I really had a blast chatting with my dear friend Kendi, who has turned local brands into powerful regional house-held names in her marketing roles for East African/Kenyan organizations such as Blue Band with Unilever, Tusker a locally brewed beer at East African Breweries, and now Safaricom, the largest telco provider, and MPESA, a mobile money wallet in Kenya with a reach of 50Mn customers.

She was also part of the team that launched Tusker Project Fame, a local reality-singing TV show that’s a local version of America’s Got Talent.

Convert Views To Money: In this episode, Kendi shares how Safaricom has built Baze, a local version of Youtube to deliver a nuanced experience for East African content creators through multi-channel distribution e.g. USSD, and web and view-based revenue models, increasing the number of views and the take-home money, creators get from their craft. 

Innovation and Growth: we also talk about how infusing the peculiar behaviours of customers into the product design spurred product innovation and growth for MPESA, Bonga Points and Baze.