We’re trying to understand something simple.
“Why do people choose one business and eliminate another?”
ITẸ began with a simple question. Why do customers choose some businesses and ignore others?
The deeper we looked, the less satisfying simple answers became.
Psychology explained part of the story. But so did money. Culture. Environment. Trust. Availability. Experience. Exposure. Convenience. And sometimes, things we hadn’t considered.
“Stop crossing your fingers every time a customer approaches your business.”
Our central ambition is replacing the anxious guesswork African business owners experience daily with empirical understanding of buying behaviour and decision criteria.
Most business literature taught in business schools or shared on social media is imported directly from Western markets. It assumes credit cards that never fail, courts that enforce refunds in 48 hours, and consumers whose primary obstacle is boredom.
In African commerce, consumer reality is fundamentally different. A customer balancing unpredictable fuel prices, banking network latency, and the constant fear of counterfeit goods behaves with sharp rationality. When businesses dismiss that customer as “unserious”, it is the business that fails the test of understanding.
Hephzibah
Founder & Lead ResearcherHephzibah leads ITẸ’s research into customer behaviour and buying decisions across Nigeria and Africa. His work combines direct field observation, business research, conversations with business owners and consumers, and continuous testing of assumptions.
Rather than treating commercial strategy as an exercise in marketing hype, his methodology treats customer choice as an observable empirical phenomenon. He works directly across open market clusters, digital commerce channels, and commercial boardrooms to reconcile boardroom beliefs with street reality.
Our Three Principles of Inquiry
We question our own observations
An observation can be wrong when the context is incomplete. What looks like price resistance is often delivery anxiety. What looks like disinterest is often fatigue.
We study the environment
People don’t make decisions in a vacuum. Culture, purchasing power, traffic constraints, and institutional fragility shape every single commercial choice.
We keep researching
One observation is not a universal truth. When our experiments fail or a consumer behaves contrary to our model, we update our public records accordingly.
ITẸ is written with the sub-dot under the E (Ẹ). Pronounced “ee-teh”.
The bespoke brand mark features the signature crossbar-serif ‘I’, balanced geometric ‘T’ and ‘E’ with the circular sub-dot (Ẹ), set in Forest Green (#081B14) and Gold (#AC824B).