By Laila Bastati, Chief Commercial Officer, APO Group.
I have yet to meet a CEO who missed a revenue target and blamed a 3% decrease in share of voice.
And yet communication is almost always somewhere in the room when revenue disappoints. Just never on the list.
Because the most expensive communication failures don’t appear in communications dashboards.
They appear later. In a regulatory process that takes twice as long as expected. In a partner who goes quiet after an announcement. In a market that understood the decision perfectly and still didn’t move. In a deal that stalled for reasons nobody could articulate cleanly.
You know the room I mean. Sales blames the market. Finance blames the timing. Operations blames the execution. Everyone has a theory. Nobody calls the communications director.
I’ve watched this happen across more markets than I can count. And the pattern is consistent enough that I’m going to say something that will make some of my peers uncomfortable.
Most of the time, communication shaped the outcome. Not the press releases. Not the coverage. The stuff that never got commissioned because nobody knew how to measure it. The regulatory relationship that wasn’t built before it was needed. The stakeholder ground that was never prepared before the announcement landed. The trust that was never established before the market was asked to move.
Kenya’s Finance Bill didn’t fail because people didn’t know about it. Everyone knew. It failed because explanation never travelled as far as interpretation. Nigeria’s fuel subsidy removal wasn’t a visibility problem. It was a confidence problem. People understood what was happening. They didn’t trust that the consequences had been thought through on their behalf. And large infrastructure stories, including the Dangote Refinery, do not stall because of lack of attention. They stall when competing interpretations fill the space that should have been occupied by trust.
Awareness is rarely the scarce resource. Confidence is.
Walmart learned this in South Africa. Clean acquisition. No competition concerns. Years in court anyway, fighting unions and government ministries and community groups who felt the company had arrived without earning its place. The friction wasn’t about the deal. It was about everything that hadn’t been done before the deal was announced. The communications metrics, had anyone been tracking them, would have looked fine. The business felt the cost for years.
This is what we see at APO Group, working across all 54 African markets simultaneously. The companies that move fastest are never the ones generating the most coverage. They’re the ones where communication was already doing its real work before anyone in the commercial team needed it to. Trust already built. Regulators already informed. Executives already visible in the right places. Narrative already set. The groundwork already there.
That work is rarely reactive. It’s a different brief. Earlier. Broader. Closer to where decisions actually get made: preparing spokespeople to be credible under scrutiny, ensuring leadership voices are present in the media environments that will shape opinion, and building regulator and stakeholder relationships long before they are required in moments of pressure.
Because here’s what nobody says out loud when the post-mortem starts. Revenue misses get examined in forensic detail. Pricing. Product. Timing. Execution.
Communication is not missing from the analysis.
It is miscategorised as everything else.
Africa Fact: Many old West African families have private library collections that go back hundreds of years. The Mauritanian cities of Chinguetti and Oudane have a total of 3,450 hand written mediaeval books. There may be another 6,000 books still surviving in the other city of Walata. Some date back to the 8th century AD. There are 11,000 books in private collections in Niger. Finally, in Timbuktu, Mali, there are about 700,000 surviving books.
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Boerewors — spicy South African sausage [boor-uh-vors] Meaning ‘farmer’s sausage’, this term describes a savory sausage that was developed by the Afrikaners approximately 200 years ago. Boerewors is usually ‘braaied’ and eaten on a hot dog roll with tomato sauce and mustard. Make sure you roll the ‘r’ when pronouncing this word.
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