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L-R: Yomi Badejo –Okusanya,MD of CMC Connect
Burston- Marsteller -Sponsor of the event, Vincent Oyo, MD, Image
Consulting, David Okeme, President of ADVAN & Guest Speaker, John Ehiguese,
PRCAN President, Vice President Muyiwa
Akintunde, and Secretary General, Adetola Odusote, both of PRCAN
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The President of Advertisers Association of Nigeria, David
Okeme has said that clients are desperately looking for that PR that can change
perception and societal behaviour with just one image.
Okeme, who is also the Brand Building Director at Unilever
Nigeria, made the statement while sharing business insights on the topic ‘What
Do Clients Really Want?’ at the September 2015 edition of the Public Relations
Consultants Association of Nigeria Breakfast Meeting held in Lagos recently.
He explained that at the heart of client’s expectation from
any campaign was PR that connects with the people and also delivers values that
enhances growth.
He explained that Unilever became the most competitive
company in the world because it had developed three pillars strategy in
creating brands namely; putting people first, building brand love and unlocking
the magic.
According to him: “In
putting people first, Unilever sees people as the reason for its existence and
therefore creates brands that offer real value and provides solutions to
everyday lives. Secondly, in terms of building brand love, we create a purpose
that becomes a high level anchor that consumers buy into and thus enhance
business growth. Thirdly, to unlock the magic, the consumer must find the logic
to believe in the superiority of the brand.”
Stressing further on how the company puts those three
pillars into use, Okeme shared video case studies of campaigns that were
purposefully created to offer real value to the society, including one that led
to the provision of safe water for a community.
Since brand align ideas that both affect societal change and
drive business simultaneously, Okeme said the challenge was for PR to create a
point of convergence that connects with the society in order to remain
relevant.
In his words: “ PR needs to get the point of convergence right in a way that
is creative and strategic to elevate PR from being a transactional activity –
which is how we have handled PR for quite some time – to a creative and
strategic partner that brings about change in the society and growth in the
business.”
He advised PR
professionals to explore the potentials of using word-of-mouth to achieve
consumer conversion in brand usage. He
added that in some parts of the world, powerful PR tool yields positive results
because it is more believable.
To emphasise the importance of memorability, Okeme quoted
Maya Angelou as saying “people will forget what you said and what you did but
people will never forget how you made them feel”, as he challenged his audience
to adapt a creative and strategic story telling approach that people could
connect with and remember for a long time to a point of becoming the brand
ambassadors themselves.
He added that how you make a consumer feel was critical to
the delivery of memorability, conversion and for unlocking growth. According to
him, memorability is crucial because growth is driven by light users – people
who buy very infrequently.
“For clients, growth happens not with the loyal consumers
but when there is a conversion as a result of a top-of-the-mind awareness that
is brought about by creative story-telling,” Okeme stated.
Okeme said that PR was integral to helping the brand create
social impact that would ultimately unlock growth and therefore, practitioners
needed to elevate themselves to the position of strategic partners with
organisations to become indispensable in all the discussions on brand building.
In his remarks, John Ehiguese, President of PRCAN, pointed
out that the take-away from the session was that practitioners needed to change
their strategy paradigms and embrace creative and strategic story telling that
creates convergence with society.
“The learning from this session for me is the clarion call
to practitioners to be more creative in their story telling approach that would
ensure that people start talking about the brand and not necessarily the
organisation, ” Ehiguese said.
The highly interactive session was sponsored by CMC Connect
Burston-Masteller, a member-firm of PRCAN. It was well attended by CEOs and
senior executives of top flight public relations consultancies.
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