What does Nendo do?
One of the most interesting questions I receive nowadays is, "What does Nendo do?" I find this question asked by three kinds of people:
- People who have interacted with Nendo's content - our blog, (dormant) newsletter, reports, social media content, or even mainstream media mentions and content.
- People who have interacted with an ‘old’ version of Nendo who want to know what Nendo is up to nowadays.
- People who are genuinely curious. Nendo has been around since 2015, and they figure the business is doing something meaningful and want to learn more.
I hope that for people considering joining Nendo as future teammates attracted by our core values and work, prospective clients, and people looking for a partner like us, this would help explain our value.
I won't bury the lede, but I will speak to the evolution of how Nendo's service offering has been shaped by a few key clients over the years who have helped us learn and grow. So, below is what Nendo does, and further down, I will give examples of the clients we’ve served recently.
Nendo is an award-winning research and marketing agency based in Nairobi working across Africa. Nendo delivers grounded African insights and trends to the world. Nendo is a Kenyan market research company that delivers consumer research services such as qualitative, quantitative, and digital intelligence research services. Nendo is a Kenyan digital marketing agency that delivers campaigns that target audiences online and offline to drive awareness, action, and behaviour change.
We aspire to find clients who bring us their biggest challenges to do with the internet, mobile phones, and social media. Nendo's also expanded towards broader areas and disciplines within research and marketing. The goal, for Nendo's clients is that research clients get more strategic and action-oriented recommendations while marketing clients get more insight-driven creative and campaigns. Our strength is the two disciplines and the diversity of ideas, insights, and implications we can spur clients towards.
We like to look at Nendo through the lens of our client's problem or challenge. Instead of Nendo asking our clients, “What do you want us to research about?” or “What can we market/communicate for you?” we use our Client Success process to discover the actual challenges keeping our clients up at night. Then, we work from there, using our skills to deliver solutions that cut across different marketing and research techniques.
Here are some problems our clients have trusted us to solve in the past 12 months.
Research
- A tier 1 (leading) Kenyan bank has Nendo provide them with a Brandwatch Consumer Research license, a world-leading social media listening platform. With this, their marketing, customer experience, innovation, and other departments have been trained to evaluate data generated by their connected customers. Nendo created comprehensive boolean queries and dashboards for custom sentiment analyses (factoring in local slang and Swahili). This brings millions of customer and competitor complaints, comments, and compliments for insight and action. To protect its brand reputation, Nendo incorporated an early warning system with rules to alert crucial stakeholders during online crises. This is similar work to what we've published in our campaign to tackle the scourge of brand reputation harm in our nendo.co.ke/react campaign. Social media listening is a core Nendo offering building on our experience in telecoms, financial services, airlines, democracy & governance, and other for/non-profit domains.
Marketing
- A leading healthcare nonprofit working across the region chose Nendo to lead the marketing, communications, and demand generation for a vision product. The problem being solved is that Kenyans over 40 who have age-related farsightedness find themselves needing to be more informed about their condition. The pain, migraines, and symptoms of struggling with their eyesight cause them challenges that our client can address with a 5-minute vision test and affordable (Ksh. 500 and below) reading glasses. This affects particularly Kenyans who are unemployed, underemployed, and of lower socioeconomic status in society. Nendo created a name, brand identity, and collateral for the brand. Nendo also did billboards, vernacular radio, and below-the-line marketing in Kisumu, Kakamega, and Mombasa to help thousands of Kenyans take their first free eye test for presbyopia and access to purchase a pair of affordable glasses.
- An international gender and climate change nonprofit engaged Nendo to support its ambitions to frame the climate crisis on multiple levels, from high-level dialogues with global leadership and nation-states to grassroots activists and champions framing the topic in approachable ways to audiences to take action in Europe, the United Kingdom, and Africa. Nendo supported strategic communications, media relations, and creative services for a global conference in the buildup to COP28, a pivotal point for the nonprofit.
- A global HIV Prevention think tank charged Nendo to take three evidence-based tools that contained dashboards, datasets, and data visualisations and create three animated explainer videos aimed at different global audiences. Nendo delivered three branded 2D animated videos that featured local narration and voiceovers, simplifying the technical content and making the data simple and easy to understand. Nendo also produced a first-of-its-kind interactive webinar that took Zoom to another level for the organisation. The experience was branded akin to a global high-production-value television show or podcast from the videos, breakout rooms, and transitions. It featured high-fidelity backgrounds, animated transitions, and engaging audience exercises.
Hybrid (Research and Marketing - our favourite!)
- A leading global pharmaceutical brand trusted Nendo to deliver a marketing effectiveness audit for their Kenya business. This involved looking up their market share across verticals, molecules, and competitors for over one year in print, radio, and television. It also involved cross-referencing their share of voice and share of the market to calculate their Excess Share of Voice. We also ran focus group discussions with customers to gather qualitative insights to inform the brand of how the market perceived their current online and offline campaigns.
- Nendo recently won a grant from USAID, administered by DAI, for their Digital Frontiers Project. The project aims to incorporate social media analytics in development. Nendo's project is titled Dada Disinfo (more to come on this in the coming months) and is focused on addressing technology-facilitated gender-based violence. Nendo will use its research experience to investigate networks and narratives and its marketing experience to co-create solutions and distribute a playbook for emerging content creators. Dada Disinfo aims to make a difference in raising awareness and providing advice and potential solutions to women and girls on the internet in Kenya. I'm excited to see us reach millions with this project.
Grounded African Insights and Trends for the World.
We have more clients than the above, but it shows the diversity of our clients. The work above doesn't include our social marketing and public health work - some of the most impactful and inspiring work we do at Nendo. We also have other private-sector Kenyan company clients who have been a pleasure to serve.
Grounded African Insights and Trends came out of a workshop in 2023 where we worked on self-implementing the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS). This has been one of the newest phrases we've been saying, and it excites me to simplify what we do in a phrase. Our work is truly global. We currently have two projects (one research, the other marketing) happening in Nigeria. I am keen on Nendo's prospects to break out into new and exciting territory with great new additions to our team along the way.
Joining Nendo’s Journey
We continue to look for great professionals from research, marketing, design, copywriting, and consulting backgrounds to join us. So, if that's you, please email talent@nendo.co.ke and include a CV/Portfolio and cover letter to help us know how you might play a role in this going forward.
