Apostrophe is a strategic consultancy based in Johannesburg. We help marketing leaders set the strategy, modernise how marketing works, and make the structural calls on partners, agencies and teams that turn plans into results.
Where we start
Services
Each service starts from one of three vantage points, and most reach across all three. The Missing Mark shows you where to begin.
Developing growth, marketing and communication strategy, from brand communication architecture to channel planning across paid, owned and earned media, grounded in your business objectives, audiences and market position.
Structured workshops that take leadership teams from evidence to decisions: interrogating audience, market and revenue data, defining the real barriers to growth, and agreeing initiatives with clear owners.
Stress-testing strategy against the futures your market could face: a channel you depend on fading, a challenger rewriting the category, new rules on customer data, or AI changing how customers find you. We map those futures and turn them into an innovation agenda of prioritised, owned initiatives.
Performance frameworks tied to your marketing objectives, contract and remuneration review, and, where change is needed, a selection and transition process that protects campaigns already in market.
Identifying, structuring and brokering the platform, content, telecoms and technology partnerships that open new audiences, capabilities and revenue.
Designing the audit framework, selecting and briefing an accredited third-party auditor, and overseeing the work on your behalf.
Modernising how marketing works: the technology and data stack, measurement the board trusts, and the right balance of human and artificial intelligence, with teams equipped to use both well.
Assessing agency, in-house and embedded models for media and creative against your objectives, and designing the structure that gives you central oversight of the whole portfolio.
Approach
Recommended starting point
A structured diagnostic that looks at your marketing from the boardroom, your agencies and partners, and your platforms and data, finds the gaps that matter most, and turns them into a prioritised roadmap with clear owners.
Focused working sessions on a defined question, hypothesis or problem statement, with recommendations formalised in writing afterwards.
A defined set of workstreams with fixed fees, agreed deliverables and a set timeline, so you know the full cost before work begins.
Ventures
Alongside Apostrophe’s advisory work, its founder is a co-founder of Cultivation, an early-stage venture developing marketing and advertising technology. Its first tools are currently in development.
Cultivation operates independently of Apostrophe’s advisory practice. Our recommendations to clients are never tied to a product we have an interest in, and we disclose any such interest where it is relevant.
About
Nazeer Suliman, Apostrophe’s founder and director, started agency-side at Ogilvy, NotaBene and Mindshare, planning for Nike and Audi. Crossed to the client side to build the engines behind two challengers, Cell C and Virgin Mobile. Came back as Managing Director of Universal McCann South Africa, at the time the youngest MD of a foreign-owned media agency in the country. Turned the team around. Made the global Agency Innovators shortlist. Launched UM Connect, the agency’s digital arm, in 2009.
Platforms came next. The BBC in London had given him an early taste; Microsoft gave him Africa. He launched Windows Phone in South Africa and took Howzit MSN across the continent.
At Unilever he ran communications from Nigeria to Ethiopia, Knorr to Pond’s. Built mobile marketing at continental scale. Took Unilever Africa into e-commerce for the first time. Then London: global media for billion-euro brands like Dove and TRESemmé, a team across London, Singapore and New York, and a new way for Unilever to plan communication.
At Meta he built the partner ecosystem for Sub-Saharan Africa. More than 40 agencies. A new wave of creative, tech and commerce start-ups. Ad software built with Vodacom and Accenture.
“Innovation is about seeing the same old world with fresh eyes or from a different vantage point.”
Nazeer Suliman
Twenty-eight years. Every side of the table. Every scale, from South Africa to the world. Now there is Apostrophe.
Nazeer has bought marketing, sold it and built the systems behind it. Apostrophe puts that range to work: we know exactly where strategy breaks down, and how to fix it. Strategy is about choices. We help you make the right ones, then make sure they happen. On time. In full. Every engagement is senior-led.
Three sides of the industry
Three scales
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