual commentary suggests. A 2024 GSMA report found that the use of digital media among South African MSMEs had risen from 35% in 2020 to 55% in 2024, while its underlying figures showed that roughly half used internet access or social media as part of the business. (GSMA, Digital Economy in South Africa and the Role of Mobile)

The wider African picture makes the distinction clearer, because IFC research found that 86% of African firms had access to digital tools such as mobile phones and the internet, yet fewer than one in three firms that had adopted digital technologies used them intensively for business purposes. The opportunity, then, does not lie solely in putting more businesses online; it lies in helping them use digital channels with enough purpose to expand markets, connect with buyers and improve the way the business operates. (International Finance Corporation)

A social-media account is a tool, as is a website, an email list or a well-designed PDF, but a collection of tools does not decide where a business should go. Strategy begins a step earlier, with questions about the commercial future of the company, the customers it is equipped to serve and the work that must be done before those customers can buy with confidence.

For the coffee shop in Montagu, that future may include more than selling flat whites and sourdough loaves across the counter. It might involve supplying roasted beans to nearby guesthouses, preparing breakfast boxes for wedding parties, becoming a preferred supplier to conference venues or creating a recurring delivery for offices and hospitality businesses that want the quality of an independent roaster without having to travel to collect it.

Digital marketing can help those buyers discover the business, although it cannot create the opportunity on its own. Before a campaign begins, someone must shape the wholesale offer, work through prices and margins, establish minimum quantities, understand production capacity, clarify delivery areas and prepare the photographs, product information and ordering process that allow a venue manager or wedding planner to make a decision without conducting a week-long exchange of WhatsApp messages.

Only then can the website, search strategy, email campaign and social content do their proper work, not as a stream of unrelated activity but as parts of a route between the business and a new source of revenue. The aim is not simply to be seen more often; it is to become easier for the right customer to understand, trust and buy from.

The knowledge is already there

The same pattern appears in businesses far beyond coffee, although it rarely begins with an owner who has nothing interesting to say. A furniture maker can explain exactly why a particular timber was chosen, where the grain needed to run and why the construction of a table will allow it to remain in a family for decades, but online, where the maker is not standing next to the piece, much of that knowledge can disappear.

A clothing designer may understand her fabric, pattern and customer with a precision that no outside copywriter could manufacture, yet still struggle to turn that understanding into a stockist pack that answers a retailer’s practical questions. A guesthouse owner may create the sort of experience that visitors describe for years afterwards, while the website, written between check-ins, maintenance calls and breakfast service, captures only a fraction of what makes the stay memorable.

The marketing problem is therefore not a failure of taste or intelligence, because the owners of these businesses often speak about their work more persuasively than anyone else could. The difficulty lies in extracting what they know, organising it around the needs of a customer and placing it somewhere useful, so that the value of the business can travel beyond the owner’s immediate presence.

The pile behind the business

Most owner-led businesses have a pile, although it does not always sit on a desk. It might live in a browser tab left open since March, a notebook carried between the shop floor and the kitchen, or a notes app containing eleven tasks that feel too small to command a morning and too important to delete.

Inside it is the About page that still describes the business as it was in 2019, the awards entry due next month, the press release for a collaboration that has already come and gone, and the stockist document that still contains the old trade terms because the new ones were agreed during a busy week and never written down properly. Somewhere below those sits the larger idea—the wholesale range, the corporate-gifting offer, the winter campaign or the partnership with local accommodation providers—which remains an idea because nobody has had the uninterrupted time to turn it into something a customer can purchase.

None of this is evidence of laziness, because the business owner is not short of work; the problem is that making and delivering the product consumes the best hours of the day, while marketing receives what remains. The pile is simply where important work waits when urgent work keeps winning.

Over time, however, the pile becomes more than an administrative irritation, because it begins to form a barrier between the quality of the business and the opportunities available to it. A hotel cannot place a wholesale order it does not know is possible, a retailer cannot assess a range without current trade information, and an event organiser with a budget cannot choose a supplier whose capacity, lead times and delivery arrangements remain unclear.

What big-city thinking can offer a smaller place

My own perspective has been formed inside a large South African corporate environment, where marketing is expected to serve a wider commercial objective and where a campaign, at its best, has an audience, an offer, a route to market and a clear reason for existing. That experience has taught me to look beyond the next item on the content calendar and ask what the business is trying to change, whether that means entering a new market, improving the value of each customer relationship or creating demand for a different part of its offer.

This is where the idea of being a “big-city thinker, small-city lover” becomes more than a line beneath a logo. It describes a way of working that takes the strategic discipline, market awareness and ambition of a larger organisation, then translates them for businesses whose value often comes from remaining independent, local and recognisably themselves.

The point is not to make a small business perform bigness, nor to exchange its personality for a polished but anonymous brand voice. It is to help the owner recognise opportunities beyond the customers already walking through the door, decide which of those opportunities genuinely suits the business and build the marketing required to pursue them deliberately.

Marketing made with the same care

The businesses worth paying attention to have often taken the long way around, refining a recipe, learning a material, restoring a building or developing the quiet judgement that allows an owner to notice what a customer needs before being asked. Their marketing should not flatten that work into a series of interchangeable captions, but neither should respect for the craft become an excuse to leave the business undiscovered.

Good marketing begins by paying attention, which means reading the old stockist emails, studying the handwritten labels and noticing the three sentences the owner wrote two years ago that still explain the business better than anything produced since. It also means asking less romantic questions about margins, production calendars, lead times, seasonal demand and the particular customer who buys the expensive version without flinching.

From there, the work becomes tangible: the wholesale offer, the About page, the trade pack, the launch copy, the email sequence and the digital campaign constructed around the real capacity of the business rather than an imaginary one. These are not decorative additions to the product, because they are the infrastructure that helps good work move from the people who make it to the people willing to pay for it.

A good product may earn affection once it has been experienced, but marketing is what gives it directions into the world. For South Africa’s independent makers, shop owners and hospitality businesses, taking marketing seriously does not mean abandoning the long way around; it means making sure that the care invested in the product is carried all the way to the customer.

I am Loren, a big-city thinker and small-city lover who writes and develops marketing for South African makers, owners and businesses. I bring the strategic perspective of large-company marketing to independent businesses at their own scale, helping them turn what they already do well into clearer offers, wider opportunities and intentional growth.

If the pile on the corner of your desk is becoming heavy, you can get in touch through this site or subscribe to my occasional notes on cutting it down properly, where there is no spam and no demand for daily attention, only useful thinking for people making good things.

thanks for reading!