Listen! A professor
of marketing is talking (II)
By Evelyn Oragwuncha
Monday, May 5, 2008
 |
Abimbola
Photo: Sun News Publishing |
| |
What are your views about brand Nigeria? What are those things
we need to fix? And those things we need to play up?
Brand Nigeria’ is at a pivotal stage at the moment.
We initially confused branding with advertising.
This is a common misconception. Let me explain further. Branding
is about the development of cohesive, appropriate and relevant
value propositions that you think your would-be customers
are likely to be delighted with. In that sense, although advertising
and other integrated brand promotions and communications are
important, it is essential to have coherent and relevant distinguishing
value propositions to communicate.
The same thing applies to nation branding. Therefore, spending
a lot of money to improve our image without changing our behaviours
and offering something good that we want to be known for,
does not seem to be the right approach in my view. If we are
now able to attract tourists and they arrive in our country
without adequate infrastructure, peace of mind to enjoy their
tours and stable political environment to reduce their perceived
risk of ineptitude, then our nation branding efforts are likely
to have the opposite effect.
We have a saying in marketing that nothing will kill a bad
product better than good advertising. So, if we have good
image-building advertising and no correspondent improvement
in our social, political and economic refinements, such ‘image’
building would only expose our soft underbelly of incompetence.
Take the example of China, after the Tiananmen Square massacre
in 1989, a lot of bad publicity followed. However, subsequent
economic development in China has virtually reduced the negative
effect of that massacre for the country.
For me, we need to fix our economy, and to do that our infrastructure
need fixing. We need to play up the size of our market, natural
and human resources potentialities. For example, a report
by the Marketing Science Institute looking ahead at the global
market place in 1973, 2003 and 2013, place Nigeria on the
list of five countries for growth in the world (along with
China, Brazil, India, Indonesia). We certainly have many things
going for us if we could only fix our infrastructure and in
turn the economy, and then also, maintain our fledging democracy.
Certain sectors of our economy are very competitive. Taking
the telecom sector, for instance, how can companies in that
sector compete effectively against one another?
For me, it is going back to the basics; and this includes
making sure that they have a robust value creation process
in place. The sector has to balance its technological benefits,
service elements and the logistics of delivery in sync with
one another. While this is easy to outline, in reality it
is more involving to link them together in a way that maximizes
consumer perceived value propositions as determined by the
customers’ willingness to pay premium price for their
offerings.
Even as saturated as the telecoms market is in Nigeria, a
fifth GSM Company, Mubadala, is coming up. What does this
portend for the existing operators?
I am in disagreement with you on this. Actually, the Nigerian
market is too large for just four operators. The number of
providers are currently not enough to provide (coverage or
they do not have enough capacity to provide seamless coverage).
I have noticed that a number of customers now own two or three
mobile numbers to provide them with full coverage across the
country.
My UK service provider 02 works effectively all the time,
not only in the UK, but everywhere around the world including
the provision of roaming services from the three key operators
in Nigeria. The irony of this is that my UK provider has better
coverage in Nigeria than all the local Nigerian providers.
In entrepreneurial strategy, people like Edith Penrose aptly
suggested that at a stage in the development of rapidly growing
entrepreneurial organizations (they are entrepreneurial in
taking the high risks that the Nigeria opportunity represented
before they enter the country), they would become so large
and enter an interstice stage. This is a stage in which such
organization will begin to shed ‘crumbs’ from
the market that they are too big to serve. Such small market
will in turn represent ‘niche’ market for small
operators that are likely to follow this success. It is this
interstice development that will give rise to more and more
firms as the market develop further to serve 100% of the market.
The challenge for MTNs of this world is to think imaginatively
ahead and strategize on how best to sustain their growth either
in the same market through horizontal or vertical diversification.
Such diversification would include technology and/or innovation-based,
geographical-based, or service-based diversification. For
example, there are a number of existing propositions that
the major players should be able to provide.
In my view, increased competition in the sector represents
challenges for the majors and opportunities for further developments
in service provisions for consumers and the Nigerian economy
in general.
In today’s crowded and ever dynamic market, what strategies
do you recommend that businesses could use to maintain their
competitive advantage?
Entrepreneurial marketing. This entails the development and
integration of marketing and entrepreneurial strategies of
creative destruction and innovativeness. ‘Creative destruction’
is an economic idea applied to marketing strategy and it is
at the heart of competitive economy. The late Joseph Schumpeter
was one of the most notable economist, who used the phrase
to describe the process of transformation that accompanies
radical innovation in an idea, product, process or service
development, leading to new product developments.
Its application in brand portfolio management entails the
process of brand mutation that continually develops new offerings
such as the creation of master brand, brand extension or category
extension to keep up with customers’ taste for newness
and uniqueness and maintain strong market presence.
Examples of this in the technology market are (i) the quick
obsolescence of fixed land-phone at the onset of cellular/mobile
phone, and (ii) the destruction of mainframe computer sector
with the advent of desktop PC. In the first example, the market
of fixed phone creatively became the main outlet for internet
access. Creative destruction occurs when something new and/or
innovative eliminates or surpasses something older through
innovative development.
In practice, the idea is that any organization with portfolio
of products must not view any as ‘sacred cow’
if it is no longer a viable offering in the light of better
alternative or technologically superior offerings. Hence,
if you have products that are no longer able to command leadership
position where it was able to do so previously, you have to
find innovative means of reviving such products or you re-invent
it.
Branding facilitates the process of gaining from entrepreneurial
marketing. Brands help organizations to build, nurture and
maintain their competitive edge in time and space. For example,
if you see a picture of the original Benz built more than
100 years ago, it is nothing more than a horseless carriage
compared to the state-of-the-art machine that is Mercedes
Benz today. However, the brand is the same, it is this ability
to renew, reinvent and help organizations to develop their
reputations that is the key reason why branding is at the
heart of the success story of developed economies.
Afterall, the majority of global brands such as Coca-Cola,
Adidas, Cadbury, Pampers, Dove, Nike, Gap, Guinness, etc earn
more from their marketing and branding efforts than from the
manufacturing aspect of their operations. Hence, branding
as competitive strategy of differentiation based on the development
and maintenance of innovative values (note that this is values,
not value) should not be equated with ‘cheap’
or ‘low-cost’. |
