BOLD INSIGHTS
Every month, a marketing team somewhere in Nairobi opens a dashboard, sees green arrows on every chart, and still cannot explain why revenue didn’t move. That’s the gap between marketing activity and marketing performance, and it’s the question every decision-maker should be asking.
For years, the industry has trained businesses to celebrate the wrong wins; reach, impressions, followers, likes. These numbers feel good in a boardroom slide, but they rarely tell you whether the business is actually growing. A campaign can “perform” brilliantly on a dashboard and still fail to move a single customer closer to a purchase.
Here’s a way to think about it, borrowed from something every Kenyan understands instinctively: the SGR.
When the Standard Gauge Railway pulls out of Nairobi Terminus, full of passengers, on schedule, engines running smoothly it looks like success. People take photos and post about the departure. But departure was never the point. The point was always arrival in Mombasa, cargo delivered, goods moved, an economy connected. A train that leaves on time but never arrives isn’t a transport system. It’s a photo opportunity.
Marketing works the same way. Impressions and likes are the departure. Revenue, retention, and referrals are the arrival. Too many businesses are celebrating the platform pulling out of the station without ever checking whether it reached its destination.
So what should decision-makers actually be watching?
At Big Bold Red, every campaign we build is measured against arrival, not departure. Because a train that never gets there was never really going anywhere.
