A locally manufactured electric mobility brand. Four and a half years spent building a category that had no buyers, no competitors and no reference point.
The client is not named, and neither are the partners. Every figure below is from the performance reporting we produced during the engagement.
The client manufactures electric scooters and bikes in Egypt. When we started there was effectively no local competitor to take share from. That sounds like an advantage. It is the opposite.
The early products ran on lead-acid batteries: modest top speed, modest range. But the objection we met was almost never about speed, range or price. It was simpler and harder than that — people did not know what the thing was, or why they would want one. Nobody had ridden an electric scooter. Nobody knew anyone who had.
So the plan was not to explain the category. It was to put the product where trust already lived, and let other people’s credibility do the explaining.
SNS held the digital content strategy and the action plan behind it, and ran customer service as an owned channel.
Content strategy and action plan. A published plan tied to product launches, seasons and partnership moments rather than a posting schedule for its own sake.
Customer service as a shop floor. The direct-message inbox was treated as the showroom it actually was. We wrote a customer-service guide with a defined thought process for every enquiry type — what the product is, help me choose, this item is out of stock, I have a complaint, where are you located — and tracked first response time and average handle time as real metrics, not courtesies.
Partnership-led distribution. Reach was bought sparingly. Presence was earned through partners whose customers already trusted them.
Three partnerships carried the year. Each one borrowed an audience that had already decided to trust somebody else. The returns below are the revenue attributed to each partnership against what was invested in it.
The retail placements solved the credibility problem in one step. A scooter standing inside a retailer people already trust is pre-approved by that retailer. No advertisement does that.
The finance partnership solved the second problem. Upgrading the plan from zero down and zero interest over six months to the same terms over twelve months changed nothing about the product and a great deal about the decision. It was the single highest-returning thing we did, and together the three partnerships accounted for roughly a quarter of the year’s revenue.
Beyond paid work, the brand was placed into culture rather than into feeds: a music video, a television drama, a summer film, a national talk show, a telecoms Ramadan campaign, a major film festival, and a run of sport and lifestyle events. Around 4,000 riders were on the road, a visible share of them public figures.
The seasonality is worth its own line. Third-quarter revenue ran about eight times the first quarter. A business shaped like that cannot be managed on a monthly average — it has to be planned around the peak, with stock, cash and campaign weight positioned months before the season arrives.
When the category is unknown, shelf space inside a retailer your customer already believes in does work that no amount of impressions will do.
Twelve months at zero interest sold what six months at zero interest could not. Same product. Different decision.
If most of your enquiries arrive as direct messages, that inbox is your shop floor. Give it standards, a script logic and a response-time target.
The engagement ran until October 2024, when the brand brought the marketing function in-house under a newly appointed marketing manager. Four and a half years, one category built from nothing.
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