It is becoming ever so difficult for advertisers to determine the value of their advertising spend in Nigeria. As advertising in today’s Nigerian marketing environment becomes more and more fragmented and expensive. Brand owners are beginning to make more and more demands of their marketing communications agencies. Not surprisingly advertising agencies bear the largest brunt of brand expectations perhaps because most of the time they have the biggest budgets for executing communications activities. It is therefore not uncommon these days to hear a client ask his agency for “guarantees of success of his or her company’s sales effort”, if he spends a particular budget on advertising plans as recommended by the agency.
However, any advertising practitioner or agency who provides this kind of guarantee based solely on his marketing communications activities and budget commits a fallacy that may cost him his integrity and business and lead to his client’s bankruptcy or at least brand failure. This is because there are other even more critical success factors responsible for a quantum leap in sales besides advertising. And the advertising agency usually (in Nigeria) has almost no contribution, least of all any control over these factors.
For one, an effective advertising campaign should do more than inform the target audience. Advertising campaigns are expected to influence consumer behavior (or the target audience) positively into making a trial purchase or giving an endorsement or a vote in the case of a social cause or a politician brand. But this may be difficult if not impossible in the short term if there is/are deeply entrenched market leaders. For example even after many years of exciting and creative campaigns by Legend Stout, Guinness Stout is still No. 1 stout brand in Nigeria by a long shot; likewise, in spite of all the innovations in product development, package design and exciting campaigns by Harp Lager beer, the Star brand still leads by miles in the lager category. Can you imagine what would have happened if the brand owners of the No. 2 brands had insisted on sales guarantees these past years.
Secondly, even if a brand is “very good” but its distribution infrastructure is very poor, there is no amount of creative advertising that will make it a success. A good example is Gani Fawehinmi when he offered himself as Presidential candidate of his National Conscience Party (NCP). Even if Gani had spent billions of Dollars in advertising, he would still have lost woefully despite being nationally revered as an exceptional Nigerian of unquestionable integrity and a ‘man of the people’. The reason for this is that NCP had no mobilizing structure across the country and therefore was ‘not on ground’ as they would say in political parlance. But in marketing, we would say he had little or no sales and distribution infrastructure. Gani the Politician is very different from Gani the social crusader.
Adams Oshiomole, the present Governor of Edo State must have realized this hard lesson when he dumped his beloved Labour Party and joined the then Action Congress to contest the Edo State governorship election in 2007. The Action Congress had a much better distribution and sales structure than the Labour Party in Edo; so coupled with Oshiomole’s existing socio-political brand attributes, his advertising campaigns contributed effectively to his victory at the polls.
Thirdly, an advertising campaign may fail to elicit the expected results if you spread your budget too thin across media or across channels. The proliferation of electronic and print media channels and the ultimate fragmentation of audiences is, perhaps, Nigerian brand owners’ worse nightmare. This is not helped by the relative astronomical cost of media rates. It is important, in this instance for both the advertiser and agency to stay focused on the key target audience of the brand and tailor its message and media-spend towards the key media channels in the best medium (press, radio, outdoor, television, online) for reaching the specific target. Advertisers should bear in mind that stations or publications with perceived high rates may indeed be cheaper in the long run as they are most likely to deliver a lot more of a specific target audience. For instance, a client that has a TV commercial aimed at reaching top political and bureaucratic personalities of the federal government is better off featuring the ad on NTA Network News at 9 despite NTA’s perceived high rates rather than spreading it across all the state and private stations. Ultimately, media expenditure is calculated on a Cost-Per-Mille basis; that is, the cost of reaching a thousand (relevant) people. So spending less (based on rates) is not necessarily in the best interest of your brand and sales objectives.
Fourthly, and this is perhaps most important, even in an ideal world, where an agency has crafted the best advertising materials and planned the best media campaigns, if a product is intrinsically bad or unacceptable, the target audience who is no fool will ultimately reject the brand. In the 70’s the Metex brand was introduced into Nigeria. It was a very salty vegetable alternative to meat, it actually felt like meat. But in a period when meat was very available and affordable, Metex had no chance in hell to succeed in Nigeria at the time. So, the product failed; not the advertising. Some products are simply hard-sell ab initio. A good example on the political-scape is the attempt at bringing forward former military president Ibrahim Babangida as the Presidential candidate of any political party. There is no magic that any advertising agency can perform to guarantee his success at the polls. Much the same way a lawyer cannot guarantee his client’s success at the courts.
Typically agencies can only guarantee exposure and effectiveness of the message. But as brand owners continue to strategise for ultimate brand success and politicians’ strategies for the upcoming political campaigns are being fine-tuned therefore, it is important to remind every success-seeking brand custodian and their agencies that building the brand starts long before the message is broadcast in the media. Agencies and astute advertising practitioners should therefore be engaged not just to craft extra-sensory messages but also to help to interrogate and define the brand, scope as well as objectives of each campaign in line with the structural and factual realities on ground. Then and only then will demands for sales or success guarantees be appropriate; with the requisite agency commission on sales equally being guaranteed by the brand owner. It is simply quid pro quo, you see.
