Xcentric - How curiosity, empathy and observing everyday tensions drive brand growth

Every brand claims to be consumer-centric.

Which is interesting, because somewhere between the annual strategy session, the competitor tracker, the brand health dashboard, and the fifteenth internal alignment meeting, the consumer often seems to disappear.

Not intentionally. Just quietly.

The conversation shifts. The focus moves inward. Teams become consumed with market share, category movements, operational pressures, and what competitors are doing next.

Meanwhile, the people they're trying to serve carry on living their lives. And that's where the opportunity gets lost.

While there’s nothing wrong with complex frameworks, the answer to the biggest growth opportunities are often hiding in plain sight, inside people's everyday lives.

The problem is that most of us are looking somewhere else.

The industry's favourite distraction

Modern marketing has become incredibly good at measuring things. We can track awareness, penetration, sentiment, consideration, conversion, engagement and loyalty. We know what people buy, where they buy it and increasingly when they buy it.

Yet for all our sophistication, we sometimes struggle to answer a far simpler question: Why?

Why do people choose one solution over another? Why do they ignore what appears to be the obvious choice? Why do they invent workarounds for problems we've supposedly solved? Why do some brands become part of people's lives while others become PowerPoint slides?

Data is invaluable. But it needs a touch of empathy.

A dashboard can tell you what happened, but it cannot sit in a taxi rank, walk through a spaza shop, or tell you what somebody sacrificed to make a purchase, what frustration they have accepted as normal, or what need they have stopped expecting brands to solve. And those are often the details that matter most.

As Xcentric co-founder and head of strategy, Bontle Modiselle says: "The market doesn't wake up thinking about our category definitions. People wake up thinking about their day. If we want their attention and affection, we need to meet them where they are."

The myth of the clever brand

The marketing industry has developed a fascinating habit. When growth slows, we revisit the strategy. When relevance declines, we revisit the strategy. When a campaign underperforms, we revisit the strategy.

To be clear, strategy matters. Deeply.

In fact, we believe actionable demand-led strategy is one of the most powerful growth levers available to any business. But somewhere along the way, many organisations began treating strategy as the destination rather than the vehicle.

The real objective was never the framework. The objective was always relevance. And relevance comes from understanding people. Beyond demographics and segments alone. There's an important difference.

People are rarely as neat as the boxes we've built for them. They're wonderfully inconsistent. They'll tell you one thing and do another. They'll buy premium one month and value the next. They'll ignore your carefully crafted category logic because real life has entered the chat.

Curiosity is still a competitive advantage

In an age of AI, automation and endless streams of information, curiosity may be one of the most underrated strategic capabilities.

Not because technology isn't valuable. It absolutely is. But technology is at its most powerful when it's helping us understand people more deeply, not helping us avoid them.

Curiosity forces us to ask the extra question. Observe a little longer. Challenge assumptions. Look beyond what is obvious. And that's often where breakthrough opportunities emerge.

As Xcentric co-founder and head of operations, Edith Rakumakoe puts it: “Some of the most valuable insights aren’t things consumers tell you directly. They sit in the compromises people make, the workarounds they create and the frustrations they’ve simply learnt to live with. That’s often where the real opportunity for a brand begins.”

Seeing what others overlook

The philosophy that led us to build Xcentric is simple: See the unseen. Serve the underserviced. Simplify the complex. Build what the world cannot ignore.

It's a philosophy born from thousands of conversations and countless hours spent understanding the realities people navigate every day. Because growth doesn't begin with having all the answers. It begins with asking better questions. Questions rooted in curiosity. Questions grounded in empathy. Questions that help uncover the tensions people are living with long before they become trends in a report.

The brands that consistently unlock growth are not necessarily the 'cleverest'. They're simply the most observant. They're willing to look beyond their competitors, beyond their assumptions and beyond their own internal narratives. They understand that before a brand can become meaningful, it must first become useful. Because brands don’t buy or consume themselves, people do.

There’s no strategy without the people we serve.