Cultural intelligence, according to mystiQ

One Friday, in a neighbourhood shop, a shopkeeper opens his till, counts a few notes and slips them into his pocket. Tonight is the tontine. Next week, when sales have picked up, he will put the money back in the till. Nobody has stolen anything. Everyone around him understands the gesture.

I often tell the story of an app designed to help shopkeepers keep track of their cash. The product was good. It was not adopted. The app made the Friday gesture complicated, and the figures visible. It did not speak the language of its market.

This app was not a mystiQ project. It is an example. But it sums up our craft better than any brochure.

A scholarly term, a simple idea

The term comes from management research. In 2003, P. Christopher Earley and Soon Ang published Cultural Intelligence with Stanford University Press. They wanted to understand why some people adapt to a new culture, and others never do. In 2007, Soon Ang, Linn Van Dyne and their co-authors measured cultural intelligence across four dimensions: being aware of your own assumptions, knowing the other person’s codes, wanting to learn, and knowing how to adjust your words, your tone, your gestures.

The concept was created for people: managers, expatriates, teams. We apply it to something else, and we say so plainly: to the way a brand learns its audiences. A brand finds itself in the expatriate’s position every time it speaks to people whose codes it does not share. Even in its own country.

In the Harvard Business Review, in 2004, Earley and Elaine Mosakowski pointed out a paradox: doing well in your own culture does not prepare you to understand other people’s, and can even get in the way. I take that as meant for us. Being from Douala is not enough. An audience in the North, the elders of a neighbourhood, a generation that speaks Camfranglais: each has its own language. We learn it every time.

What research says about the Friday tontine

Back to the shop. The tontine is not a curiosity. In 2021, according to the BEAC, 32% of Cameroonian adults saved through a tontine, a savings group or informally, compared with 21% in a financial institution or a mobile money account. It is a mass practice.

Visible figures are not a technical detail either. Three economists, Jean-Marie Baland, Catherine Guirkinger and Charlotte Mali, studied savings and credit cooperatives in Cameroon. Some members borrowed there, and paid interest, even though their own savings already covered the loan. Why? So that their relatives would believe they had no savings, and to escape demands for solidarity.

Money that is seen is money that is asked for.

An app that puts the till on display interferes with this discretion. The app does not know it. Its users do. One caution all the same: the research sheds light on our example, it does not explain it. We know nothing more about this app than what the story tells.

The tools that serve the ritual, on the other hand, are adopted. In the Grassfields, Francis Nyamnjoh and Divine Fuh spent a year observing how mobile money complements njangi groups without betraying their principles, and even makes exchanges safer. Since 2016, a Cameroonian app, Djangui, has taken over the tontine’s rotation. And in an AFP report in 2024, a tontine member, Emmanuel Talla, said what matters most: “the contact goes beyond the money”.

You do not fight a ritual. You serve it.

Same product, different people

M-Pesa, in Kenya, is the most cited demonstration. Launched in 2007, Safaricom’s service was sold in three words: send money home. It did not invent a need. It took a gesture that already existed, the money city workers send to the family back in the village, and made it simple. In 2016, in the journal Science, Tavneet Suri and William Jack published the results of several years of follow-up: access to M-Pesa lifted 194,000 Kenyan households out of extreme poverty, or 2% of the country’s households.

The same service closed in South Africa on 30 June 2016. Vodacom explained it plainly: it needed a critical mass of users, out of reach in a country where access to financial services is already high. Same product. Different people.

Advertising follows the same rule. In 2014, Guinness launched “Made of Black” in Africa: a contemporary, creative Africa, with radio versions in each country’s languages and ways of speaking. In 2017, Nivea took an advert for a body lotion promising visibly lighter skin all the way to Cameroon. In Ghana, the campaign sparked calls for a boycott. The first spoke to people in their own codes. The second brought them a norm from somewhere else.

In Cameroon, near enough is not good enough

Here, the choice of a language is never neutral. French and English have been official languages of equal status since the 1996 Constitution. The country has more than 240 national languages according to the Presidency of the Republic, around 275 according to Ethnologue. In Douala’s markets, three languages dominate: French as it is spoken here, Pidgin, and Camfranglais, which is gaining ground among young people.

And Camfranglais moves fast. In 2010, the sociolinguist Laurain Assipolo told AFP that today’s Camfranglais would no longer be the same in two or three months. A word that is right in January can date a campaign by April. That is why, when the project allows, we test messages with people from the target audience before rolling them out widely.

Finally, there is the economy your audiences live in. In 2021, according to the National Institute of Statistics, 86.6% of jobs in Cameroon were in the informal sector. The till, the contribution, trust: for most of the people you want to reach, these are daily realities, with their own rules. Ignoring them means talking past people.

How we work, in five steps

We do not sell cultural intelligence as a separate service. It applies to all our projects, in five steps.

The coffee. You tell us about your project, and we put our assumptions on the table. Who are your audiences, where do they live, what language do they speak among themselves?

Understand. We go and see your audiences: fieldwork, interviews, online conversations, studies. For a financial product, for example: the place of the tontine in a shopkeeper’s cash flow, what he is willing to show, and to whom.

Decide. A clear strategy, a message, priorities, a timeline. Sometimes the decision comes down to a single word changed on a poster.

Create and distribute. Ideas, content, media, press, events, with the words, the tone and the images of those who are listening. Production is entrusted to mystiK Studio.

Measure and pass on. A review against the indicators set at the start: what worked, what we are correcting, and what your teams need to know to carry on without us.

Culture is not decoration

Culture is not decoration that we add to everything. It is a way of looking at your problem. Sometimes it leads to a campaign with an artist. Sometimes to a single word changed on a poster. Always to better-informed decisions.

Your audiences already speak their language. They speak it at the market, in the taxi, in the family WhatsApp group. The real question lies elsewhere: has your brand learnt it?