Pakistan's small retail runs on WhatsApp, and the media plan does not
Ordering, credit, catalogue and complaint all happen in one app. Almost no brand plan in the market treats it as anything but a support channel.
Walk a Karachi trade route and the commerce is visible in one place. Orders arrive as messages, catalogues circulate as forwarded images, credit is agreed in a thread, and a complaint that would be a call centre ticket anywhere else is a voice note.
The media plans written for these brands treat that app as customer service, which is the same category error as treating a shop floor as a storeroom.
What the channel is doing
For the distributor and the retailer it is the order book. For the consumer it is where a recommendation from someone they know arrives, which in this market outperforms every paid format we can buy against it. Both of those are marketing surfaces, and neither has an owner in a typical brand structure.
Where to start, in order
- Give the trade a catalogue built to be forwarded — image-first, priced, current. Most of what circulates today is an out-of-date screenshot.
- Staff the inbound. The volume is already arriving; the question is whether anybody is reading it.
- Instrument it. Order volume, repeat rate and complaint type are all sitting there unrecorded.
- Stop treating a forward as free media. It is the most valuable distribution in the market and it deserves to be designed for.
The plan buys attention on platforms the retailer opens twice a day, and ignores the one they never close.
