Open Squares Consulting has been named a Strategic Partner for The New Pour Summit ’26, bringing a specialist perspective on African consumers, culture and brand strategy to the July 25 gathering in Nairobi.
The partnership strengthens the summit’s focus on understanding the forces shaping consumer behaviour across African beverage markets, where differences in culture, community, purchasing behaviour and consumption occasions can have a direct impact on how brands are built and positioned.
Open Squares Africa is a marketing and strategy consulting firm founded by Feyi Olubodun, with a stated focus on helping businesses navigate African markets. The firm describes its work around strategy consulting, execution support and market-entry consulting, positioning itself as a guide for companies seeking to understand and participate in Africa’s consumer opportunity. That focus makes consumer understanding central to its relevance to the beverage industry.
Africa’s consumers are often discussed as a single growth opportunity, but the commercial reality is considerably more complex. Differences in culture, income, geography, language, social structures and consumption habits can influence how consumers interpret products, brands and experiences.
For beverage companies, those differences can affect everything from product development and packaging to pricing, communication, distribution and the occasions around which drinks are consumed. Open Squares has built much of its intellectual positioning around this challenge.
Olubodun is the author of The Villager: How Africans Consume Brands, a book built around a proprietary framework for understanding African consumer psychology. His work has also focused on helping multinational and indigenous businesses understand how to compete more effectively in African markets.
The consultancy’s approach has subsequently been associated with the Villager Map™, a framework used to examine African consumer behaviour and translate cultural understanding into marketing and go-to-market strategy. The framework has become part of Open Squares’ broader proposition around helping businesses understand Africa beyond surface-level assumptions. That distinction is increasingly important for beverage brands.
A product can be technically strong and commercially well priced, yet struggle to gain traction if its proposition does not connect with the cultural context in which consumers encounter it. Conversely, brands that understand the social meanings attached to drinking occasions can identify opportunities that may not be obvious from conventional demographic or category data alone.
For an industry dealing with rapidly changing consumer expectations, that creates a strategic imperative: understand the consumer before attempting to predict the market. This is one of the questions Open Squares will bring into The New Pour Summit ’26.
The summit is built around the theme “Liquid Resilience: Africa Future-Proofing Beverage Brands in Africa’s VUCA Market.” The programme examines how beverage businesses can respond to volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity across African markets, with sessions covering brand building, market intelligence, innovation, investment, route-to-market, culture and consumer trends.
Open Squares’ participation is particularly relevant to the summit’s brand-building and consumer-intelligence agenda. Feyi Olubodun is scheduled to deliver a masterclass titled “The Village Map: Unpacking the African Beverage Consumer Through the Lenses of Commerce, Culture, and Community.” The session is designed around the relationship between consumer behaviour and the wider cultural and commercial environment in which African beverage brands operate.
The subject reflects a broader shift in how consumer intelligence is being applied across the beverage industry. Traditional segmentation can tell businesses who consumers are. Cultural and behavioural analysis can help explain how those consumers see themselves, what influences their decisions and why particular products or brands become relevant within specific communities and occasions. That distinction matters as African beverage markets become increasingly competitive.
Brands are competing not only on taste and price, but also on identity, experience, cultural relevance, convenience and the ability to fit into consumers’ increasingly varied lifestyles. For companies operating across multiple African markets, the challenge is compounded by the fact that strategies that resonate in one market may not necessarily transfer unchanged into another.
Open Squares’ Strategic Partner role therefore adds a consumer and cultural intelligence layer to the summit’s broader examination of resilience. The consultancy’s work extends beyond theory. Its founder has held senior leadership roles in the marketing communications industry, including serving as CEO of Insight Publicis, while continuing to advise businesses on strategy, innovation and the African consumer.
Open Squares has also been recognised in the 2025 MEA Business Awards, where it was listed as Best Boutique Marketing Strategy Consulting Firm 2025 – Africa and received a Marketing Innovation Award. The awards listing describes the firm as helping businesses navigate African markets through consumer understanding and culturally grounded go-to-market strategies.
Its involvement with The New Pour Summit comes as the event brings together more than 20 speakers from across African markets to examine the commercial forces shaping the continent’s beverage industry. The summit will cover market intelligence, channels and distribution, product innovation, capital and investment, advertising, brand and marketing, culture and consumer trends, and business turnaround strategies.
The New Pour Summit ’26 will take place on July 25, 2026, at the Golden Tulip Westlands in Nairobi, with online participation available through its hybrid format. For Open Squares, the partnership places its consumer strategy expertise within an industry conversation where understanding the African consumer is becoming increasingly consequential. For the summit, it reinforces a central proposition: future-proofing beverage brands requires more than responding to market numbers. It requires understanding the people behind those numbers.
Because Africa’s beverage opportunity is not simply about how many consumers are entering the market. It is about understanding how they live, what they value, where culture influences their choices and what makes a brand meaningful enough to earn a place in their lives. That is the consumer question Open Squares Consulting brings to The New Pour Summit ’26.
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