Now that's what i'm talking about

Today I would like to explode another Nairobi advertising/marketing fraternity urban myth” Kenyans love money!”

Ok… yes… Kenyans do love money, or at least a lot of us do, but we also love family, church, school, job (sometimes), the rave, arsenali, eating goats, men/women, driving stupidly na kadhalika.

I guess I should therefore clarify myself by saying that the myth is “Kenyans love money" when it comes to thinking of a prize for a promotion…

If there is one thing that we are very fond of as an industry in Kenya, it’s promotions. As a guy who tends to think that the brand is the alpha and omega of everything, I personally tend to be wary of them. Whilst I do understand the pressures of quarterly sales targets, I also feel that one can become hooked on promotions – and like all the best stimulants, promotions produce diminishing returns over time (and side-effects).

That said, there is a time and a place for a promotion, and you will not work in advertising without having to spend some time designing one.

There are two key issues with any promotion: the mechanic (how to enter/play) and the prize (the draw/the temptation/the pull). I shall focus on the latter.

The first thing I would say, and this is one reason why the ‘just give away money’ thing is generally such a mistake, is that you should always try and give away a prize or prizes that are somehow relevant to your brand. It is often forgotten in advertising that actions speak just as loudly as words and pictures. The very selection of your prize delivers a message in and of itself about your brand. Note that repeated promotions dilute a brand (people should buy because they value the brand, not because it has turned into a lottery), so if your promotion can act to re-enforce the brand, it will help to counter-act the inherent dilution.

This is why I like this Naivas promotion (looking like a there's a good agency somewhere), because the prize on offer re-enforces the brand’s underlying position as the affordable supermarket that’s ‘by the people, for the people’. It demonstrates an understanding of the audience and is guaranteed to resonate with them (the holiday for grandparents by air is, methinks, a touch of genius).

Therefore pick prizes that are relevant to your brand and ‘make sense’ to your audience. Again, this is why the ‘love money’ thing is so insidiously dangerous… it demonstrates a ‘lowest common denominator’ mentality and speaks to a complete lack of empathy (the most important word in advertising) with your customers.

And there’s more! The ‘give away money’ thing is further a sign of incompetence because it breaks the key ‘be distinctive’ rule/principle discussed previously. A promotion is supposed to drive sales hard. Therefore it needs to be exciting and vibrant and un-missable (which does not mean star-bursts). Why then run a promotion giving away free money when so many promotions are giving away free money? What’s different about yours? What makes it stand out? Unless you are giving away a ridiculously huge amount of money – WIN ONE BILLION SHILLINGS!!! – then it is definitely worth the time and the effort to come up with prizes that are interesting and novel.

I also have a theory (there are many) that, where possible, and especially when budget is an issue, one should try and come up with prizes that have a value over and above the monetary cost of purchasing them – can you put a value to your grand-parent’s smiles?

Allow me to illustrate. Say you have the choice between giving away a million shillings in cash and giving away a CDSC account with a million shillings worth of shares in it. Think about the mental process that your audience will go through – with a million shillings it’s “I can buy X,Y, Z till the money is finished”, whilst with a loaded CDSC account it’s “Ooh… if I’m really clever I could turn that into 10 million shillings…”

I guess the point is you should always ask what dream (are we not dream-sellers?) you are trying to trigger… because yes we all need cash in Kenya, that is a cold and hard fact, but it is dreams that really drive us as humans, including driving us to spend more money…

Finally (I promise), promos are supposed to be fun, so make them fun! “Win 5 rounds in the ring with Conje!” “Win all the beer you can drink in 24 hours!” “Win a husband who washes the dishes and changes nappies!” “Win a briefcase political party!” “Win your weight in dark chocolate!” “Win 5 nights in Kamiti Maximum!” And so on and so forth. Why so serious…? 

The issues of the day

Twitter has a great slogan: “Join the conversation”. It captures exactly the essence of the product, and its’ great success is a reflection of the fact that it taps into the great human need to run our mouths.

Because of course conversation, the ability to exchange ideas and thoughts and opinions, is one of, if not the, defining characteristics of humanity. Talking is pretty much the first thing that we learn to do post-birth, and the vast majority of us never stop talking until we meet our maker, myself very much included.

It is very important for advertisers and marketers to realize that every time we run a piece of communication, we are communicating with a society that is already very busily engaged in an intense process of communicating with itself. People are not sitting at home quietly waiting for you to run your ad – if anything you must remember that your ad is almost certainly an interruption of their conversation.

This is why the use of topicality in advertising (a la the Naivas ad here referenced) can be a very powerful tool. It is a bit like if two guys are talking about football and you walk up to them and ask them if they have seen the latest hand bag collection from Prada. Chances are you will walk away with a black eye…

It has been my observation that all the greatest communicators in the world share the characteristic that they are also the greatest listeners. You can only really know how to talk to ‘the people’ if you spend some time and effort to listen to ‘the people’. Thus you can always tell a good ad creative from the quantity and quality of the communication that they ‘input’ – so please don’t be too hard on them next time you see them spend a couple of hours glued to youtube…

Listening, which also means seeing, observing and understanding, is the only way that one can pick up on trends (no you don’t necessarily need a research company), and trends are one of the very driving forces of advertising.  Societies and cultures are permanently changing (sorry about that Al Shabab), and this is expressed in fashion, in music, in art, in architecture, in hairstyles, in language and even in cuisine.

Given this fact, one tends to find that one can break most ad campaigns down into one of two types: those that follow trends and those that set them.

N.B. there is a third type, those that ignore trends, with this type being utterly brilliant or fundamentally incompetent.

Following the trends is the easiest thing to do – it is safe, it is comfortable, people will tend to kind of ‘get it’, and it probably won’t get you fired. However, it will also almost certainly not, ever, turn your brand into a leader. So if you happy with 3^rd/4^th place, follow dem trends…

But if you want your brand to be the leader, then you must lead. You must be… the trendsetter. You must be the one who comes up with new ways of doing things. You must be the first to explore new media opportunities. You must be the first to identify the next hot MC to endorse your brand, before he’s actually become hot. You must be the first to spot the growth of the new ‘retired with money’ market segment. Please note repeated use of the word first.

In many ways, this process of keeping your brand first, of keeping it ahead in an increasingly fast-paced race, is the fundamental job of your ad agency. It’s not “I want posters, flyers, a radio ad and a branded handkerchief”, it’s “I want you to take my brand to the very very top and don’t want it to ever ever leave there”.

It is very important to paint this bigger picture for your agency, because we ad people are a very sensitive bunch, and if we’re not to be found aiming for the stars, we tend to be found drowning (our sorrows) in a ditch…

In closing, remember that advertising – the tools and techniques and exposure and budgets – gives you the power to set trends. With power comes responsibility, so use that power well.