Alabukun: The Magical Powder.
Today we discuss a little bit about branding.
Sometimes I spend my day deconstructing past experiences and seeing how they affected me — observing and connecting patterns.
So this morning, I thought about how Alabukun was a major part of my childhood growing up, even though I was raised in Port Harcourt but it is not anymore. That thing worked for everything it was rumoured to work for and was a go-to drug for a lot of homes at that time. At the moment, it is still one of the very few trans-generational brands from Nigeria.
But things are changing. Did I outgrow the conversation or I moved away from areas of established distribution centers (the last time I saw the brand name was on the reflector jacket of traffic wardens)?
Did I outgrow the conversation?
First, for many of us, I think our parents made us use it, so now that we are old and out of the house, levels have changed.
They never did so much of traditional marketing but hacked distribution channels to always be available in places or areas where word of mouth ensured that people always needed them. The “chemists” were a big channel. Cos, it supposedly worked, the brand leveraged the primordial instincts of fear, survival, and pain to carve a niche in the minds of a generation that had limited access to external information.
Do you know the Alabukun powder? What changed? Do products have expiry dates? Or millennials and Gen Z do not like that model of taking drugs (mixing with water)? Have we grown mental associations that make us not want to use them anymore?
So many questions, what do you think?
- O’gbemiro.
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