Rupu rebrands its business to market content

E-commerce platform Rupu has repositioned and rebranded its business to a content marketing website known as P Promos, moving away from being an online purchasing website.

The pivoting of its business model is a development of its earlier marketing strategy, which may lead to greater success than its opening proposition, it says.

“P Promos is a promotional platform that connects merchants to a larger market without sharing their revenue with us or being fully set up logistics-wise. The model is based on a pay per ad model,” said Stacey Ondimu, the managing director of P Live and P Promos, East Africa.

“The rebrand was influenced by what we learnt from Rupu in terms of what the market and merchants want, thus we adopted a strategy that would offer a practical and relevant solution to our target market.”

“Too many start-ups begin with an idea for a product that they think people want. They then spend months, sometimes years, perfecting that product. When they fail to reach broad uptake from customers, it is often because they never spoke to prospective customers and determined whether or not the product was interesting. When customers ultimately communicate, through their indifference, that they do not care about the idea, the start-up fails,” he said.

“However, once entrepreneurs embrace validated learning and focus on providing the consumers with what they want and will pay for then there is no need to spend months waiting for a product launch to change the company’s direction. Instead, entrepreneurs can adapt their plans incrementally, inch by inch, minute by minute.”

It involves the pivoting strategy, under which a brand stays relevant, competitive and avoids disruption when new players are introduced.

“In today’s market, those forces will make people in every kind of organisation—start-ups, small businesses, corporations, and government—feel the pressure of rapid change.

The pivoting approach will help them meet it head-on, innovate rapidly, and transform business as we know it,” said Steve Blank, an adjunct professor at Stanford University, in his Harvard Business Review article, Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything.

P Promos repositions as social media platforms has enabled consumers to buy products directly from companies instead of buying through online middlemen, leading to its change in tack to informing consumers of the discounts rather than selling the products.

“This is a new chapter in enabling commerce online and offline. They can get access to offers, businesses, discounts and so much more on P Promos and the broader P Live platform,” said Ms Ondimu.

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