Episode
Episode 184 - Reinventing Brands Globally at Africa Online, Kodak, & Celtel: The Making of Tito Alai | Part 2
- Published
- Jul 11, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3636
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Summary
Part 1 of my conversation with Tito Alai ended just as he was leaving Unilever and joining Africa Online. Part 2 begins at that exact inflection point. After almost a decade in one of the world’s most sophisticated consumer-goods organizations, Tito deliberately moved into a young African internet business because he wanted a genuinely new learning curve. Africa Online was scaling across several markets at a time when the internet itself was still unfamiliar to most consumers and organisations on the continent. Tito explains what it meant to take the consumer understanding, organizational discipline and brand-management principles he had learned at Unilever and apply them inside a startup environment. The conversation has special personal resonance for me because Africa Online is also where I began my career. We revisit the company’s “My World, My Provider” era, the need to create consistency across countries and the importance of presenting one coherent narrative to customers, employees and investors. Tito then takes us into Eastman Kodak. He first managed consumer imaging across roughly 90 countries covering Africa, the Middle East and Central Europe before being appointed to lead the film category across Western Europe. His assignment was simple to describe but difficult to execute: find growth in a mature category. Tito explains why that meant taking market share from competitors—and how Kodak was already confronting the early strategic challenge of digital photography. The final chapter introduces Mo Ibrahim and the vision that became Celtel. Tito describes joining a group that believed Africans deserved mobile technology as good as anything available elsewhere, and we begin exploring how the company developed market-specific innovations rather than treating Afric…