By this time, the now shrunken in-country brand teams' and agencies' noses were well out of joint and they began reporting troubling news. What world-class gains, local relevance loses and the spectacular growth of global brands began to slow. Local product marketeers had quickly found their answer; national pride. They employed local spoken and visual languages, local humour and local lore. Where they couldn't compete in production values, they competed in entertainment value and relevance. In South Africa, people went around saying, "local is lekker", meaning local is cool. The global brands, in attempting to mean so much to so many, had developed pan-regional campaigns that blanded out the communications. Research companies, Nielson, Milward Brown and Research International were quickly deployed to understand the the thoughts and ideals of the consumers on the ground and an antidote was developed. Marketing budgets flowed back to local brand teams, new, more flexible brand guideline manuals were produced and distributed and local advertising agencies sprang to life with a new buzz word: global-local.

Stephan Jennings