You are stuck in traffic on the Third Mainland Bridge. Two billboards face you. The first belongs to a bank. It shouts its name, a big percentage, and a stock photo of a man in a suit shaking hands with nobody in particular. You don’t read it. Your eyes have already moved on.
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The second is simpler: a woman who looks like someone in your family, caught mid-laugh, with one line underneath that names a worry you actually carry.
The second is simpler: a woman who looks like someone in your family, caught mid-laugh, with one line underneath that names a worry you actually carry. You don’t buy anything at that moment. But you think about it again at dinner. Same city, same week, probably similar budgets.
One of those campaigns vanished the instant you passed it. The other followed you home. The difference wasn’t the design, the agency, or the spend. One started with a number. The other started with a person. That gap is where most of our marketing money quietly disappears.
Every serious business sets objectives, and we are good at that part. Grow revenue by 40 percent. Increase transactions by a quarter. Double sign-ups before year end. The targets go on the whiteboard, they get underlined, and nobody disagrees.
That discipline matters: a business with no clear objective drifts, and drift doesn’t last here. But on its own, a clear objective is only half a strategy. It tells your team where to aim. It tells your customer nothing.
Here is the part we skip: your customer does not care about your target. The trader at Computer Village isn’t up at night thinking about your transaction volume. The mother doing a school run on a Monday morning isn’t rooting for your download numbers. They are
carrying their own problem, and they will give their money, attention, and loyalty to whoever solves it cleanly.
Your number moves as a result of solving theirs. Never the other way round. So the more useful question isn’t “What do we want to achieve?” It’s “what problem are we solving, for whom, and at what moment?” Translate the business objective into a human one, and the work suddenly has somewhere to go.
Grow card transactions help a trader pay a supplier now, not after a forty-minute queue. Selling ten thousand meal packs becomes giving a tired parent dinner they can trust, ready before the children start crying. Double sign-ups let a first-time saver start small without feeling judged for it.
The number stays the same. What you are building finally has a face. Your objective doesn’t stay on a strategy slide either. It becomes the brief, the brief becomes the campaign, and the campaign is what reaches a real person on a Tuesday afternoon.
Start from the business goal, and you get the bank billboard: loud about itself, silent about them. Start from the human one, and you get the woman who looked like family, because now the work talks to the person watching, not past her.
A human objective can be lazy too, though. “Make customers happy” isn’t an objective; it is a mood. “Serve people better” commits you to nothing. The work sharpens only when the target is a person with a name and a problem, not a demographic with a budget. You can’t out-spend the giants. You can unfocus on them. So the real test isn’t whether your objective is clear. Clear is common. It is whether a real person sees themselves in it.
Here is what you would do, whether you run the business or the brand.
Rewrite your biggest objective as a human one before anything else. Take this year’s goal and translate it. Name the person, the problem, and the moment it shows up in their day. If you can’t fill those three blanks, you don’t have a strategy yet; you have a wish.
Test your decisions against that person, not just your campaigns. A new product, a price change, an extra branch, a fresh ad: ask whether each one makes her problem smaller. If it moves your number but does nothing for her, look again before you spend.
Decide who you are for, and make peace with who you are not for. Trying to reach everyone is how you end up reaching no one. Pick the person whose problem you can solve better than anyone, then build the business around getting that right.
Adim Isiakpona is the founder of The People Company, a creative agency group operating across African markets. This is his monthly column on people, brands, and culture.
