The Making of Nigeria’s Marketing Ambassador

Ikechukwu Kalu, marketing director, Zantel (Zanzibar Telecommunications) takes a look at why some Nigerian supposed big brands have consistently failed to cross the rubicon while taking the trio of O’Lekan Babatunde, Kenneth O. Eze and Ralph Tathagata through his marketing journey in various multinationals including Guinness, MTN, Zain Nigeria and now Zantel (an Etisalat owned telecom operation) in Tanzania. Excerpts….

Where did this marketing journey begin?

I think I have an interesting story even if I have to say that myself. I just told my wife one day that I wanted to be a marketer and she asked me how? Where is this coming from? She said after all my working years; she had never really heard me talk about marketing. I told her that was why I read Business Administration because I wanted a course that will enable me to be versatile. You know there are four organic elements of marketing: personnel management, financial management, production management and marketing management. You can dwell on each of them as it were, even at first degree level.

After my marriage in 1994, by 1995 I said I wanted to work in marketing and my wife wondered where the urge was coming from. I said I wanted to develop concepts and see them come to fruition and I think that is the essence of marketing.

Was it because you had a lot of marketing people around you or was it an inspiration?

Well something like that. I spent time with people like I D Enang, now the financial director, Cadbury Nigeria among other marketing professionals. Then, he was in charge of Satzenbrau and I was excited about the way he approached his job. He talked so confidently and passionately about the brand. I started developing interest and I remember telling him one day that I will just come to him and wouldn’t mind whatever he taught me. So I used to spend time with him even though I had spent more time in Guinness than him. But they came in as management trainees. So inspiration came from there coupled with my general interest to know how as a brand, you can help the customer.

Can we look at some of those brands you handled at Guinness? For example, some brands like Satzembrau and  Gordon Spark are almost in coma in the Nigerian market right now. What marketing lessons can you draw from these?

Don’t forget that there are priorities in business. The first priority in Guinness is the Guinness Stout. So if there is a huge demand for Guinness Stout, and if it means not producing any other drink, they would go to that extent. The priority is Guinness Stout, followed by Malta Guinness before you could talk of lager. By the time we joined, lager was growing very rapidly in terms of demand and that was why Harp Breweries was built. As far back as 1982, Harp was already grossing above 1 million hectolitres in market demand.

We also wanted to use that process to launch herbal drink. There is a raw material, a by-product of beer production. This is a kind of carbonated water. At some point, we toyed with the idea of going commercial with it. We wanted to bottle it and market it as soda water. We went through the process. It was almost at the last gate that we discovered that it was not going to be viable because water is disposable and having it in a green bottle might be difficult to market.

Again, we decided to go a step further to make herbal drink out of this raw material and that was when I met the late Elizabeth Kafaru. I would always go to her to study the herbs she had. I bought and read some herbal books looking for the ones that are good for the health that we could make a drink out of. It was part of the extension that Guinness wanted to get into. We actually came up with all kinds of combinations but putting them through the New Product Development (NPD) process, they didn’t quite pass the required test. This process ensures that you have products that are tested and developed through consumer insight and based on a well articulated process.

That led us to the idea of a malt drink. We wanted to know how we could enhance the market for Malta Guinness. You have the classic Malta Guinness and imagine drinking it with the taste like banana, orange or pineapple. We were still testing, analysing and researching when Nigeria Breweries launched its flavoured Maltina. So what we needed was to hold back and my assignment became monitoring. For about six months, I was monitoring the sales of Maltina classic and its variants. We knew what they were selling before as total and we then started checking if the total market share had grown because of the variants, or if it remained the same. We discovered that it was not adding any value in terms of growth. Rather, it was costing them more money because the brand was cannibalizing itself and based on that we took a decision that we were not going into variants. But we were still faced with the challenge to introduce a new product and that was how Gordon Spark came up. We came up with a gin-mix drink called Gordon Spark. We experimented with different kinds of drinks including Smirnoff and the one the customer appreciated was Gordon Spark; a combination of gin, carbonated water and some sugary contents. So we have added something to the by-product of the carbonated water I talked about earlier and it was well accepted. We had to test-market it and chose Port Harcourt given that it was positioned as a brand that people would like to drink while they are having fun and you know Port Harcourt is a fun city.

With the benefit of hindsight, what would you say is the problem of Harp?

