You can’t treat a patient who doesn’t know they’re ill

In 2014, in Douala, a young digital agency knocks on company doors. It is called ODB. It holds one conviction: the web is going to change the way businesses speak to their customers. The doors stay shut.

Nobody was acting in bad faith. Few businesses wanted to hear about the web back then, that’s all. They could not see the problem we were offering to solve. We arrived with the remedy. They did not know they were ill.

From that year, we drew a lesson that still guides us: you can’t treat a patient who doesn’t know they’re ill.

Explain before you sell

So we changed the order of things. We explained. We trained. We brought together marketing managers from small and medium-sized businesses to show them what digital could do for them. Not to sell them a website, not yet. So that the need would become visible, in their words, in their reality.

In 2015, we register ODB in Douala. The first Digital Thursday brings together Douala’s web community. In 2017, we organise the first edition of La Nuit du Web, which rewards the people behind the Cameroonian web. None of this was a campaign. It was a way of bringing to life a conversation that was not yet happening.

I say this without nostalgia: those gatherings did more for our craft than any brochure.

The years of doubt

Then come the years of doubt. The names change: Mystic ODB, then Mystic. The agency is also the rough patches, the moments when you wonder whether you were right too early, which often amounts to being wrong.

We are still here. The mystiQ agency comes to life in 2020: AGENCE MYSTIQ SARL is registered in Douala on 24 June. In 2021, we spell it out: “Une agence au cœur des gens”. The phrase did not come from a branding workshop. It came from those years spent explaining before selling.

What this tells your brand

Every time a brand brings something new to its market, it relives our 2014. A financial product in a market that saves through tontines. An online service for customers who prefer the counter. A technology its future users have never seen at work. The reflex is to talk about the product, its features, its price. The reflex is wrong.

As long as your audiences cannot see the problem, your solution is an answer to a question they are not asking. Your first job is not to sell. It is to make the problem visible, in their language, starting from their daily lives. Then to teach them how to use what you bring.

This takes time, and that is often where budgets run out of patience. A launch campaign lasts a few weeks. Bringing a market to maturity takes months, sometimes years, and actions that look nothing like advertising: workshops, meetings, content that explains, demonstrations in the field.

That is why passing on knowledge is part of how we work. We explain our choices in plain words, so your teams can defend them without us. We train your teams on the tools we put in place. A client who understands their audiences and their tools makes better decisions. A profession that grows helps everyone grow.

The same scene, today

The 2014 scene is playing out again before our eyes with artificial intelligence. Many people talk about it. Few yet know what it can change in their line of work, in practical terms, from Monday morning. The remedy exists. The diagnosis is still to be made, one business at a time.

This is the purpose of IA Connect Africa, a mystiQ initiative, which is preparing its first pan-African forum on artificial intelligence in Cotonou: African professionals, for African decision-makers, on African issues. It is also why training remains one of our crafts.

In 2024, I said it with a smile: “I am sure robots will conquer the world… but only after they have learnt to cook a good ndolè.” Behind the quip, the same lesson. A technology only enters people’s lives when it speaks their language.

So, before you present your remedy, ask yourself the question we have been asking ourselves for twelve years: do your audiences already know they need it?