Meet Bob Atuheirwe Norman: Our Vibrant Country Manager, Uganda
About Bob
Bob joined the MarketForce 360 team in 2019, leading Business Development for Mesozi Inc and Marketforce360 in Uganda. Previously he had been part of leading teams in the business development of digital channels with Stanbic Bank and also previously heading the Information systems team at Uganda Securities Exchange. Bob brings with him more than 12 years of technology innovation and business development, as well as cross-cultural collaboration on various projects within East Africa.
In his free time, Bob is an aspiring laureate, spending most of his time writing and reading, swimming, or playing basketball. He loves to engage with charities in his community and is one of the founders of Six and Dove, a local charity in Uganda. He also participates in creative spaces like DIGASA which occasionally runs events for creatives. He believes a community is always almost as strong as its cultures and is passionate about events that bring people together to share ideas and most especially to improve each other by sharing knowledge and insights in any form possible. Bob believes that the soul of any society can always be seen in the level of empathy it has.
In his own words: Why Bob believes in MarketForce
Bob wanted to share with us how MarketForce is redefining the customer journey, and why he believes that this is what makes MarketForce a great company to work for.
“Most companies look at the average retailer more like a conduit to a market. A gateway to the final customer or consumer. In so doing, they almost always design their products and surrounding ecosystems around that final customer, picking on the various tastes and preferences of that customer. Very quickly, the value chain becomes part of the customer experience rather than being part of the product experience. I know, I might be putting forward a rather ambiguous proposition. One might argue that being part of the value chain which delivers the final product is in a way part of the product consumption. I think not.
At MarketForce we look at a product that the consumer takes as the whole embodiment of the product itself. The product can not exist without the retailer, the retailer can not exist without the distributor, and so on. By doing so we no longer look at the delivery as various, separate compartments, each of them working to bring a product to life, but one whole body working to produce a product, which the consumer finally enjoys.
We look at the customer journey not starting simply when the final customer starts to interact with the product, but when the product starts its journey to the final consumer.
You wonder how MarketForce then comes in, in all of this. Delivering a product to the customer is not simply a journey of manufacturer/service provider, distributor, retailer and finally consumer, but rather is the complex relationship that delivers this product in a way that the consumer is happy to consume it, that is either as a product or a service.
MarketForce in itself is a suite of services that focuses on the entire value chain rather than the consumer/customer, it focuses on the workforce that works to deliver this product or service to the final consumer by providing solutions for the various bottlenecks they might face, from commission calculations, merchandising, customer insights and surveys, retailer/distributor credit scoring to allow credit extensions, integrated payment solutions and tax revenue collections. This list is endless. In this way, MarketForce becomes the oil that eliminates all the frictions typically present across the distribution value chain. MarketForce focuses on this critical value chain to make it easy for the internal customers to be happy and deliver a product and or service as efficiently as possible while maintaining visibility over their business.
With this unique approach to closing the gap between the consumer/customer and the supply value chain in the African market, I find that MarketForce presents a strong proposition to the largely untapped opportunity to improve the African consumer experience.”