Oh yes! We knew what the problem was. The demand was huge and that is probably what is happening to a lot of brands now. And I can also say that quality was sacrificed to meet demand. For example, there was this story about Guinness Stout. When they started producing Guinness Stout in Nigeria, consumers were coming up with complaints. They said it didn’t taste like the Guinness they had before. Meanwhile, the only difference was because of the time it took to reach the consumers from the plant. The time it spent in the store before it went into the market. The more you keep Guinness, the more it matures. The period of about three weeks or more that it would take the consignment to arrive and then get cleared at the port was enough for the drink to mature. But producing today and pushing it into the market the next moment did not give the brand enough time to mature. So when we produced, we would keep it in the store to ‘mature’ before we hit the market.

Ironically, Harp suffered the same problem. When the demand became very huge, sometimes, the brand would come out the factory and immediately hit the market. People started complaining about the quality. And don’t forget that was the period the issue of barley was on. People were accusing us of not using the right ingredients and you know how fast propaganda can travel. Consumers believed it, because the taste was no longer what it used to be. Before we knew it, Harp was going down, down, down. But if you go to drinking joints now, you will see a lot of presence for Harp. It has gained a lot of market share now but it all started with the change in label, bottle shape and all the marketing supports that followed.

What about the Satzembrau experience? What would you say went wrong with the brand?

Satzembrau was produced in Nigeria, it was never imported. Although the first batch you saw was imported, but the ones you have now are produced locally and are not the same with the imported brand. It was propaganda at that time because there was a technical challenge. You see, once a beer consumer sees sediments in a beer, any story they tell him, he will believe it. And it was also very strong, even stronger than Gulder. But the real issue was that we didn’t manage the processing very well. There was also a bottle issue because the demand was very huge and the turnaround time was a bit slow. This also underscores the fact that if you want to maintain a certain market share, you have to make available, a good number of bottles to sustain circulation because that short period that it was scarce, made whatever story you had in the market very credible.

On the other hand, in retrospect I think some PR people would have done a good job if I look back now. For example, there was a time that Guinness Stout was being faked massively. But you can’t come out openly and say it was being faked else every Guinness in the market becomes a fake. So the better way to manage it was to come up with a new bottle so before fakers could catch up with it, it would have taken a long time. So I would put the problem of Satzembrau to the management of information. The customer has the right to know what is happening. And you shouldn’t be ashamed of professionally telling the customer what the problem is. Although at that time, experiential marketing was non-existent. If it were now, maybe what you need to do would have been taking Satzembrau to the outlets that you can find your targets and tell them your own side of the story and then support it with PR. For example, look at what Heineken is doing with football. When you go to Heineken house, there is a mad rush for the brand. I heard that there is even short supply now because there is an experience around it and people are drinking it massively.

Now if you want to look at the Guinness brand, what are your takes?

The Guinness brand was a brand you would like to manage because it was the height of brand management. If you ever become the brand manager of Guinness, then you can claim that you know marketing because it had the budget, and it had the support of the group. So there were clear initiatives. Guinness brand was well managed based on consumer insight and good understanding of consumer evolution. If you remember, there was this programme we did in the campuses tactically designed to catch them young. It was called the ‘Emergent Drinkers’ programme where we moved around campuses to make the youth taste the drink because the stout taste takes time to be acquired unlike lager. We wanted to catch that youth generation, so by the time they are in their late 20s and early 30s, they can confidently say, ‘this is our brand.’ Even till today, if you check the kind of marketing programmes they build around Guinness it is always a total package because it is extremely important to the Diaego Group.

During your sojourn in Guinness, were you part of the stout war?

There was really no war.

But there were utterances and responses.

I won’t call it war because fighting with a handicapped person is not really a fight. Don’t forget that we are talking about tangible products. Yes, I agree that consumers may come out confused at the end of a blind taste of two different products not being able to indicate which is better. But when you bring out the bottles, you will see them shift to where they truly belong. But as a brand, you don’t keep quite when jabs are being thrown at you.

You said you had that urge to work for multinationals even when you did not know what it meant. What motivated you to move to MTN?

What that tells me is that once you have something in your mind, somehow, it works out. On how I joined MTN, we went to launch Gordon Spark in Abuja and were looking for a platform. Then we heard about a film that Ego Boyo premiered and RMD starred in at that time. I spoke to some of my friends who organized the programme. They asked us to contact MTN as the corporate owner of the event and I contacted Olu Akanmu explaining to him that our brand presence at the venue will add some value and he obliged us.

