This week I will revisit the subject I previously dealt with that looks at the role played by mythology in building iconic brands. I will then bring this home to look at how muses in our lives inspire us to love humanity (despite the complexities arising from its imperfections); inspire us to aspire for excellence in the work we do; and they inspire us with an insatiable desire to leave the world in a better condition than we found it. According to the Roman and Greek mythologies, each of the nine goddesses who were the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, presided over the arts and sciences. A muse is defined as “a person or personified force who is the source of inspiration for a creative artist.” The English bard, WB Yeats, had Maud Gonne MacBride (1866 – 1953) as his muse – an English-born Irish republican revolutionary, suffragette and actress. Egyptology also teaches us about many goddesses such as Hathor (of many things that include love, beauty, music and dancing); Isis (life and magic); and Seshat (wisdom and intelligence).
Social media is awash with accounts – such as “The Black Woman is Art: Exposé and Appreciation” on Facebook – that aim to challenge western epistemology by publishing beautiful photos celebrating African beauty or music groups such as August Greene not objectifying women but “foregrounding” them as our queens and princesses.
So let me introduce you to this group that I have founded, Brandhill Africa. It is a pan-African competitive identity and public diplomacy group specialising in global marketing; destination marketing; trade facilitation; and, investment promotion; and international relations. This BBBEE Level 1 contributor manages the reputations of locations (corporates/ products/ districts/ towns/ cities/ regions/ provinces/ countries/ and the African continent). Yes, it were humbled to win the coveted “Best Brand Award” at the “Brand Leadership Awards 2021” hosted by the World Brand Congress on 15 July 2021.
The group is constituted by five independent and autonomous, yet strategically aligned, subsidiary companies – namely, Brandhill Africa (Pty) Ltd (a brand development and management agency); Brandhill Africa Investment Holdings (Pty) Ltd (that mobilises funding for infrastructure development in a number of African countries); Brandhill Africa Media Holdings (Pty) Ltd (which publishes this news portal and has a number of books in the project pipeline); Brandhill Africa Institute of Public Diplomacy (Pty) Ltd; and, the Brandhill Africa Foundation NPC. The last subsidiary administers the last subsidiary company which is a not-for-profit corporate social investment vehicle (CSI) for the group.
Each subsidiary has its own Chief Executive Officer – though I also serve as the CEO for Brandhill Africa (Pty) Ltd, and caretaker CEO for both Brandhill Africa Investment Holdings (Pty) Ltd and Brandhill Africa Media Holdings (Pty) Ltd, I am the Group Chairman as the founder.
Our deliverables
Although as a TRADE AND INVESTMENT PROMOTION CONSULTANCY, our BRAND DEVELOPMENT AND MANAGEMENT services are multi-sectoral.
Our tangible deliverables to our clients are trade and investment promotion strategies; mobilisation of funding for infrastructure development; speeches; media statements; presentations; opinion articles; research papers; magazines/ journals/ books; websites; customised databases; events (meetings/ seminars/ conferences); and, promotional videos/films.
Our flagship projects are this news portal, Jambo Africa Online and the Biashara Services and Products Africa (BiSPA) Conference and Exhibition. We launched these platforms to respond to the worrying findings of Thebe Ikalafeng’s annual Brand Africa Survey that has found that while during their launch year in 2010, 34% of the “Top 100 Most Admired Brands in Africa” were the continent’s indigenous brands, this paltry percentage has since been consistently dwindling down to reaching 13% in 2020. This cut out the work for us to ensure that we help build reputations of “Made in Africa” service and product brands so that the 1.3 billion consumers in the continent may embrace and uptake them. Our argument is that the integration of Africa into a common market, through the operationalisation of the AfCFTA, may not benefit these brands as long as foreign ones continue to dominate in the marketplace.
Our brand positioning
We are unashamedly inspired by the “Africa Rising” narrative – as eloquently communicated by The Economist – and as such all our creatives are grounded in a post-modernist African “transvergent” cultural landscape.
In line with this assertion, our creatives are consciously making a strategic break from the colonialist “Jungle of Africa” conceptualisation to presenting Africa’s journey to becoming a future economic powerhouse of the world. Not undermining the role that wild life still plays in our destination marketing effort, we believe we have to adopt a strategic distance of all communications that feed into the naive myth of Africa being one big jungle in which Tarzan and wild animals freely roam our streets.
It is for these reasons that our creatives showcase our world class sophisticated infrastructure – rail, road and air; skyscrapers; industrial infrastructure development; and above all else, showcase our ICT infrastructure development initiatives which testify our readiness as a continent in advancing the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR).
Stakeholder management
We value stakeholder management as a strategic imperative. To us, the art and science of stakeholder management over every project we undertake is conceived as the process of assessing a system and potential changes to it as they relate to relevant and interested parties, clients and customers – we can’t over-emphasise especially the media. The information gathered will be used to assess how the interests of those stakeholders should be addressed in a project plan, policy, program, or other action.
Stakeholder analysis is a key part of stakeholder management. A stakeholder analysis of an issue consists of weighing and balancing all of the competing demands on a firm by each of those who have a claim on it, in order to arrive at the firm’s obligation in a particular case. A stakeholder analysis does not preclude the interests of the stakeholders overriding the interests of the other stakeholders affected, but it ensures that all affected will be considered.
