The shop had a small second-hand furniture section, and we’d deliver to the town as well as the informal settlement ourselves – I’d normally go along for payment in Toff-o-Luxe and Coke, but I also got to meet all and understand our customers as well as their friends and family; this all at the height of apartheid.
Grounding in Reality
That grounding – understanding that when someone came into the shop and asked ‘Ndifuna iCadbury’, they specifically meant they wanted to buy a Cadbury Chocolate Eclair – became the essence of Boomtown. Quantitative research is helpful when you’re putting together a brand strategy, but a genuine qualitative understanding of where a brand’s consumers are, is invaluable.
When we started working on heritage brands like Ricoffy and Rajah Spices for the mass market, our team took the lead in going into informal settlements and having conversations about daily life and the sentiments as well as emotions the brands we were working with evoked in them. Armed with that information and the detail from the client about the brand offering – and connecting the two – is how we’ve sustained and rebuilt some iconic FMCG brands in the last two decades.
You Still Have To Sell
Ultimately, building a brand is great – but the end point isn’t brand recognition, it’s sales. You can leverage Cremora’s “It’s not inside, it’s on top” all you like, but you still have to get consumers to put the box in their basket.
Because of the economic challenges we’re all facing, brands have had to look at different ways of connecting with consumers to communicate changes of all sorts. Having to explain to someone why they’re paying double the price for the same product they were buying three years ago is tough, so we have to use that immersive understanding to speak to them about value and work on the emotional benefits.
Some brands push their functional benefits, some focus on adding value and at the end of the day, we have to help build the consumer path to purchase from awareness, by building theatre around the brands that lands messaging with consumers and improves our clients’ brand’s chances at the point of sale.
New Conversations, New Ways
With the world changing and offering us new ways to have conversations with consumers, we’ve developed a separate business by the name of ‘Verbata Chat’, which gives us the opportunity to establish a conversational loop with consumers via WhatsApp. Here we can ask about their relationship with a brand, talk about what they love and what they don’t as well as test messaging with them before rolling it out. Because the loop is continuous and they feel they can talk about the brand whenever they like, it’s establishing a new kind of brand/customer relationship.
In essence, it’s still the observation and conversation behind the counter of the General Store that piqued my interest in FMCG – because it’s the relationship with the people who use the brand, that matters.
Consumers aren’t generic profiles in a brand presentation – they’re real people.
Glen Meier, Chief Executive Officer at Boomtown
November, 2025
I learned about the importance of genuinely immersing myself in the world of consumers when I worked at my dad’s general dealer store near the train station in King Williams Town (now Qonce) in the 1980’s. I’d watch it all from behind the counter – what people looked for, how people shopped, how they spoke about products – and learn.