I always speak about the Holy Trinity of marketing, which is pretty much digital, PR and activation. You require those three elements to work in unison in order to maximize your opportunities.

It's the three C's. You need remarkable content. You need to be able to plug it in to a relevant community, whether it's part of your existing target market or it's a larger base of individuals. When you marry these two together, that's when you have the ability to really impact at a commercial or sales level or download level or click-through level, depending on what your business objectives are.

When it comes to growth hacks, we've had some recent success with MatchKit where we partnered with a surfing brand from Durban called Pollywog. We basically acted as the technology partner for them to find a new brand ambassador. The campaign is still ongoing, but that basically allowed us to grow our platform by about 30%, just from the surfers that were signing up. 

For me, the thing that defines an influential brand is a brand that's really taken the opportunity to understand what its tone of voice is. It might sound incredibly rudimentary and very simplified, but so few brands actually come across as having a personality. Those that do have taken years - or decades even - to define what that sounds like.

Influence is such a blanket term - and when you think about it, what is influence? Influence is when you are posting something and there are members within your community that are willing to allow your post to impact their behavior or change their behaviour based on your recommendation or your suggestion on your social channels.

Over the years, we've always had great support from BrandsEye (today DataEQ) because of the way in which they allow you to monitor - it's like Google Alerts on steroids and, also, their local support office is definitely a great help on that front. We leverage tools like Socialbakers as well.  Generally when it comes to the native apps for the specific social networks, those generally provide a lot of great cover when you're just needing to be updated.

Biogen made a decision about two and a half years ago that they wanted to be the most authentic health and wellness brand in our market. It was a Dischem house brand - so it had great distribution model and great distribution channel. However, there was something lacking from a humanity perspective to really drive the emotional connection between the brand and the target market.

We said to the brand, “You know, there're so many brands out there, so many competitors out there leveraging these perfect bodies, men, women, black, white, different backgrounds, they're telling this perfect sculpted human body story. And so many of these individuals, they are paid to be part of these campaigns. So you don't necessarily know if they actually love the products that they're promoting or if they're just doing it for the payday.” So we said, “Why don't we create the antithesis of an influencer marketing campaign? Why don't we create an unfluencer marketing campaign?”

It’s crucial that your business is aware of the threat posed by the proliferation of messaging on social media - both negative and positive. Once again, it's a speed thing, if you can act swiftly and with authenticity and integrity, you're more likely to be protected by your brand fans and your real hardcore champions who are going to generate 80% of your positivity.

When it comes to startup mentality, we always like to ask, how can you leverage your most important fans or champions from day one? Generally a lot of those people just exist within our Facebook realm or within our Instagram followings. Those people could be friends and family. They could be your nearest and dearest, but leveraging your true fans is a really great way to start your startup ambitions.

We've always worked particularly well with challenger brands. We are challengers in essence, in our own DNA, and that challenger-status resonates. We generally tend to work better with number two, number three, number four brands in market, because we are willing to push boundaries. We don't necessarily have the biggest budgets in the market - and so we have to be smarter with our approach.