HOW AFFILIATE MARKETING HELPED THE IGBO TRIBE

Recently, there seem to be an increase in affiliate marketers with the uprise of the brands, Learnoflix and expertnaire.

What really is affiliate marketing, well for starters, marketing is any process that helps and facilitates the sales of goods and services and enables the target audience be able to get value from a company, firm or vendor.

We have the marketing mix, things that can be used to influence these sales and facilitates the audience to perceive value from the vendor, manufacturers or company, they are the price,the place, the product, promotion but other schools of thought add people, process and physical evidence etc

But affiliate marketing has to do with a third party helping in the marketing process, the work of this third party is to drive traffic to the place or product and for each sale made because of the involvement of this party, there would be commission.

This isn’t really the official definition but I made it simpler because of where I’m about to head.

When the civil war in Nigeria ended in 15th January 1970, the Igbos had to strategize on how to become better, help themselves, about 2 million of this tribe had been massacred and their business, institutions either displaced or demolished.

The Igbos have been known for their industrious nature and entrepreneurial skills, so they started and some of them became successful, the successful ones started coming home to pick their younger relatives and train them for a for a couple of years.

The west call it internship or apprenticeship but the Igbos called it (Imu-oru) it was a way of giving back to their younger ones, the younger relative would serve his older relative, learning all the crooks and hooks of the business, trade or handiwork for a period of time then their older relative or master would reward the younger relative with a shop of their own or a reasonable amount of capital to start theirs knowing that the knowledge, skill to run that business has been acquired.

This went on for a while until the younger relatives sometimes got better with sales and closing that they decided to use affiliate marketing

It’s a common misconception that Amazon invented affiliate marketing. Actually, affiliate marketing began in 1989 with a man named William J. Tobin, who holds the proud title of the world’s first internet marketer. The founder of PC Flowers & Gifts, Tobin conceptualised the idea of affiliate marketing and launched his program on the Prodigy Network. This model involved paying the Prodigy network a commission on every sale. By 1993, it was generating more than $6 million dollars yearly for Prodigy. This success encouraged Tobin to patent the idea in 1996, although this wasn’t issued until 2000.

Meanwhile, in 1994, CDNOW launched their BuyWeb program. The idea was that music sites could review albums and link their visitors directly to CDNOW where they could purchase the albums.

Then there was Amazon
Amazon were latecomers to the party, arriving in 1996 with their associates program. Although not the first to start an affiliate program, they were the first to attract global interest

However as wise as William J Tobin was, I think the Igbos were the first to start using the affiliate marketing which they called (Igba Oso ahia)

This is how ‘Igba Oso ahia’ works, the younger relative or some other person who has an idea of how the business works would stay close to the shop, waiting for a seller and when the seller comes, he or she tries to close the seller, adding his commission immediately to the already fixed price and when he convinces the seller to buy, he goes home with the commission which is deducted from the already fixed price.

This works very well with building materials, like the rod because these materials are bought in bulk, so an additional price of ₦50 might not be valued until the customer buys more than 200 pieces which sums up ₦10,000.

The Igbos learnt to become better, and wealthier by applying these two strategies as well their entrepreneurial skills long before William started affiliate marketing.

Hope you learnt from my historic content?

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