By Inamangwe Mtumtum, Senior Integrated Strategist at Boomtown
There is a strange performance built into strategy.
We walk into boardrooms, project slide decks onto screens, clear our throats and speak in the language of confidence: “The consumer wants … the market is moving … the opportunity is clear … the brand must. We’re paid to make ambiguity sound elegant; to turn collective panic into commercial pillars. To look at a country that feels like it is being held together by debit orders, WhatsApp prayers and mid-month calculations and somehow produce a seamless way forward.
But what happens when reality refuses to be simplified?
Right now, South Africans are not just under pressure but are living inside a matrix of overlapping crises. The official unemployment rate rose to 32.7% in the first quarter of this year, with youth unemployment at an alarming 45.8%. This translates to almost one in two young people looking for work unable to find employment.
Meanwhile, the cost of living keeps rising with the average household food basket costing R5,452.09 in April 2026, up by R123.56 from the previous month. On top of financial strain, public institutions face intense scrutiny under the Madlanga Commission’s look into policing and systemic failures, while renewed parliamentary debates around presidential accountability keep national anxieties simmering.
Then there’s the more insidious stress of artificial intelligence threatening that your so-called valuable skill set might be tomorrow’s automated efficiency saving.
We tell young people to build careers in an economy that can’t absorb them. We expect workers to be grateful for employment they are terrified of losing. And we bombard consumers with conflicting cultural mandates: spend, save, heal, hustle, rest, glow, gym, supplement, self-care, invest, soft-life, hard-launch – and somehow still have money left over for fuel. No wonder ashwagandha (a herb in traditional Ayurvedic medicine that helps the body resist and adapt to stress) has become a personality type.
The consumer condition is the contradiction
In the midst of all this, strategists are asked to understand the consumer, grow the brand, unlock relevance and drive conversion. We are asked to find the elusive human truth that will compel someone to spend a little more, switch a little faster or care a little deeper.
At times, it feels absurd, even mildly offensive. Because the honest, uncomfortable question we must ask ourselves is: How do you ask people to buy more when life is already taking so much?
That is exactly where the strategist’s imposter syndrome begins. It doesn’t stem from incompetence, but from the fact that the job demands absolute certainty from a reality that only offers compounding tension. We are expected to provide definitive answers while the consumers themselves are still desperately negotiating basic questions such as whether they can even afford the product or service: Can I justify buying this? Do I deserve this? Is this responsible? Is this joy, or is this just survival?
Contradiction is no longer a consumer insight. It’s the consumer condition.
The traditional strategist could historically hide behind neat, tidy segmentations such as ‘The Aspirational Consumer’, ‘The Value Seeker’ and ‘The Young Urban Professional’, amongst others. Those labels feel laughably thin in the current environment.
Today’s consumer can be anxious about their financial future and still buy luxury perfume. They can be deeply mistrustful of institutions and still gamble online. They can be exhausted by capitalism and still deeply desire a Stanley cup, a pilates membership, an IV drip and the curated soft life aesthetic.
The growth of gambling and online sports betting in particular, is a case in point. While formal job opportunities continue to shrink, South Africa’s betting revenue has grown fourfold since 2021. The local gambling sector reported a staggering R1.5 trillion in total amounts wagered in FY2024/25, with gross gambling revenue reaching R74.5 billion. Betting has stopped being mere entertainment. For many, it has become hope with odds attached – a small, high-stakes theatre where people can feel like their lives might fundamentally change by the final whistle. That is not irrational behaviour. It’s rational behaviour operating inside an irrational economy.
Moving from empathy to brand accountability
What defines our real work now is not to make brands sound certain, but to make them more honest.
We must stop pretending consumers are simply “resilient.” Resilience has become the polite, corporate euphemism we use when structural systems have repeatedly failed people. We must stop romanticising systemic struggle into “hustle culture.” Crucially, we cannot use empathy as a tone of voice while our underlying strategy remains purely extractive.
Empathy at scale can’t just mean writing softer ad copy. It has to mean enforcing sharper brand responsibility. Consumers can instantly feel the difference between a brand that genuinely understands their pressure and a brand that is merely studying it to fuel a campaign.
This is where clients, agencies and strategists need to have much more uncomfortable conversations. We can’t keep asking advertising to feel culturally alive while simultaneously starving it of the operational conditions that make it meaningful.
The paradox is that while brands are asking for emotional relevance, cultural breakthrough, organic loyalty and deep human connection, what they actually provide are compressed budgets, hyper-accelerated timelines, conservative approvals, generic CSI and risk-averse briefs.
We operate under a flawed belief that culture can be borrowed for a seasonal campaign without ever being invested in. We chase emotional relevance while refusing to take any emotional risk. Advertising cannot keep shouting “we see you” while doing absolutely nothing to prove it.
Embracing the mess
The future of strategy will not belong to those who sound the most certain. It will belong to the people who can sit inside uncertainty without flattening it.
The industry needs strategists who can look at a slide deck and acknowledge that the consumer is scared but still desire things; broke, but still expressive; angry, but still hopeful; exhausted, but still reachable. But they are only reachable if we stop insulting them with oversimplified messaging.
Maybe the strategist’s job is no longer to manufacture a false sense of certainty. Maybe our job is simply to make better sense of the mess; to help brands understand that in uncertain times, people aren’t just buying products for the sake of owning the item. What they’re also buying is relief from immediate friction, proof of their hard work, control over a small part of their day, status, escape and continuity. They’re buying a fleeting feeling that life has not completely cornered them.
The most honest strategy today starts with admitting that we don’t have a perfect answer. Instead, we have a responsibility to ask far better questions.
The consumer is not a static target audience on a PowerPoint slide. They are somebody trying to make rent, dodge debit orders, stay sane, look good, believe in something, feed a family, survive the family WhatsApp group, avoid the depressing news cycle, keep their job – or find one – and still retain enough internal softness to want something beautiful.
So yes, being a strategist right now feels like imposter syndrome. But maybe that discomfort is not proof that we are frauds but rather proof that we are finally paying attention.
