Who is speaking for your brand?

BY RUMBIDZAI MASHAYAHANYA
In February 2016, a single WhatsApp message sent depositors hurrying to NMB Bank.
It claimed, on the word of an unnamed senior manager, that the bank was headed for curatorship, and it urged account holders to move their money as fast as humanly possible.
The claim was false. The bank’s chief executive said its liquidity was sound and the Reserve Bank called the message malicious. But by then the rumour had a head start, and the bank was fighting to contain a flight of depositors that no balance sheet had predicted.
Ten years on, the lesson has only sharpened.
The same medium now carries cloned voices, generated images and fake profiles that can look more convincing than the real thing. Your brand no longer lives only in your logo, your annual report and your advertising. It lives wherever someone can say something about you, and increasingly wherever something can be said as you.
Consistency, reputation, purpose and customer experience, the pillars we have explored in this series, are now tested in public, in real time, on a phone. Here are four lessons, drawn largely from Zimbabwean experience, on how to protect and grow a brand in the digital and AI age.

Firstly, own your channels before you need them. In September 2025, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe had to warn the public about fake social media profiles impersonating its governor, Dr John Mushayavanhu.
The bank stated that the governor has no personal accounts and pointed people to its verified channels on X, Facebook and WhatsApp. A separate fake post attributed to him a promise of US$6,500 a month for anyone who opened a bank account with US$230. The central bank called the message false and malicious and said it had reported the accounts behind it.
The private sector is not spared. WestProp Holdings chief executive Ken Sharpe has had to alert the public to multiple fraudulent accounts using his name to solicit money from unsuspecting people, and the company asked anyone who spots one to report it to its communications office. Notice what both institutions could do. They could point to a clear, official source of truth. Where that source is missing, impostors will happily supply one.
This is brand infrastructure, and it deserves the same discipline we give to a balance sheet. Claim every handle on every major platform and verify it. Publish your official channels on your website, in your email signatures and on your invoices. Name the person who owns the first response, and agree in advance how quickly a holding statement goes out. Brief your staff too, because their personal posts and WhatsApp groups are channels whether you planned it or not. In the digital age, hours are the difference between a rumour and a run.
There is also an upside. A brand with an active, trusted official presence earns the benefit of the doubt, because its customers already know its voice. When the next rumour comes, they know where to look and whom to believe.
Secondly, you need to be accountable for every machine that speaks in your name. when we glean on the global arena, the cost of getting this wrong is already visible. In 2024, the engineering firm Arup confirmed that one of its Hong Kong employees had been deceived into transferring roughly US$25 million after a video call in which senior colleagues, reportedly including the finance chief, turned out to be deepfakes. That same year, a Canadian tribunal held Air Canada responsible for wrong guidance its website chatbot gave a grieving passenger about bereavement fares, rejecting the argument that the chatbot was a separate entity.
The principle travels well to Harare, Bulawayo and Lusaka. Zimbabwean businesses are rightly adopting AI to draft content, answer customers on WhatsApp and make sense of data. Reports that have been featured in many mediums, often describe how firms are adopting and using AI to process mobile transactions, social media activity and banking data to sharpen strategy. None of that is wrong. What goes wrong is treating the tool as a delegate with no supervisor. If a chatbot misquotes your refund policy, a generated image misrepresents your product or a cloned voice authorises a payment, the customer will not blame the software. They will blame you.
So counter this by setting guardrails. Train customer facing chatbots only on approved, current policy and give them a quick route to a human. Require a named person to review anything AI generated before it carries your name. Write a short staff policy on which tools may be used and what data must never be pasted into them, mindful of your duties under Zimbabwe’s Cyber and Data Protection Act. And agree a verification routine for any payment request that arrives by voice or video, however familiar the face.