We undertake a stakeholder analysis which is frequently used during the preparation phase of each project to assess the attitudes of the stakeholders (particularly the mainstream media and the general public) regarding their potential perceptions of the programme. Stakeholder analysis will be conducted continuously to track changes in stakeholder attitudes over time.
Ultimately, the success of every project will be adjudged on its ability and capacity to build or enhance the brand equities of our partners.
In pursuit of this noble strategic imperative, the group has signed strategic partnership agreements with various institutions that provide us with access to research resources and their members. These are Enterprises UP; UNISA Enterprises; African Agri Council (AAC); and Proudly SA. The first two are revenue generation agencies of the two universities – University of Pretoria (UP) and the University of South Africa (UNISA).
‘Fa re tla re ke dipitse, re tla bona ka mebala…’
The above idiom, articulated in Setswana (an official language in South Africa and Botswana) could be loosely translated to mean: “Zebras are spotted by their stripes.” This poetic phrase explains the core of brand management in our indigenous African traditions.
Brandhill Africa (Pty) Ltd builds nation brand equities through developing and designing strategic nation brand architecture for cities, provinces and countries. This helps places to, within a globally competitive context, assert their brand identity and manage their reputation; attract foreign direct investment (FDI); and to reposition themselves as tourism destinations of choice.
Since building and forging a nation brand is more complex and multidimensional than branding a commercial product or corporate entity as a result of the multiple stakeholders with vested interests in a nation brand, the Brandhill Africa group, with its bouquet of multidisciplinary services, is an ideal vehicle to advise governments, institutions and corporates in undertaking such brand image-building and reputation programmes.
Since nation brand concept has infinite range of touchpoints, the group helps to unpack and streamline them by developing holistic public diplomacy strategic platforms.
The non-state actors, such as the private sector and civil society, are defined by public diplomacy theoretical paradigm as vehicles for communicating a country’s foreign policy objectives and yet they are often not given the opportunity to engage with government’s conceptualisation and development of implementation initiatives of such strategies. The Brandhill Africa group endeavours to close such a strategic gap by guiding and mentoring such institutions on navigating the ambit of foreign policy environment.
According to Simon Anholt, brand Africa is under siege. He correctly argues that people have known for centuries that a “Made in… ” is just as powerful as a “Made by…”. In line with this, Germany is with its engineering, France with chic, Japan with miniturisation; Italy with flair; Sweden with design; Britain with class; Switzerland with precision; and Africa with famine, disease and terror.
The question then is how do we manage the perception of Africa away from the images of a dark continent as articulated by Joseph Conrad in his seminal work, “The Heart of Darkness”. How do we manage the reputation of Africa while we avoid “the danger of [communicating] a single story”, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a Nigerian contemporary novelist, has put it. How do we communicate a message of the “Africa rising” narrative while at the same time asserting the sub-text that “Africa is not a country”, as eloquently articulated by Arthur Lewin. Beyond this, how do we manage the nation brands of Africa Union’s 55 member states within the context of Africa striving to establish a Continental Free Trade Area. To us, these complexities provide us with opportunities for presenting individual nation brands which are at once distinctive yet varied.
The Brandhill Africa group provides its clients (governments, private sector and civil societies) with a strategic brand management framework which is based on Keith Dinnie’s “ICON model” that adopts an approach that programmes for nation brand development have to be integrated, contextualised, organic and should provide new perspectives.
The company’s work also takes into cognisance the sensitivities of the imperfections of the concept of “nation brand” and draws from the philosophical frameworks established by Anholt (in his book, Competitive Identity, whose title may replace “nation brand”), and the world-renowned strategy theorists, Michael E. Porter (in his books – namely, Competitive Advantage and Competitive Strategy). Assessing these debates on name change (and without evading the strategic thrust, the strategic questions the agency poses are: Are we talking of a new wine in an old bottle or do we talk of old wine in a new bottle? For the branding of non-metropolitan cities such as Polokwane, Lumumbashi, Kisumu and Bulawayo, the company relies on a nation brand theoretical framework, “Brand Index for Rural Development” (the BIRD), which I have developed.
We also rely on the theoretical framework on nation brand and investment promotion model which I have developed in my MSc in Global Marketing dissertation at the University of Liverpool which I aptly titled “the Zebra Paradigm” that ranks forty variables that influence investor decision making regarding destination of their investments.
Click this link to see the award acceptance speech:
I do know the video was too short as your popcorn bowl is still full but I do hope it has inspired you to fold our sleeves and try your level best in making your mark in this world. Don’t despair, finish them off by while watching my presentation last week to the social media two-hour webinar which was organised by the Egyptian African Businessmen’s Association (EABA).
So while the muse to the English bard, Yeats, was Maud Gonne MacBride, I have one, so you also need to decide WHO IS YOUR MUSE? This person who serves as your source of inspiration doesn’t have to know you; may have been a character in literature, movie or a subject of a song; yes, may be a character, such as Mona Lisa, depicted by an artist; or even just a sculpture. This is that one person or personified force that speaks to your soul and drives you to go beyond the call of duty. Do identify and embrace one.
Enjoy your weekend.
Saul Molobi
Publisher
Tel: +27 759 4297
Mobile: +27 83 635 7773
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