By Adam Wakefield
The conference was opened by comedian Nik Rabinowitz, who acted as the MC for the day, while media personality Jeremy Maggs questioned the different speakers following their presentations.
The first speaker was chief marketing officer at McDonald’s, Daniel Padiachy, who looked at business through the eyes of brand strategy.
What McDonald’s believe, beyond just being seen, is convenience and functionality are not brand building enablers, share of voice is irrelevant without equal or better share of mind, and share of mind is earned by all the experiences across all your brand touch points.
They drive these beliefs, according to Padiachy, through what he calls the three Rs: relevance, relevance, and relevance.
“Relevance has to be tangible and intangible,” he said, with tangible demonstrated through taste, price, and the restaurant. Intangible is arrived at through consistency, predictability, and transparency.
It’s the employees who deliver on McDonald’s brand promise, from over the counter, to the drive-thru, and via home delivery. According to Padiachy, they spend “copious amounts of time on execution, an inordinate amount of time on the tactics, and a fair amount of time on the strategy”.
People being at the centre of the business and its brand was at the core of the next presentation, by marketing and corporate affairs director at the JSE, Zeona Jacobs.
When Jacob’s began at the JSE in 2012, she found that JSE employees were more critical of its brand than external stakeholders, with younger employees especially displeased. The exchange sought to move away from being viewed as a utility, as it had been in the past.
“We needed to be one brand with one brand promise that needed to deliver to a number of audiences,” Jacobs said.
They had to create a common understanding with all its employees to be a brand, with the brand the living asset they defined, brought to life across all touch points, and that creates definition, differentiation, and “most importantly, creates value”.
“What has become a core pillar for us is who we are and that is the JSE brand. We dealt with what it is that we do, how we do it, and why we do it ,and that has become our brand promise.”
After Jacobs, director of business development at data insights firm TNS Global, Nuala Harris-Morele, spoke about the power of a consumer-led business plan.
With the global economy gradually slowing, and, for the foreseeable future, businesses and brands need to change what they were doing to grow in such a climate.
Local brands, compared to global players, are able to better negotiate these times by exploiting opportunities through being nimble and agile.
Harris-Morele further emphasised the macro environment by pointing out that; “Only 2% of all brands reach more than 80% of a country’s households, most buyers only buy your brand once and buyers are in a constant churn”.
“There’s no longer one size fits all. There’s a growing number of touch points with which your brand can play a real relevant and compelling role in your consumer’s lives,” Harris-Morele said.
Marketing is a partner for growth in connection with brand health and marketing return-on-investment, with levers of growth being demographics, geographics, occasions, categories, and new categories.
Businesses that realise the marketing strategy is a partner for growth will reap the rewards.
Following Harris-Morele was Robyn de Villiers, chairman and CEO for Africa at Burson-Marsteller. Her presentation centred on the ABCD of future brand communication, being audience, business, creativity, and data.
For audience, it is imperative that African youth be understood and reached out to, with their 200 million population set to double by 2045. They are aspirational, discerning, entrepreneurs, interactive, and demand authenticity, transparency and accountability from their chosen brands and role models.
De Villiers also reminded the room of the importance of women and the trillions of purchasing power they are directly and indirectly responsible for.
On business, De Villiers had three points: integrate everything, be alert to the dangers, and live your corporate purchase.
For creativity, brands need to be bold and brave, change the virtual and augmented reality, and use visual and emotional story telling.
Lastly, on data, De Villiers said brands must have data relationships with greater connectivity leading to better data and engagement. They must also target and time to perfection, and respect consumers’ privacy fears.
“We must prepare for a future that has continually evolving communication disciplines. We all need to be eternal students,” De Viliers said.
The final speaker was The Awethu Project CEO and co-founder, Yusuf Randera-Rees. He focused on why transformation and capability building are critical business tactics.
He noted that the vast majority agreed with the premises underpinning the need for transformation. South Africa in material terms is very unequal, it stemmed from unfair circumstances, and material inequality is socially destabilising.
The problem arises, as do emotions, when the question of 'How?' is addressed.
There are two types of inequality, being income and wealth inequality. Income equality is salary based while wealth is more entrenched and much harder to deal with.
There are two ways to address inequality. Either you transfer assets from privileged to the under privileged, which is what nationalisation represented, or you just focus on growth.
This is the framework in South Africa, a “grand compromise” but when it was tried the first time, it did not happen fast enough, due to the incentives not being strong enough, supply-side constraints and solutions not being scalable.
Procurement, financing, and skills development and training all form part of the new framework, but ultimately embracing transformation makes good business and brand sense in the long term.
A company will tap into the growing black consumer market, be able to attract the best talent who identify with their company’s values – and consumers - and it is the right thing to.
“We need transformation champions but not scorecards champions. If we don’t start asking these questions on a micro-scale, we aren’t going to solve the macro problems,” Randera-Rees said.
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