Innovative fresh-fruit brand links to Amapiano music trend

South Africa’s preeminent apple and pear brand, Tru-Cape, is again stretching the envelope in its marketing activities to increase fresh fruit sales.

Tru-Cape, in what might even have been a global first for a fresh fruit brand, last year contracted the hip South African band, Sunset Sweatshop, to record their song, Takeaways from Nature and released the song across all streaming platforms and shared the associated music video extensively.

Now they are hitching their marketing waggon to one of the biggest music trends to hit Southern Africa – Amapiano.

Amapiano, according to Wikipedia, is the isiZulu and isiXhosa word for “the pianos”, and a style of House music that emerged in SA in 2012 but has found great favour recently with 920 million global streams, 4,2 billion TikTok views and is currently among global listeners, Africa’s largest music genre.

What characterises Amapiano is the wide percussive baseline and Log-Drum sound. The tempo tells a story too with between 108 and 115 beats per minute. Riffs on the Kwaito baseline are also signs of this DJ-mixed sound.

Singer and songwriter Gideon Hanekom, better known by his stage name, Gian Groen, wrote the original song as Tru-Cape’s Marketing Director, Conrad Fick, explains: “That jingle grew into a song and Tru-Cape is thrilled to share that not only has Gian Groen updated the song for Tru-Cape but Sunset Sweatshop, one of the hippest bands recorded it. Gian Groen’s music has evolved since his Spinnekop days with the likes of Anton Goosen, Valiant Swart and Koos Kombuis to working with the biggest names in South African music such as Kurt Darren, Laurike Rauch, Karen Zoid, Dozi and more recently Sunset Sweatshop. We are certain he will be excited to hear Amapiano mixes of his song too,” Fick says.

In a competition with a prize purse of R40,000 cash to a single winner, deejays are invited to create their own Tru-Cape Amapiano remix to the pinned Tru-Cape sound on the @Tru-Cape TikTok account with Sunset Sweatshop, and share it to their social-media accounts with the hashtag #TruCapeAmapiano.

The competition will run until October 14. The competition will run in two phases: Submissions from now until October 14 and  voting until October 24.

No entries received after midnight on 14 October 2022 will be considered.

The top 20 songs with the most likes on social-media platforms will move to the final phase where the public will vote for the winner. The song with the most votes via the Tru-Cape website will be the winner.

Link to the song on Tik-Tok here: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMF1nxpRN/ See Tru-Cape.com