After a couple of days of frivolity I suppose it was inevitable that the fizz would go out of the lockdown lemonade sooner or later, even though I did take 23 minutes off the 5km #RoundMyHouse time trial today.
I’m definitely looking for a sponsor now but I can’t make up my mind whether to sign-up with Bridgestone for improved cornering ability or New Balance for perfectly cushioned injury free running. My concern is that New Balance might want me to sign an NDA when they discover what my time-trial times are, and then I wouldn’t be able to blog.
I say this because I have discovered that walking is the key to #lockdown blogging. Particularly walking in a confined space where there are no distractions. Other than the Bougainvillea, which I mentioned in a previous blog. In a strange kind of way it’s not dissimilar to the last 21kms of Comrades. Just watch your feet, don’t trip and keep moving.
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in Twilight of the Idols that “all truly great thoughts are conceived while walking”. Jean-Jacques Rousseau said “When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs”. And that last observation is certainly true of #Lockdown2020 because the amount of time you waste on WhatsApp and Facebook increases in direction proportion to the amount of time you spend with your arse in a chair.
Wordsworth was another keen walker and it’s likely that Daffodils, probably the most quoted of all English poems, was written while he was on his favourite walk at Rydal Mount. Some years ago I also wandered lonely as a cloud on the Rydal Mount walk and I would have to concede that, even though I personally never saw a daffodil, the walk was certainly a notch up from my 5km #RoundMyHouse.
What I have had time to reflect on while I walk is the never-ceasing issue of the divide between the haves and the have-nots in South Africa. The more TV and social media I see, the more I comprehend the futility of trying to enforce a lockdown in impoverished communities. The more I comprehend that futility, the more I realise that, however restricted my walking space may be, the mere fact that I am able to self-isolate is a blessing from God, not a burden.
Every time my foot hits the ground I’m going to thank the Lord that I am one of the haves. It’s not much but right now but, when it comes to emerging from #Lockdown2020 more focused and more determined that ever to make this country and this media industry more inclusive, it’s a pretty good place to start.
One of the methods we have traditionally used to highlight the distribution and market viability of haves and have-nots is through socio-economic segmentation and functional applications such as the SEM model. One of the barriers to full adoption of the SEM model in a post-AMPS landscape has been a concern about proven stability and the inability to trend consumer movement over time.
The release of ES2019 AB gives us the ideal platform to address that concern.
Analysing the data for the past three calendar years, we can see at a glance that there is very little fluctuation across the five SEM clusters, although there is some slight erosion of the bottom-end and corresponding growth in SEM_C3. The Middle Class.
So the basic model provides us with the reassuring bell-shaped curve which has determined so much of the pattern of advertising and media investment in South Africa. As always though, the devil is in the detail when we are trying to understand the dynamics of human behaviour.
When 76% of households in SEM_C1 are using an external pit toilet and fewer than 5% have access to water in the home, then a lockdown is simply a nonsensical non-starter for these communities. Even in SEM_C2 fewer than 10% of households have a flush toilet in the home and 54% are using an external pit latrine. Four out of every 10 households in SEM_C1 accesses water through an external community resource outside the home and one in every four adults in SEM_C1&2 is totally reliant on social grants for income and must therefore leave the home just to stay alive.
The time has come for the haves to stop thinking about this as somebody else’s nightmare. It’s our nightmare. And we must make sure that when we see each other on the other side of this nightmare, it never happens again. When I go for my walk tomorrow I’m not going to bemoan the fact that Wordsworth had a better view than me.
Every time my foot hits the ground I’m going to thank the Lord that I am one of the haves. It’s not much but right now but, when it comes to emerging from #Lockdown2020 more focused and more determined that ever to make this country and this media industry more inclusive, it’s a pretty good place to start.
Gordon Muller is Africa’s oldest surviving media strategist. Author of Media Planning – Art or Science. Mostly harmless! Read his Khulumaedia Blog here.
