The Returns on Vision: What Rwanda’s Sports Investments Reveal About Long-Term Brand Building

Welcome to the Mellow Madness update, a space for thinking out loud about strategy, execution, and how systems translate into real life. 

“What is the ROI?”

It is one of the most common questions I hear from clients.

ROI, or Return on Investment, is a perfectly reasonable thing to ask.

 Every business leader has a responsibility to understand whether money is creating value. 

Yet after more than two decades in branding and advertising, I have noticed

 that the question often reveals a deeper assumption: that every investment should be measurable in the short term.

Clients want to know how many leads a campaign generated this month. 

They want customer acquisition costs, lifetime value calculations, conversion rates, and quarterly returns. Increasingly, they want dashboards that can 

explain every dollar spent and every dollar earned.

The challenge is that some of the most valuable investments a business can make do not behave that way. Brand is one of them.

Last weekend reminded me why.

As an Arsenal supporter, Saturday night was difficult. Watching Arsenal

 lose the UEFA Champions League final on penalties hurt because 

opportunities like that do not come often. 

Reaching a Champions League final is an achievement in itself, particularly 

for a club whose journey back to Europe’s elite has taken years of rebuilding, patience, and belief. 

Yet less than twenty-four hours later, London was celebrating a 

Premier League title that Arsenal supporters had waited twenty years to see again. An entire generation had grown up without experiencing that moment.

At the same time, my attention kept drifting elsewhere. Basketball has always been my first sporting love. 

While much of the sporting world was focused on football, I found myself equally fascinated by what was happening in Kigali. RSSB Tigers had reached the Basketball Africa League final in their debut season, becoming the first Rwandan club to do so. 

Across the city, there was a sense that something significant was 

unfolding, not just for a team but for a country that has deliberately 

invested in building its presence within global sport.

As I watched these events unfold, I found myself thinking about the 

kinds of questions that are rarely asked when history is being made. 

Nobody standing in a trophy parade asks about customer acquisition 

costs. Nobody celebrating a championship asks for a quarterly 

performance report. Nobody studies a city hosting a major international event and immediately asks for last month’s conversion rate. 

Yet years earlier, when the investments that made those moments

 possible were first proposed, those are precisely the questions that

 would have dominated the discussion.

This is the challenge with vision. Most people evaluate decisions based on present circumstances, while visionary leaders make decisions based on future possibilities. One group asks whether an investment makes sense today. The other asks whether it will make sense ten years from now.

For years, Rwanda’s investments in tourism branding, sports partnerships, hospitality, infrastructure, convention facilities, and international visibility campaigns have attracted both admiration and skepticism. 

Questions were raised about sponsorships, partnerships, and the 

resources required to support them. Those questions were understandable because the outcomes were uncertain. The costs were visible. The benefits 

were not.

Yet brand building has never been about producing immediate certainty.

One of the biggest misconceptions in business is that brand is a marketing activity. It is not. Marketing communicates value. Brand creates value.

 Marketing helps people choose you today. Brand influences whether they remember, trust, and prefer you tomorrow. At its highest level, brand is

 not a communications exercise at all. It is a strategic exercise.

This is why I increasingly see vision and brand as two sides of the 

same coin.

Vision is the future story a leader wants to make true. Brand is the systematic process of making that future believable.

When leaders invest in a brand, they are not simply investing in 

awareness. They are investing in perception, reputation, positioning,

 trust, relevance, and association. These assets rarely appear on a

 balance sheet, yet they influence almost every decision people make.

 Customers choose brands they trust. Investors back stories they believe. Tourists visit destinations that capture their imagination. Talent joins organizations that stand for something meaningful.

The difficulty, of course, is that none of these outcomes develop 

overnight.

Had Rwanda’s sports partnerships been evaluated solely through 

short-term Return on Investment metrics, many of them might never 

have survived. The value was not in a single match, a single season, 

or a single campaign. The value was in shaping how millions of people around the world would think about Rwanda over a period of years. 

Brand works through accumulation. Every partnership adds another 

signal. Every event adds another association. Every successful 

experience adds another layer of trust. 

Over time, those signals compound into something much larger than the individual investments that created them.

The same principle applies to businesses. Too many organizations 

abandon brand-building efforts because they expect strategic

 investments to produce tactical results. They want long-term assets to behave like short-term campaigns. 

They expect reputation to be built at the speed of advertising. In doing 

so, they often sacrifice the very thing that could have created sustainable competitive advantage.

What struck me most about last weekend was not the trophies themselves.

 It was the realization that none of those celebrations had begun this weekend. Arsenal’s success was the result of decisions made years ago. 

PSG’s rise to the summit of European football was built through years of ambition, investment, and persistence.