A day in the life of TomTom South Africa’s marketing manager Charlotte Saayman starts with breakfast at Corner Bistro in Craighall, Johannesburg. Both of us are late because of traffic on William Nicol and Corlett Drive at that time of the day but Bronwyn Tippett, marketing manager of Tracker, is already there. Over several cups of coffee and a tasty omelette, Saayman and Tippett discuss marketing budgets (or rather, the lack thereof), the ins and outs of social media branding, whether PigSpotter is a good or bad thing for the vehicle tracking business and a joint game project the two want to develop using Facebook. There’s a TomTom GO 750 unit on the table for Tippett to take away, complete with pictures of Katherine Street in Sandton on the box. TomTom is a relatively recent brand name in this country and the operation is lean. How did it get localised names?

“We’ve worked hard at localising content given how few people there are in the office,” says Saayman. “We’ve been in the country since 2007, but it was through a distributor – the Core Group – and we’ve had an office under the TomTom brand for two years now. Our first shipment hit the country in September 2008 so it’s really recent. We were going to get a country manager from Amsterdam but that fell through so we have to start the process all over again.”