Stop Fighting Culture, Design Around It

Sometime back, on one of our Masterclass sessions, a young business owner — she sells ladies’ accessories, jewellery, scarves, etc. raised her hand with a problem that sounded small but wasn’t.

She had done everything “right.” Her business had outgrown WhatsApp. Orders were getting mismatched, complaints were piling up, her team couldn’t keep track of who wanted what. So, she did what every consultant, every growth guru, every LinkedIn post tells you to do: she built a proper website. Clean categories. Full catalogue. Price ranges from the high end to the low end. Everything a customer could possibly need to make a decision without typing a single message.

And her customers ignored it. They kept sending “send me your catalogue” on WhatsApp. A hundred people, on a good day, all asking the same question she had already answered — beautifully, she thought — on a website she had spent money and time to build.

Her frustration was honest: “How is my salesperson supposed to handle a hundred people asking for a catalogue on WhatsApp, one message at a time?”

I understood the frustration. But I also had to tell her something that a lot of business owners don’t want to hear: the problem was not her customers. The problem was that she had built the solution she wanted, not the one her customers were already living inside of.

The mistake we keep making

Here’s the pattern I see over and over, across industries, across the businesses represented in that room that morning — advertising, insurance, pharmacy, social media, jewellery, printing: we build something efficient for us, and then we try to train the customer to use it.

We say things like “they need to get with the times,” or “once they see how easy it is, they’ll switch,” or my personal favourite, “we just need to educate the market.”

I’ve said it myself, honestly, at different points in my own work. But here is the truth I’ve had to sit with: you don’t get to decide what’s convenient for your customer. Your customer already decided. They decided a long time ago, shaped by culture, by habit, by trust, by what’s simply become their lifestyle. Your job is not to fight that decision. Your job is to design around it.

This isn’t just a feeling I have from years of consulting. The numbers back it up. Recent industry data puts Ghana among the most “WhatsApp-first” markets in the world, with over 90% of internet users on the platform daily — right up there with Nigeria and South Africa. And it isn’t just a place people chat; it’s fast becoming where they buy. Businesses that sell through WhatsApp are seeing conversion rates in the region of 18–25%, roughly three times what the same business would typically get from an email campaign sitting around 6–7%. That gap is not a coincidence. It’s customers telling you, with their wallets, which channel they actually trust enough to act on.

Think about it. The average Ghanaian — and honestly the average person across much of this continent — has grown comfortable buying mobile data with a short code. Star-one-double-oh, star-one-seven-zero, whatever the network. Quick, no app needed, done in ten seconds, back to WhatsApp. Meanwhile, telecom companies have spent real money building apps, dangling bonuses and extra gigabytes to pull people onto them. And still, a huge number of people default to the short code. Why? Because it’s already muscle memory. It’s already lifestyle. It’s already trust.

You can be the smartest brand strategist in the room and still lose to muscle memory. This is measurable, by the way, not just anecdotal — even now, with smartphone apps everywhere, USSD-based transactions still make up more than half of all mobile money activity in Ghana by payment mode. Telecoms and fintechs have poured money into app experiences, and the short code habit still refuses to budge. That tells you everything about how slowly deeply-rooted convenience habits change, and how foolish it is to build your customer strategy around the assumption that they’ll change quickly for you.

WhatsApp isn’t a phase. For most of your market, it’s home.

I said something in that session that I want to repeat here, because I believe it deeply: the average local customer is comfortable with WhatsApp. Only a small segment — the more tech-savvy, the ones already living an e-commerce lifestyle — will naturally gravitate to a website and fill out a form without being pushed. The rest of your market isn’t behind. They’re not “not there yet” in some deficient sense. They simply live somewhere else, digitally, and that somewhere else works fine for them.

So, when a customer sends you “send me your catalogue” for the fortieth time that week instead of clicking the link you worked so hard to build, that’s not resistance to progress. That’s information. That’s your customer telling you, in the clearest way they know how, where they actually live.

The businesses that grow fastest in our market are not always the ones with the most sophisticated systems. They’re the ones who stopped resenting where the customer already is and started building competence there instead. That doesn’t mean throw the website away. It means understand what each channel is actually for.

