May I warmly congratulate the Publisher of City People, Mr. SeyeKehinde and the team on the event of your 24TH anniversary. In the last 24 years, you have weekly delighted Nigerians as you changed the face of entertainment media. Yours has become a strong media brand and a household name.
May I also thank you most sincerely for inviting me to share few words with your team on the topic KEEPING A BRAND AFLOAT DURING TURBULENT TIMES.
INTRODUCTION
Your topic is most auspicious and relevant. Yours is a truly strong and relevant brand in the space where you operate. However I have never stopped wondering how publications have continued to come out daily or weekly as the case may be, in spite of the myriad of challenges facing publishing. And it is in this respect that I warmly salute your doggedness and industry.
WHAT IS THE BRAND?
I will like to be as fundamental as possible by asking us: WHAT A BRAND IS? Growing up as I started my career in Advertising in LINTAS nearly 40 years ago, life was less complex, and so was the definition of the Brand; a Brand simply defined as PRODUCT + NAME. Which meant Soap + Lux = A Brand. Car + Passat = A Brand. Condom + Durex = A Brand. And looking back with some nostalgia, I truly wish we had left it at that. On the other hand, I am glad that we did not, because during the period, the Brand has assumed such amazing relevance to our lives and so much has been done by scholars and students of Marketing Communication to enhance the subject matter and make it continuously relevant.
So today, what would we refer to as the Brand? Trust me, the last time I checked we had more than 50 different definitions of what the Brand is, from the very academic to the almost mundane; it’s amazing that almost everyone has an opinion on the Brand. For me, by far the most enduring definition of the Brand was given by the former Chairman of Ogilvy Worldwide, the charismatic Shelly Lazarus; hear it:
“A Brand is not just what you say it is; the Brand is the totality of what the consumer experiences. From quality, to taste, to packaging, to the retail environment, to line extensions, to ergonomics, design and colour, to sales promotions, to price, to corporate reputations and public relations, to the sales force and service experiences, to the delivery trucks, to word-of-mouth, to telemarketing scripts and receptionists style, to the way you answer the telephone, to prejudices and attitudes, to collective and individual memories, to history: Scraps and straws that add up to a company’s most valuable asset: a 360°Brand.”
Apart from the fact that this definition is profound, Shelly established a fact most organisations are not aware of: that the most valuable asset that any company or organization owns, even individuals, is the Brand. Unilever without Omo, Close-Up, Sunlight etc., has scant value. Coca-Cola without its brands of Coke, Sprite etc., is nearly worthless. And this is the way organisations and individuals and even nations must approach the sensitive issues of Branding. Hopefully I will have the time to extend this to Nation Building and the efforts we have made to brand or rebrand Nigeria.
What do these brands all have in common: Nike, McDonald, Pepsi-Cola, Coca-Cola, GTBank, Nescafe, Dangote, MTN? They are all successful brands. In building an enduring brand, first we must understand that a brand is much more than a tagline a logo. In a general sense, a strong, successful brand will permeate every aspect of the organization or even an individual. A brand is everything a company does. And as Shelly Lazarus said, the way employees answer the phone, the way you greet customers, deal with constituents both internally and externally, dress, speak, respond to people all combine to define the brand. In branding, what you are doing is making a promise to customers, and everything you do will either enhance or detract from the brand. Make no mistake about it: a recognizable and loved brand is one of the most valuable assets a company owns. According to a Nielsen Survey 59% of consumers prefer to buy new products from brands familiar to them.
So how do you keep a brand afloat during turbulent times?
A QUICK DESCRIPTION OF THE TURBULENT TIMES
Nigeria is in a recession, and possibly one of the worst in the nation’s history, made worse by an economy that had performed poorly in the last 24 months, and then weakened by Covid-19 in the last three quarters of 2020.
In every recession, we find ourselves in poorly charted waters because no two downturns are exactly alike. However, in studying the marketing successes and failures of dozens of companies as they have navigated recessions from the 1970s onward, we have identified patterns in consumers’ behaviour and companies’ strategies that either propel or undermine performance. Companies need to understand the evolving consumption patterns and fine-tune our strategies accordingly.
Of course during recessions, consumers set stricter priorities and reduce their spending. As sales start to drop, businesses typically cut costs, reduce prices, and postpone new investments. Marketing expenditures in areas from communication to research are often slashed across the board; we all know that in many instances, such cost cutting decisions are indiscriminate, and can even be a mistake.
WHERE ARE WE?
If we are going to be discussing how to survive the turbulence in this very uncertain environment and situation, we necessarily need to understand some details about the operating environment, so that in discussing possible solutions, we will be closer on target.
Locally and globally, economies are at their poorest in more than a 100 years. Even before the Covid-19 Pandemic, the global economy had looked shaky as the price of oil wobbled. More so for Nigeria as oil and gas remain our mainstay for cash. Income from Brent is likely to remain stagnant for many months around the $40/45 per barrel region.
This situation has affected everything from government revenue to financial services, FMCG, other services etc. In Nigeria, while the telecoms appear to be very active in this season, they also will be affected if people are not working and earning. The issue of opportunity cost comes in: should I buy a magazine or a loaf of bread for my family? If we look at what happened in Venezuela, a major oil producer like Nigeria, when it went through its crisis, even telecoms were severely affected.
Sadly, Nigeria has become a net borrower again, and recently collected another tranche of $3.4b from the IMF, with another application pending before the World Bank. The implication of sustained borrowing is more pressure on our income when we service the loans, leaving nothing for infrastructural development. The global financial community is likely to come to our rescue: IMF, World Bank, ADB, the Chinese etc. They cannot allow the Nigerian economy to go belly up, as this can lead to many things, including unrest and political turmoil that can spread to and have a serious ricochet effect on the sub region all the way to the Gambia.
As a run up to the end of 2020, we are likely to still be cleaning up on the effects of C-19, except the vaccine has come out; indeed, the whole world, and Nigeria are bracing for a major round of lockdown again. In 6 months, it’s almost certain the world will have a vaccine. Then we must begin to look at repairing our economy. So in essence, we are looking at a tougher time the rest of 2020 and the first two quarters of 2021, during which we cannot meet our projected growth forecast and will now be lucky if the economy grows by 1%.At the start of 2020, Nigeria was forecasting economic growth of 7%, but most observers found this estimate over-optimistic. In January the IMF forecast economic growth of 2.5% in 2020 and in 2021. This would be below sub-Saharan Africa’s average growth rate of 3.5% in both years. The good news is that if some urgent structural changes are made, we may experience recovery from the end of Q2 2021. This is where we are; this is where City People is operating and will operate in the next few months when we hope for a change.
