Glo has a consistent marketing strategy, and it has had it for years. More data. Bigger bundles. More gigabytes per Naira than the competition. The value proposition is volume, and the campaigns return to it again and again because, on paper, it is a genuine competitive advantage — Glo often does offer more data for the money.
And year after year, the brand perception problem does not move. Because Glo’s challenge was never the quantity of data. It is the reliability of it. And no volume offer, however generous, can fix a problem that lives in trust rather than in price.
The Gap Between the Offer and the Experience
Here is the disconnect at the centre of Glo’s marketing. The campaign says: look how much data you get. The consumer’s lived experience says: but does it work when I am in a meeting, in traffic, on deadline, in the part of town where I actually need it? For a significant segment of the market, the answer to that question has been inconsistent for long enough that no amount of additional gigabytes changes the underlying calculation.
A consumer who has experienced a network failing them at a critical moment does not get won back by being offered more of the thing that failed them. More data that you cannot reliably use is not more value. It is more of an unreliable promise. The offer is answering a question — how much? — that the consumer is not asking. The consumer is asking a different question — will it work? — and the volume campaign does not address it at all.
Why Brands Keep Reaching for the Volume Lever
Volume is the easiest lever to pull because it is the most measurable. More gigabytes is a concrete, defensible, easy-to-communicate proposition. It fits neatly on a billboard, in a radio jingle, in a data plan comparison table. It gives the marketing team a clear message and the sales team a clear pitch.
Reliability is much harder to market, because it is harder to prove and far harder to fix. You cannot put “our network now works” on a billboard, because the consumer will test that claim against their own experience within a day, and if it fails the test even once, the claim becomes another reason not to believe the brand. Reliability is earned in the consumer’s daily experience over months, not asserted in a campaign over weeks.
So the brand keeps pulling the volume lever, not because it works on the perception problem, but because it is the lever available to the marketing function. The reliability problem sits with network infrastructure and engineering, outside marketing’s control. Marketing markets what it can affect, and hopes the rest catches up.
What Would Actually Move Glo’s Perception
If the perception problem is rooted in reliability, then the only marketing that addresses it is marketing that lets reliability prove itself. Not claims of improvement — demonstrations of it. Campaigns built around real, verifiable, consumer-generated evidence of the network performing in the exact moments and places where consumers expect it to fail.
The honest version of this is uncomfortable, because it requires the underlying reliability to genuinely improve first. Marketing cannot lead here. It can only follow a real infrastructure change with communication that invites the consumer to test the claim and discover it is true. A brand recovering from a trust problem cannot talk its way back. It has to perform its way back, and then point at the performance.
Until that happens, every additional gigabyte Glo offers is answering the wrong question. The consumer hears “more data” and thinks “more data I might not be able to use.” The generosity of the offer is filtered through the skepticism of the experience, and the skepticism wins.
SoroSoke Brands Tip: When your brand has a perception problem, the first question is whether it is a value problem or a trust problem. A value problem responds to better offers. A trust problem does not — it responds only to a changed experience that earns the trust back over time. Pulling the value lever on a trust problem does not just fail to work. It wastes budget confirming to the consumer that you do not understand why they left.
