By Futurescale · August 2026 · 5 min read
Brands spend significant resources defining what their product is for. They develop positioning, write briefs, build campaigns and train teams to communicate a specific value proposition to a specific audience. And then the customer takes the product home and does something entirely different with it.
The most useful thing a brand can do is get curious about what its customers are doing with what it made and why.
The observation.
Coca-Cola was created to be consumed as a beverage. In South African and broader African households it is also used to clean surfaces, remove rust and as a household remedy. Vaseline was developed as a wound sealant, it is now one of the most versatile products in millions of homes, used as a moisturiser, a hair treatment and a multipurpose household product. Baking soda was created for baking and it now lives in refrigerators, bathrooms and laundry rooms across the world.
In every case the customer did not misuse the product. They understood it differently to the brand that made it and then used it accordingly. They took what existed and fit it into their own reality, their own needs, their own context and their own creativity.
The unintended use case is not an anomaly. It is intelligence.
Most brands treat unintended product use as a curiosity interesting perhaps but irrelevant to strategy. It sits outside the brief, outside the category definition and outside the marketing model. This is the wrong way to read it.
The customer who cleans with Coca-Cola is communicating something significant about trust, versatility and perceived value that the brand’s own research may never surface. They have found a use case the brand did not create and they are demonstrating, through behaviour rather than through a survey, exactly what they find valuable about what the brand made. That is some of the most honest customer intelligence available. It costs nothing to observe. It is hiding in plain sight.
Why this matters more in African markets.
In South African and broader African markets, creative and unintended product use is not a fringe behaviour. It is a deeply embedded consumer reality shaped by context, resourcefulness and the practical ingenuity of people who make what they have work in ways that imported brand models were never designed to anticipate. Most marketing frameworks built for these markets were developed elsewhere and describe a consumer who uses products as instructed, within the intended category, for the defined purpose. That consumer exists here. But so does a far more sophisticated and far more interesting consumer who adapts, repurposes and innovates with what they have access to.
What research-first strategy does with this.
A research-first approach does not start with what the brand wants to say about the product. It starts with what the customer is actually doing with it and why. That sequence changes everything. The messaging shifts from defined benefit to demonstrated value. The positioning moves from what the brand intended to what the customer discovered. The communication stops trying to educate and starts trying to reflect.
When a brand genuinely understands how its product lives in the customer’s world including the ways the brand never anticipated it can build strategy that meets the customer where they actually are rather than where the product brief assumed they would be. That is not a creative insight. It is a commercial one. And it begins with research that is curious enough to ask the questions the brief never thought to include.
Futurescale is a research-first marketing, strategy and data-led growth agency based in Pretoria, South Africa. We help B2B organisations understand how their customers actually make decisions and build strategy around what the evidence shows.
Research is how we get to strategy. Strategy is what we deliver. Execution is how we prove it.