Selling a payment platform of whatever kind is a hard sell when your main target demographic is Gen Z and Gen Y (millennials) – two generational groups that have been through the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 and the global pandemic of the 2020s.

Money is tight for many in these groups who have access to it, widening income inequality and worsening economic conditions mean wealth is a dream that is likely to remain distant for many years to come. What use is a payment platform at all if the money is always just barely enough?

This is one of the questions you’d expect will be discussed in an ideation meeting for a payment platform targeting the Gen Z and Y consumer. If they are answered wrong, you end up with the same old boring platforms that make up the majority of traditional financial institutions, to be largely ignored. If answered right, however, you end up with a platform that takes on the reality of life for these target groups, fashioning something exciting that makes living this reality just a little easier, and just like that, you have Abeg.

Abeg na

The phrase ‘Boujie on a budget,’ is not popular with millennials for no reason.

Here is a demographic birthed into growing consumerism whose income did not grow to match the growing options flooding the market beckoning them to indulge. You have lunch hangouts planned around easy the bill burden on the individual so the collective can have a good time. You have carpooling to reduce the impact of transportation bills on a thin income and even thinner savings.

The Abeg app, a peer-to-peer (P2P) social payments platform that lets one send or request money from another Abeg user without having to input any bank details, took this millennial and Gen Z social reality and made it easier to manage.

There is more to the brand strategy however. Funds pooling is not just about hangouts as many millennials and Gen Z’ers know too well.

With an estimated 22% of them reported by the Resolution Foundation to be likely to live in relative poverty in their late twenties – a higher proportion than any previous generation, millennials and Gen Z’ers have learnt to pool what money they have and take to crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe to seek further assistance.

A generational divide exists where older generations – Boomers and Gen X’ers – frown at this necessary communal support. The developers of Abeg, all of them millennials and Gen Z’ers, understanding, and in an almost millennial fashion, they reclaimed a term sometimes used to shame, ‘Begi begi,’ to serve their lived reality.

The brand message – a key selling point, is “Make Someone Happy With Cash.”

When you send someone money, a recent Abeg advert we took an insightful look at here, it could be for something as simple as your pride in their courage to stand up for themselves.

The storytelling hits the mark.

Organic virality and meaningful storytelling

If you weave a meaningful enough story to sell your brand it is almost inevitable that it will gain traction and go viral organically, particularly if your target market is the demographic that make up the bulk of social media users.

Abeg’s ‘You are a part of that generation,’ ad, a 1 minute 30 seconds story of a wrongly graded student who demanded a resolution involving a remarking of her paper but was propositioned instead by the lecturer, did many things but these stand out:

1.    It acknowledges the generational shift that exists among Millennials and Gen Z’ers, highlighting the outspokenness of this demographic.

2.    It recognized the inventiveness of its target demographic and in so doing sold its app without needing to say it because its audience recognize it as a part of their innovative drive.

3.    It reframed giving away from the shame associated with it in Nigeria’s cultural atmosphere.

It worked too. The ad, released barely a week ago has been viewed a combined more than 100, 000 times on Instagram and Twitter, with Twitter engagement overwhelmingly positive.

Speaking about the goal driving his creation, Abeg CEO Dare Adekoya, said in this interview with TechCabal that he was going for something, “Exciting.”

From the way the apps target demographic ineract with the brand’s message, the brand has their formula locked down to the T.