CashBerry is a digital payments and commerce platform that aims to transform the way customers and businesses transact. Among its range of services, it offers the ability for merchants, like store owners, to allow consumers to withdraw cash from retail outlets—not ATMs, solving significant cash-access challenges in many emerging markets. Merchants receive a percentage-based fee per transaction.
It also empowers shopkeepers to, easily and securely, create online stores, integrated with WhatsApp, which creates new revenue streams for merchants.
CashBerry’s leaders studied a number of international cities to find the ideal location to launch their offerings. Choosing the right market was as essential as it was hard because it required careful tradeoffs among many competing needs. More importantly, it would determine the company’s further expansion plans. After much research, they landed on Cape Town, South Africa.
The future pointed to Cape Town. Now it was time to launch.
The push to start operations in Cape Town required meticulous planning and execution across several fast-moving fronts including standing up a website for consumers, and merchants; designing mobile applications, building marketing kits, and carrying out multi-modal advertising campaigns that included print, digital, and social media.
Two key challenges presented themselves early: Trust and digital literacy.
CashBerry’s services represented a new, innovative way to interact financially. To be successful it needed to be adopted by not one but two sets of audiences: Consumers and merchants. And large sections of both cohorts were suspicious of novel fintech and retail technology services, often because of less-than-optimal levels of digital literacy.
Cashberry enlists the expertise of Helveticans to revamp their website with a modern and user-centric approach.
The push to start operations in Cape Town, called in multiple service capabilities including:
- Branding Strategy
- User Experience Strategy and Design Services
- Content Strategy and Creation Including Video Production
- Digital Marketing Strategy and Execution
- Creative Advertising Strategies and Ad Creation
Key to the project’s success was building a solid foundation. This required buyer and use case exploration that revealed the needs of a variety of potential CashBerry users, and reasons for them to accept or reject CashBerry. Buyer research also included a study of the mental make-up, digital IQ, and language of customers, and the platforms they most used.
This dataset was used to create a content strategy based on clearly delineated value propositions, and also informed the team’s choices around the brand’s visual language and tone of voice.
Building on this foundation, the CashBerry website and applications were planned, architected, and built and tested. This was quickly followed up with a series of above-and-below the line advertising campaigns using hoardings, brand collaborations, and social media platforms.
The closely-monitored-and-continually-tweaked social campaign segmented audiences using geographical, situational, demographic, and psychographic measures.
The team also activated an on-ground strategy, sending out groups of brand evangelists who targeted carefully selected influential groups of early adopters with marketing kits.
