Philip Kotler, the renowed Professor of Marketing at the ...



Good Evening Ladies and Gentlemen.

Thank you for the opportunity to share with you some ideas about marketing communication.

Marketing is an area that I am particularly passionate about. It is an area also in which, hopefully, I do have some experience. In addition to earning an MBA in marketing from the Kellogg School of Management which as some of you know, is the foremost graduate marketing school in the world, I have had the opportunity to work in consumer marketing, for SC Johnson in Racine, Wisconsin and for Diageo, the parent company of Guinness. I am currently the Head of Corporate Services & Legal at Standard Trust Bank which means I am simultaneously the Bank’s Chief legal officer and Chief Marketing Officer. I am therefore ultimately responsible for all our marketing communication and brand building activities.

My objective for this evening is simple – to illustrate that effective marketing communication is an important pre-condition for growing and managing any SME. I will try and illustrate with some local examples and would urge you to challenge me in the discussion afterwards with some other examples. I will be happy to take questions at the end.

Before I go on, could I please ask you to put all cell phones on silent or vibrate mode and keep distractions to the barest minimum.

First let’s set the context so as to ensure we are all on the same piece of paper. When someone talks about marketing communication, what comes to mind?

……………………. [Audience]

For most people, when you talk about marketing communication, they only think of advertising. However, advertising is only a miniscule of marketing communication. Indeed for SME’s advertising might be completely inappropriate and a waste of resources that could be channelled better elsewhere.

Philip Kotler, a pre- eminent marketing authority defines marketing in his book ‘Kotler on marketing’ as follows:

He says and I quote ‘marketing is the science and art of finding, keeping and growing profitable customers’. Note the elements:

• First it’s a science

• Second it is an art

• It is about finding profitable customers

• It is about keeping those profitable customers when you have found them and it is about

• Growing profitable customers

Having defined marketing, let us look at the other main component of the topic for today. SMEs – small and medium size (or scale) enterprises. In 1971, the Boulton Committee defined SMEs as enterprises with the following characteristics:

• Relatively small share of the market

• Managed by owners or part owners in a personalised way and not through a medium of a formalized mgt structure

• Independent in the sense of not forming part of a large enterprise

There is a curious paradox that many SME aspire to leave the SME category. And indeed the SMEs of the yesterday – Unique Trust, Domod Nkensie, Lizzie’s Wigs etc are LSEs today (Large Scale enterprises).

If you are seeking to grow and manage your SME, effective marketing communication is absolutely essential for the following reasons:

• Effective marketing communication creates customer connection. Successful marketers focus on creating customer connections and enhancing the customer experience which will translate into naira and kobo or cedis and pesewas. The logic is as follows: Your initial communication should create awareness about the product or service. Once a customer becomes aware you use reinforcing messages to get him to try the product. At that stage you have to make a connection. This notion has been described as ‘the magic that goes beyond the box’. Without a connection, the customer may only try the product once and never go back. But it is the customer connection that gets him to try the product or service again and again and if you do it well, the customer becomes an ‘advocate’ – the most effective form of marketing. The customer goes round telling everybody about the product or service and would only buy that product. You should note the following data:

o 70% of a company’s average sales comes from existing customers.

o 70%-80% of a company’s sales is driven by 20%-30% of customers.

o 100% of unhappy customers will tell their ‘horror stories’ to at least nine other people

o 13% of those unhappy customers will tell 20 other people.

• How does one make a connection because as an SME owner, you may be far removed from the time and place of the eventual purchase of your product? I will give you a very simple example to illustrate. How many of you have heard of Mama Olive’s plantain chips? I have no idea who Mama Olive is but I have connected deeply with this product and I am a heavy consumer.

• What did she do right?

o She met my consumer need. She communicated with me not through flashy advertising but by simply being available first at my local Shell and then at many other filling stations and supermarkets. Then when I bought it, the taste was exactly as I wanted it to be – not the same, but close to the way my mother makes plantain chips. Recall that the name of the product is Mama Olive’s, again pretty consistent. My mother could have been a Mama Olive and that resonates. It is clear from the packaging – simple plastic with a computer generated label – that Mama Olive’s is made in a cottage industry of some sort. Again, consistent with the rest of its communication. It is ‘rough and ready’ and inexpensive which all ties in. Anyone who knows me will confirm that when it comes to plantain chips, I only buy Mama Olive’s.

• Another example. Eunqui-I-Décor is a very small interior decorating firm in South Labadi. I went to them upon recommendation from my sister (an advocate). During my first encounter with them, they took too long to deliver a few things I had ordered which made me very angry with them. When the sales guy eventually turned up to finish up the work in my absence, he noticed that my bed had still not been assembled. He assembled the bed and laid it in a way that only an interior decorator could and then left a note saying that he thought I would appreciate this being done for me. I was so impressed that my anger disappeared and I have become an advocate of Eunqui-I-Décor. Often, I know they can get a low priced alternative but I am prepared to pay more for the personal touch (which by the way has continued).

