Strategy In Session – Issue #3

Contributors: Nelson Moropana, Nkosazana Khumalo

Let’s be honest, no one really knows where the world is headed. While no one has answers, maybe we should be looking at ways to find answers.

In order understand the future of how things will need to be, especially in a business sense, we should start asking questions of how things once were.

More so, we need to ask what the foundation of ‘their’ existence was — theirs being brands or businesses, that influenced how these companies were founded, and are operating.

Brands, or ultimately businesses are created to serve a purpose within a certain state of time and context. I’m all for africanism because many brands tend to misconstrue the context of Africa e.g. A lot of international brands bring their strategies to Africa as if Africa is one country, forgetting that various countries have varied consumer behaviours.

Brands represent each generations’ aspirations, trends, movements of a particular time. In most of the cases, the purpose is linked to the state of the economic climate of the time, or an ‘era’ if you like, and a combination of these, including people’s believes — creates institutions with different motives and and systems — that serves the time well.

How is this any relevant thought?

Time changes, people grow & generations move…

The generation before us, is totally different from the present . The generation after us, will surely be different in its own way too. Each generation defines their own rules of success, of doing things, and operating.

In the mist of this, we find institutions or brands that still choose to remain the same.

Unchanged, untransformed and not innovative.

This sounds far fetched, but I will illustrate with a few points further below, but you can already think of Kodak, which failed to transform vs. Netflix, which is an excellent example of what it means to move with generations.

The unfortunate thing is that the lack of understanding generational movements leads to a great disconnect with consumers, and as communications specialists, we are tasked with the duty to connect the brand with the consumer, and so, given the modern crisis, what’s actually, the best way to go about this?

Let’s identify the two problems:

The first problem is that South African brands, big as they are, have not established themselves to be as meaningful to consumers, especially locally — over time. Additionally, SA brands have not proven to be ‘in touch’ with the generation it is currently ‘serving’, looking at today’s marketing landscape. A great example is how the likes of Shoprite/Multichoice (all South African born brands) are failing to expand fruitfully in the African market because they themselves did not do a thorough analysis of their market)

Young people today, can be summed up as social advocates who stand for causes, something that challenges the status quo — and this very thing, is something South African brands has not been successful in doing.

SA’s top brands have been, for the most part and for the longest of time been recycling old ‘modus operandi’ that is highly vested on old traditions and approaches that have served their businesses ‘safely’, and as such, senior managers are highly skeptical about ‘changing things’. Hence, having a non-flexible management team is the downfall of many brands who have potential to excel, but because management teams are not as agile as time is, they fail to transform.

There are a few exceptions of-course, and such brands are what you call ‘leading global brands’, proving that being in touch with the shifting grounds, can lead to a major brand success.

The second problem stems from the above insight, and now as an agency, you are faced with a brief that is aimed at bringing the brand to life, driving sales and brand affinity, despite the current state of economic crisis.

So how do you begin?

For a while now, most of SA’s finest brands, have been on a lead generation-sales-driven approach and failing to invest in heavyweight brand work. This could have for the most part, saved them by being consumer’ preferred choice, in the mist of economic crisis, such as the post COVID business era.

Still though, how do you develop brand love & affinity, given all this?

The answer goes back to understanding generations, their motives, and playing well within the space they live in. Let me illustrate with practical examples, that prove that some brands are still far from understanding this simple truth.

VODACOM Please Call: A PR Story vs. An Institutionalised Crisis ?

In the story of Vodacom, there lies a great PR story but also an institutional crisis. Vodacom should have long carried out the story of the ‘please call’ and glamorised it as a tool for embracing ideas and transparency, where inventions are welcomed and celebrated.

Wouldn’t that have turned out well for their PR team, a story of a young man who invented a ‘Please Call’ ?

It would have, without a fail, but there is an institutional failure as you can imagine. The company is not embracing change, and has failed to understand the current wave on internal innovators that bring in fresh & new ideas. The lack of recognition, speaks volumes to the management’s awareness of market and what is to come, and thus requires a swift response.

The please call me story could have been an enterprise innovation story of a decade.

South African Banks: Skeletons in the closet — an opportunity ahead?

South African banks are always under fire for practices they’ve done in the past. In fact, ABSA bank decided to put in new drapes behind their new ‘brand’, which was well received but no one truly connected the dots. ABSA has so much stories that makes the brand questionable, as a result of practices that related to institutional failure, that lead to brand fail.

VW did the same, H & M, & Clicks…

There is a rather forth-standing debate around all three of these brands, are they diverse enough? With all of these brands having been involved in some way in extinguishing fires related to racially-offensive content, this brings us to the question of what is really the underlying problem and what possible solution can be exercised to remedy this.

This begs the question however of whether or not diversity really is at fault in all of these cases or is there some form of institutional or structural issue or does the problem lie with individuals creating all the brand messages? Is it in their tradition to bypass all these nuances that cause havoc in society? Others may even argue that social media and brand activists are reading too much into some of the content produced because in every interview or PR session post the incident brands and those responsible always respond ‘it was never our intention to offend anyone, we as a brand take full accountability for what has occurred’.

These events however have not hindered these brands from meeting projections year on year. It is not to say that these brands are not affected at all by boycotting and activism against them however with the three above mentioned- they have survived!

Brands-under-fire is an age old phenomena that brands can’t run away from because you can’t be too careful and you’ll never know who you’ll offend next. Therefore, yes having diverse teams is definitely an option however that doesn’t guarantee mistakes wont happen. Post COVID- brands should really take their time so they can ensure due diligence is observed because rushing to flight an ad can cost the organisation big time. However, this doesn’t imply going on relax-mode, because you as a brand can end up missing positive inflection points that could contribute to it pivoting.