Wake Up! Shake Up!

Wake Up! Shake Up! represents over a year of quantitative and qualitative research and integrates the expert analysis of 70 of South Africa’s leading economists, academics, financial analysts, industry specialists, as well as business and marketing forecasters.

Socio-economic forces, mostly related to the aftermath of the recession, have resulted in seismic shifts in the local marketplace. A new study by the UCT Unilever Institute of Strategic Marketing, entitled Wake Up! Shake Up!, shows that marketers will have to rethink their tried and tested strategies if they want to stay ahead of the game.

In the project, the analogy of a tsunami was used in the sense that the causes of the global recession happened far from our shores, but gathered momentum before hitting South Africa. Just as it happens in natural disasters of this sort, those on the lower ground were hit very hard, while those higher up were hardly impacted at all.

Similarly with the recession – those towards the upper end of the socio-economic spectrum rode out the downturn largely unscathed, whilst others who were lower down on that spectrum were hit very hard and are still dealing with the ensuing fallout – such as debt repayment and job losses.

This project explores the whole South African marketplace from the low end right to the upper middle class. It looks at how the South African consumer has fared since 1994 and, more recently, after the recession. In the process it became clear that the marketplace has now changed significantly, and perhaps irrevocably so, over the last 15 years.