• I chose these examples because I don’t think Mama Olive’s or Eunqui-I-Décor has ever paid for a radio or TV or newspaper ad. But they do effective marketing because they have a good idea of who their customer is and take that into consideration.

o Mama Olive’s knows (or it appears to me that she knows) that I like to connect with my childhood by resorting to plantain chips as a quick snack on the go. She knows that customers like me sometimes don’t have time for a meal and plantain chips is ideal. She knows I must be able to get to the plantain chips whenever I need it since the decision to buy is often impulsive. As a result of that, she is at most filling stations that I drive through.

o Eunqui-I-Décor may have figured out that I have no clue how to fix beds, prefer to sleep on a bed rather than a mattress on the floor and that I was too busy at work to find time to get someone to assemble the bed.

To understand your customer you should always carry out market research. This does not have to take the form of a questionnaire or a focus group necessarily. Keeping your eyes open about your customer’s habits and lifestyles and listening alone could be enough.

o A better known example (and one using mass communication) is Kasapa.

▪ Kasapa is not trying to be all things to all men and women. You hear the gong and then the famous words – Good Talk, Great Value. Tells me Kasapa is targeting ‘value conscious customers’. Unlike its competitor which previously was ‘communicating for the nation’, Kasapa focused not on network but on delivering cheap talk which is more important to its customers than network coverage. With a Kasapa handset priced around C300, 000, free Kasapa to Kasapa calls you might argue that they are on track.

▪ The examples I have given also show that effective market communication is about consistent messaging across all customer touch points. I find it very funny that SIC says ‘Our promises are sacred, yet when you go to make a claim it takes a long time for the claim to process it’

A company must strive to deliver a consistent and positive message at all contact points. If like Domod Nkensie, you say ‘pa pa no no’ then you should be prepared to replace any defective saucepans for example. Both your internal marketing and your external marketing should be consistent – to the ‘t’. Marketers typically think of external marketing but not internal marketing. Internal marketing is as important as external marketing.

Internal Marketing Communication is essentially what the firm communicates about itself internally. The image you form when you meet the reception lady for example, when you see the branded company cars outside, the physical appearance of the office etc. Your staff are crucial to this and it is important that they all understand the company’s values, the product offerings etc.

• As an SME, resources are likely to be more scarce than for your LSE counterparts. You may not be able to spend a fraction of what Unique Trust or Areeba spend. But your message ought to be as effective. You got to cut through the clutter, but how? Classic advertising - in newspapers, magazines, trade journals and on Radio, TV etc are a no-brainers so I will not dwell on it except to say if you are going to use any of those media, be clear that your target customers are in fact watching that show or buying that magazine, based on basic research.

I would suggest that you consider a few other alternatives, obviously depending on your product, budget and objective:

• Direct Marketing: direct mail to select customers, telephone marketing, Internet. TravelKing – a leading travel agency- does a great job of direct marketing by complying customer email data and sending customers details of promotions. Direct mail via email is inexpensive but because of all the spam that people get, if you are going to use it, get help with graphics etc to ensure that your message is so visually appealing that it gets read.

• Ghana Post has a marketing department that works with businesses to send out mailings to individuals and corporates with Post Box numbers. An entrepreneur wanting to introduce a new office product for example can send out a flyer to post boxes in Accra Central, Ministries, Cantonments and Accra North thereby capturing a large %age of the Accra business market.

• Public Relations: articles in print media about your product, business or you written by you or a journalist. If you are a consulting firm for example and you write a great piece on recruitment for example in Graphic, you will be communicating that you are an expert in that field

• Meetings, workshops etc – would have the same effect but please go prepared.

• Viral marketing - viral marketing is also known as word of mouth advertising is consistent with our cultural and social and cultural mindset and values. A great way for example to market a new youth item might be to ‘plant’ people in the main hang outs for young people, to exhault the virtues of the product or to been seen using the product in a very visible way.

• Effective communication also means that Communication not based on a single vehicle but on as many different communication vehicles that are necessary, given budgetary constraints. Rather spend your entire budget to launch a product on advertising on TV for example, you may decide to do the following:

Hold a press conference to get ‘free’ press coverage. ‘Free’ in quotes because you will incur some costs such as hiring the venue, Section…etc. You can then follow up with a print advertising campaign

One size does not fit all. Clearly. What size fits you or your SME will depend on the nature of your products, your resources and more importantly your customer. Whatever your business (even if it is a Church) effective marketing communication can help you grow.

Thank you for the priviledge and courtesy you have accorded me this evening by listening.

Thank you.

If you have follow up questions etc, feel free to email me at elikem@

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