Train your team before you train your customer

My advice to her, and to anyone in that position, was simple: don’t try to compel your customer to the website right now. Train your team to handle WhatsApp orders well. Get good at the channel your customer has already chosen, and you will out-perform the competitor who is still trying to force people onto a form.

One of the participants, who runs a social media agency, pushed back on this in a useful way — and I want to give him credit, because the pushback sharpened the point. He said something like this: it isn’t that customers are difficult, they are “special” — meaning specific, meaning they respond differently depending on who is handling the conversation. He’d seen conversions on WhatsApp drop, not because the customer changed, but because the business owner, who used to personally reply to every DM, no longer had the time and had handed the phone to a junior staff member who didn’t know how to convert a “how much” into a sale.

That’s the real cost most business owners underestimate. WhatsApp looks free. It is not. It costs you in time, in the skill required to hold a conversion-worthy conversation, in the discipline to reply fast, in training someone else to sound like you when you can no longer be the one replying. A badly staffed WhatsApp line is not more convenient than a well-designed website — it’s just differently expensive.

Which brings me to the number every business owner in that room needed to hear, and needs to hear again here: calculate your true cost of acquisition, channel by channel.

If it takes twenty minutes of staff time to convert a hundred WhatsApp enquiries a day, and your margin per sale is five cedis, do the math honestly. What does that twenty minutes cost you in salary, in opportunity, in the sales you lost because you were busy typing instead of closing? Compare that to what an automated catalogue bot might cost you monthly, or what a well-built website converts without a single reply typed. There is no universally correct channel. There is only the channel that makes sense once you’ve actually done the arithmetic instead of guessing.

Meet the halfway point, don’t demand the whole distance

This is where I’d add the nuance that came up later in that same conversation. Someone made a smart observation — bridge the two worlds instead of treating them as competitors. If your website already displays the product beautifully, add a button that takes the customer straight from the product page into a WhatsApp chat, pre-loaded with what they were just looking at. Now the website is doing the work of organizing your catalogue, and WhatsApp is doing the work of closing — each channel doing what it’s naturally good at, instead of fighting each other for the customer’s full attention.

That’s design around culture, not resistance to it. I’ve also learned, from years of consulting across different businesses, that not every customer deserves the same channel investment. One of the participants in the room — a professional who works with clients across several countries — shared something that stuck with me. He had one client who insisted on documentation by email, no matter how many phone calls preceded it. He had another whose whole relationship was built on being personally called, never emailed, never handed off to a junior. Two completely different expectations, same underlying need: to feel like the way they prefer to be handled is being respected, not corrected.

He didn’t try to convert either of them to his preferred workflow. He built himself around theirs. And that’s exactly why he has kept those relationships for years.

The same logic applies whether you’re running a two-person accessories business or a multinational contract. Segment your customers by what they’re actually worth to you, and by what they actually need from you, and then decide where the investment goes. The client who represents real, recurring revenue is worth building a custom process around. The customer sending a single “how much” message a month on a low-margin item may simply need a well-designed, self-service catalogue and nothing more from you personally. Both are legitimate. Confusing which is which is where businesses bleed money and burn out their teams trying to be everything to everyone.

The lesson underneath the lesson

If there’s one thing, I want business owners to take from all of this, it’s this: don’t spend your energy trying to change your customer’s behaviour. Spend it understanding your customer’s behaviour so precisely that your business becomes the path of least resistance for them.

Culture is not an obstacle standing between your business and efficiency. Culture is the terrain. You don’t flatten terrain to suit your map. You redraw your map to match the terrain, and then you build the roads that make sense on it.

The businesses that will win the next decade on this continent will not be the ones with the most advanced technology stack. They will be the ones who understood, deeply and without ego, exactly how their people already prefer to be reached, to be sold to, to be served — and who had the humility to build around that instead of demanding the market catch up to them.

Your website isn’t wrong. Your app isn’t wrong. But if your customer keeps sending you “send me your catalogue” on WhatsApp, that is not a training problem on their side. It’s a design opportunity on yours.

Remember, I am your Branding and Publishing Consultant.

The best is yours.

Bernard Kelvin Clive