The Tunisian Institute for Marketing Nonsense

  I have a theory about Tunisian television advertising, and like all properly interesting theories, it came to me sideways, through a circuitous route involving pregnant women, Finnish birds, and Renaissance Florence. For the longest time, I watched Tunisian ads with a nagging sense that something was off—rather like when you meet someone at a party and can't quite place why they seem familiar, or when you taste a dish and know something's missing before you can articulate what. The psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz wrote about this phenomenon: your mind detecting an implicit pattern before you have the words to make it explicit. A woman knows she's pregnant with an idea, she noted, before she can articulate it. The unconscious knows before consciousness can explain. You feel the presence of something forming, growing, demanding attention—but you can't yet name it. I knew these ads lacked tension and clarity, but I felt and this is the crucial bit that it was more th...

There's a rather depressing game you can play in any Tunisian supermarket. Pick up a 2-liter water bottle. No, really try to pick it up with one hand. You can't, can you? The plastic has become so gossamer-thin that the bottle crumples like a defeated soufflé the moment you apply the slightest pressure. It's not a water bottle anymore; it's a water suggestion. Walk down the chocolate aisle and you'll find the same story, told in diminishing weights and expanding air pockets. Tris, Maestro, Gaucho ,they've all joined the Great Thinning. Each year, the bars get lighter, airier, more insubstantial. Pick one up and you're holding what feels less like chocolate and more like the memory of chocolate. This is happening everywhere, across nearly every CPG category you can name. And it's not just wasteful ,it's catastrophically stupid. The Misconception: A Tragic Oversimplification The fundamental error plaguing modern product management springs from two sour...

  In 2018, a phone brand you'd never heard of quietly entered Tunisia through Cellcom and Jumia's online marketplace. No fanfare. No celebrity endorsements. Just phones aimed at kids, sold exclusively online. That brand was Infinix—a Hong Kong-Chinese company founded in 2013 that exclusively targets emerging markets in Africa and Asia. They're the phone world's best-kept secret, and that's entirely the point. What happened next wasn't planned genius. It was accidental alchemy. The Contrast Con The entire Infinix proposition rests on one psychological trick: amplified contrast. They don't just offer decent specs at reasonable prices. They scream about features and MediaTek processors! Extended RAM! Gaming performance!in a way that makes the price seem almost suspiciously low. "Surely corporate made a pricing mistake?" It's not just contrast between features and price. It's their prices versus Samsung's. Their specs versus what you'd ...