Third, always let people take part in the brand, not merely watch it. Why? Because digital attention is cheap but digital affection is not. Consider the Share a Coke Zimbabwe campaign, which was named Best Social Media and Digital Campaign at the 2025 Marketers Association of Zimbabwe awards. Its power was not the bottle. It was the invitation. Around a Harare relaunch event and across social platforms, people hunted for their own names and turned the hunt into memes, reels and posts the brand did not have to write. Personalisation became participation, and participation became reach.
AI now lets even small Zimbabwean enterprises personalise, from tailored offers to replies in Shona, Ndebele or English. The temptation is to automate the warmth out of it. Resist. Use AI to remember a customer’s name, and use people to mean it.
The strongest local proof that the product experience is the brand experience is EcoCash, crowned the 2025 Superbrand overall winner. Its brand is not a slogan on a billboard, although there are plenty of those. It is a payment that clears, a wallet that works at the tuckshop and a confirmation message that arrives on time. In a digital economy, every failed transaction, slow reply or broken link is a brand statement. Marketing makes the promise. The product proves it.
Social media makes every brand feel watched, and that can distort judgement.
At one covening for markerters in Zimbabwe in July this year, one speaker urged marketers not to be bullied by social media, since online reactions represent only a portion of stakeholders and should not be mistaken for the whole market. A loud comment section is a signal, not a verdict.
The opposite error is just as costly, which is to ignore the digital room entirely. A 2025 audit of 34 Zimbabwean corporate brands by Able Mukondo found that the average TikTok presence had roughly 1,588 followers and posted about seven times in 105 days, even though TikTok scored the highest engagement of any platform studied. The audience is there, yet too many brands are not. Silence online, as I have argued before, is also a message.
The smarter path is data guided by judgement. AI powered platform that aims to help Zimbabwean brands assess creators on audience relevance, engagement quality and campaign suitability before they commit money, serve brands better than chasing follower counts that will not win the future of influencer marketing. That is the right instinct for every brand. Track what reflects trust, such as how fast complaints are resolved, how many customers return, how many refer a friend and how sentiment moves over months, and review those numbers in the boardroom as seriously as the financials.
These lessons matter beyond our borders. African business is increasingly cross border, and the first meeting between a Zimbabwean company and a Zambian, Kenyan or Nigerian counterpart now often happens on a screen. A verified channel, a responsible approach to AI and a consistent digital presence does the work that a shared network once did. They tell a stranger that you can be trusted before anyone has shaken a hand.
Zimbabwe starts from a stronger position than we sometimes admit. Our marketers are winning recognition at home for digital work rooted in real experience, from Econet’s Victoria Falls Marathon campaign, honoured as the best social media and digital campaign in the 2023 awards, to the Share a Coke activation. Mobile money has taught millions of Zimbabweans to transact by phone, which means digital trust is already part of daily life. The question is whether brands will deserve it.
Before your next executive meeting, put four questions on the agenda. If a rumour about us began on WhatsApp at six this evening, who would respond by seven, through which channel and with what message? Which machines speak in our name, and who is accountable for each one? Do our customers help tell our story, or do we simply broadcast it? Which numbers on our dashboard measure trust, and which merely measure noise?
These are not questions for the marketing department alone. As I argued in my last column on executive branding, leaders are part of the brand’s voice, and, as Dr Mushayavanhu and Mr Sharpe discovered, a favourite target for impersonators. A chief executive who has built a credible, verified and consistent presence gives customers and partners something solid to check a rumour against. An absent one leaves a vacancy that someone else will fill.
The age of AI has not changed what a brand is. A brand remains a promise, kept consistently over time. What has changed is the speed at which that promise is tested, and the number of voices, honest and otherwise, now speaking on a brand’s behalf. NMB’s ordeal in 2016 was an early warning, delivered by nothing more sophisticated than a WhatsApp forward. The next warning may arrive as a cloned voice or a convincing fake video. The brands that withstand it will be those that built their channels, their guardrails and their customer relationships long before the crisis, not during it.
So, ask yourself, honestly. If your brand were impersonated, misquoted and rumoured about by lunchtime tomorrow, would your customers know where to find the truth, and would they believe you when they got there?