Murat Gebeceli has only recently taken on responsibility for Sony’s marketing across the Middle East and Africa, but South Africa already sits near the top of his agenda. In his first major interview since stepping into the role, he talks about why the country demands its own strategy, what “data-driven” marketing really looks like when perfect information doesn’t exist, and why the future of Sony’s brand here depends as much on creators and communities as it does on products.
“South Africa remains one of Sony’s most strategic markets in the Middle East and African regions,” Gebeceli says, citing sustained demand for premium experiences across personal audio, gaming, home entertainment and digital imaging. That’s not a small claim inside a region that runs from Riyadh to Lagos and covers some of the widest gaps in purchasing power anywhere in the world.
It hasn’t always looked the same, either. “Our focus has evolved over the years,” he says, “from expanding our footprint, to building deeper engagement with consumers by bringing globally relevant innovations to the local market and strengthening partnerships with retailers and creators.” The next phase, in his telling, is more connected and experience-led, aimed at a customer base he describes as increasingly informed and intentional about what it buys.
None of which means South Africa gets treated as a smaller copy of the regional strategy. “While South Africa is part of our MEA organisation, we certainly don’t approach it as simply an extension of the region,” Gebeceli says. “It is a distinct market with its own economic realities, consumer expectations, and retail landscape, so our strategy is tailored accordingly.”
There’s a surprisingly pragmatic definition of what “data-driven” actually means at the heart of Sony’s strategy.
Murat Gebeceli runs marketing for Sony across the Middle East and Africa, a patchwork of markets so uneven that treating them as one region rarely works. South Africa gets folded into that patchwork on an org chart. In practice, Gebeceli says, it runs on its own logic, built from whatever signal his team can get its hands on.
“Being data-driven isn’t about having perfect data,” he tells us. “It’s about making better decisions with the insights available.”
It’s a practical stance, and one that fits the market. South Africa doesn’t have the retail analytics infrastructure of, say, the UK or Japan, so leaning on one clean dashboard was never really an option. Gebeceli’s team works more like a newsroom piecing together a story from several sources at once: retail and channel insights, digital analytics, consumer research, social listening, direct feedback from partners on the ground, and increasingly AI tools trained to spot patterns humans would miss. None of it is perfect on its own. Together, it’s enough to move fast and stay close to what’s actually happening in the market.
It’s also, pointedly, not the end of the sentence. “Marketing today must demonstrate clear business value,” Gebeceli says, and a big part of his first year is going into measurement and attribution rather than campaigns alone, so that media spend, creator partnerships and experiential marketing can all be judged against outcomes rather than vibes.
That precision doesn’t come from a marketing playbook. Gebeceli didn’t come up through brand marketing at all. He ran sales teams first, and he brings the distinction up more than once, unprompted.
“Sales knocks the ego out of you, honestly,” he says. “If a message can’t survive an actual sales conversation, it’s not ready to ship. I stopped believing in one global message fits all, because what works in one region falls flat in another, and you learn that fast when you’re accountable for the number in each territory. I also got brutally honest with pipeline data, because it tells you the truth about your marketing faster than any brand tracker will.”
He carried the same instinct into digital imaging, the category he ran before this role. “That whole category comes down to one gap,” he says, “the difference between a spec sheet full of megapixels and sensor sizes, and what a photographer actually feels the moment they pick up the camera and take the shot. Sales taught me to start from that feeling, not the spec sheet.”
It’s a small line, but it explains a lot about how Sony is currently trying to sell in South Africa, a market where the product range is genuinely wide. Audio buyers are choosing between the ULT series and the 1000X series, the latter just turned ten and got a fresh Collexion drop to mark it. Imaging spans the Alpha and ZV series through to the Cinema Line FX cameras used by working filmmakers. Home entertainment is anchored by the BRAVIA Theatre lineup. Gebeceli doesn’t try to collapse that into one customer profile. “Every consumer’s journey is different,” he says, which is corporate-speak for: stop trying to build one campaign for a musician, a wedding photographer and someone upgrading their home cinema setup.
There’s one audience Gebeceli keeps circling back to across all of this, South Africa’s creator community, and the commitment goes further than sponsoring a launch event. Alpha Femme, a photography programme built around women creators, has stuck around long enough to stop looking like a stunt. Sony Alpha Universe, the Sony Alpha Festival and a Creators Convention run alongside it, aimed at giving photographers and filmmakers a place to develop skills and show their work, not just buy a camera. Sonyworld.co.za, the brand’s direct-to-consumer platform that launched last year, cuts retail out of the loop entirely for Sony’s most loyal buyers, with membership perks attached.
The strategy also reflects a broader shift happening across consumer technology. Increasingly, the story isn’t about the hardware alone, but the experiences built around it, a trend I’ve looked at previously in The smartphone is dead. The AI computer is replacing it. Sony’s emphasis on creators, communities and services suggests it’s reading the same market signals.
None of this is unique to Sony. Every camera and audio brand on earth is chasing the same portfolio-building, TikTok-native customer right now. What’s notable is how much weight Gebeceli puts on this specific group when asked, twice, in different ways, what Sony still needs to build in a market it’s operated in for decades. Not shelf space. Not awareness, which he says the brand already has. Credibility with a younger, digitally connected buyer who responds to authentic experiences over traditional marketing messages, in his words, and treats a creator programme as more convincing than an ad.
All of which raises the obvious question. Ask Gebeceli what success looks like twelve months from now and the answer is long, the way these answers usually are: stronger brand preference across categories, deeper engagement through influencer and gaming and music partnerships, growth in web traffic, CRM and e-commerce, tighter retail execution at launch, and a smoother customer journey from purchase through after-sales support.
Strip out the list and what’s left is a simpler idea he keeps returning to under different questions. “The first thing I want to do is ensure that Sony’s marketing in South Africa feels genuinely local,” Gebeceli says. “While we benefit from a strong global brand, it’s important that our campaigns reflect South African culture, creativity and consumer needs through relevant storytelling, meaningful partnerships and experiences that resonate with local audiences. We want people to see Sony not just as a global technology leader, but as a brand that understands and celebrates the communities it serves.”
Gebeceli is betting that South African consumers can already tell a campaign that was built for them from one that was simply translated for them, and that Sony has real room to close that gap ahead of its rivals.
It’s a bet that plays to his own history. Sales taught him to notice the difference between a spec sheet and a feeling. Marketing now has a year to prove it can do the same, at scale, for an entire market.