A HARARE apparel business built its entire product line around a single, deceptively simple idea: printing Zimbabwean slang on T-shirts and mugs and, beneath each design, explaining what it actually means.
"Sadza." "Robots." "Make a plan." None of these words needed translating for the customer buying them. The translation is the product. What the SME understood, and what most Zimbabwean SMEs have not yet worked out, is that vernacular language is not decoration for a brand. For a large part of this market, it is the brand.
That gap is worth taking seriously, because it is not a minor oversight. The constitution recognises 16 official languages, and Shona or Ndebele is the language spoken at home by the overwhelming majority of Zimbabweans.
Yet walk down almost any commercial street in the country, and the shopfronts, price boards, and social media captions are set almost entirely in English. That is not necessarily a mistake.
English still carries genuine commercial weight here, signalling formality, export-readiness, and aspiration. The mistake is treating that as the whole story. It surely is not!
English carries prestige signalling. Shona and Ndebele carry comprehension, trust and closeness. A brand that only ever speaks in one register is deliberately giving up one of those two things, usually without realising it made a choice at all.
This matters more for Zimbabwean SMEs than for the large corporates that dominate most branding advice, because SMEs live or die on the second register, not the first.
A bank or a mobile network can afford to spend heavily on English-language prestige signalling and still be understood, because its brand has already been explained to the market a thousand times over on television and billboards. An SME rarely has that luxury. Its entire relationship with a customer often rests on a single WhatsApp exchange, a market-stall conversation, or a five-second glance at a hand-painted sign. In that narrow window, being instantly and warmly understood beats being impressively formal almost every time.
The commodities markets across the country do not run on English signage. The run on vendors who know exactly which phrase, delivered in exactly which tone, closes a sale in the next ninety seconds. That skill already exists in abundance in these markets. It has simply never been treated as a brand asset worth managing deliberately, the way a logo or a colour palette would be.
The smarter move is not to abandon English and switch wholesale into Shona or Ndebele. It is to be deliberate about which register does which job, in the same way a bilingual sales assistant already switches without thinking about it.
A product name or shopfront sign aimed at signalling formality, export quality, or a younger, aspirational urban audience can reasonably stay in English. But the moment a business is trying to build trust, explain something complicated, or close a sale with a customer who is deciding in real time whether to believe a stranger, vernacular does work English cannot easily do on its own.
A WhatsApp voice note explaining a refund policy in Shona or Ndebele will land more warmly, and be trusted faster, than the same policy typed out in careful English. A market trader's chant, adapted rather than abandoned for an Instagram Reel, carries more genuine texture than a stock caption ever will.
We have seen this shift happening already in spaces adjacent to branding. Zimbabwean newsrooms are only now being pushed, through recent capacity-building work with journalists across the country, to take reporting in Shona, Ndebele and the country's other recognised languages as seriously as English reporting, on the basis that a story only fully serves the public once it reaches people in the language they actually think in.
Branding faces the identical argument and has been slower to have it out loud. A product only fully reaches a customer once it speaks to them the way they already speak to each other, not the way a business assumes a ‘proper’ brand ought to sound.
None of this requires an SME to hire a translation agency or overhaul its visual identity. It requires an owner to sit down and honestly separate two questions that are usually collapsed into one: what am I saying, and in which language does that particular message actually land? A tagline aimed at prestige can stay in English. A customer service voice aimed at trust probably should not.
Until then, think, eat, sleep, and dream about branding!
- Dr Farai Chigora is a businessman and academic. He is a senior lecturer at Africa University’s College of Management and Business Sciences and a global business modelling practitioner. His doctoral research focused on Business Administration (Destination Marketing and Branding, Major, UKZN, SA). He is involved in agribusiness and consults for many companies in Zimbabwe and across Africa. He writes in his personal capacity and can be contacted for feedback and business at fariechigora@gmail.com, www.fachip.co.zw, or via WhatsApp on mobile: +263772886871.
- *Dr Tabani Moyo is an extra-ordinary researcher with the University of North West, South Africa’s Social Transformation School. He holds a Doctorate in Business Administration (Research focus on new media and corporate reputation management, UKZN), chartered marketer, fellow CIM, communications and reputation management expert based in Harare. He can be contacted at moyojz@gmail.com @TabaniMoyo (X) or Tabani Moyo (LinkedIn).