We were given a small portion and you know that Guinness is known for good marketing. So when the programme ended and they were coming out, we feted them with the new product and salsa dance. As that was going on, we picked the microphone and told them that the product comes from Guinness. In fact, people left that event talking about our brand not remembering the event they came for. I would imagine that Olu got the feedback because he wasn’t there.

Meanwhile, two or three weeks later, I submitted my CV to MTN, obviously out of anger for some corrections my boss, Sam Edohor asked me to make. To my greatest surprise, a week later, I was called for an interview and before I knew it, they made an offer to me. In fact they doubled what I was earning at Guinness and I left with the sound principles I imbibed from the company.

I joined MTN as trade marketing manager which was like an interface between sales and marketing. So there were these Friday meetings that brought sales and marketing departments together and almost every person at the meeting was a general manager and I was the secretary, being the most junior officer. After taking minutes for the first and second week, I started directing the meeting by the third week. It got to a point that one day, one South African, a GM asked me why I should be telling them what to do and what not to do when I was not even a GM.

Another thing that helped me was the kind of boss (Akanmu) I had. I can say that Olu was the kind of boss that inspired leadership in others. Again, GSM marketing moves faster than FMCG. You can change a new product launch plan within six months, but in GSM, one or two weeks is enough for you to move on. I think the implementation, discipline and speed are totally different in these sectors. If you have an FMCG background, you will have a solid background because you will know what to look out for. But in GSM, you need to add the speed, think and act quickly because the customer of today can change tomorrow.

That reminds me, marketers of consumer goods today are accused of being lazy for basing their whole marketing plans on promotions. Can we say many of them did not go through the same rigorous training that you went through?

That could actually destroy a brand. You are supposed to be doing promos only when there are gaps to fill. You tell consumers to buy one and get one free because you want them to quickly come and buy. But it must remain a tactical marketing initiative.

However, what seasoned marketing professionals are now doing is to ensure that the elements of brand building are put into the tactical initiatives. For example, when I did Zain Naira Rain promo last Christmas, the idea of giving one million was for it to be an experience that the winners will never forget. The idea was for the brand to have ambassadors because Zain at that time was no longer evoking emotions. So you use your tactical initiative to build sustainable interest for a short period. But when you do promotions all the time, it just tells one thing: you are not meeting your target. And don’t forget that when you are doing promotions, the sales volume will be very high but cannot be sustained in the long run. What I will advise based on my experience in Guinness and MTN is that the business should be about your core values. Segment your market properly so as to have core offers that are targeted at each segment. Then from time to time, you can use promotions to excite the customer. On a serious note, a good promo should enable you drive customer loyalty too.

You mentioned Olu as one of your models. We gathered on good authority that you contested the position of a GM and could not get it. Was that why you left?

No, No. Before then, I came in as trade marketing manager. After about two years, I became senior manager, mass market segment and that was the role I performed until Olu left. Although before he left, there was a need to for someone that will oversee all the marketing activities so all the segments were reporting to me and when Olu left, I became the Acting GM. I acted for six months which was abnormal because during that time, so many other people acted in different positions and within a month or two, the positions were advertised and many of them filled the positions. But I did appreciate the fact that consumer market was almost 98 percent of the business so there was need to be cautious in filling that position. I reverted to my former position and the job was advertised and Kola Oyeyemi got the job; a great guy.

At some point, I didn’t think that my role as a regional marketing manager in MTN could allow me to do more and luckily for me, Zain called me. I was meant to understand that Zain wanted an experienced hand that could drive their business from the management to the lowest level. The company wanted a youth segment that it could manage and drive as a youthful brand. So when I got that brief, I was excited. Although when I got there, my job description as customer retention strategist wasn’t what we discussed at the interview. But in the long run, I found out that I was actually at the centre of action. Interestingly, at the end of my sojourn in Zain, I was actually at the driver’s seat.

What can you say about Zain’s constant metamorphoses?

Actually it has made the brand to be perceived as unstable. Even the bible talks about how a double-minded person is unstable in all his ways. You cannot trust the brand because you don’t know what it stands for. But there is also a positive side to it. It’s like a beautiful bride that gets a lot of suitors. I would rather buy a business that has the potential to deliver than a business that has reached its peak. Meanwhile, I agree that a brand needs to be known for something.

What about client/agency relationship?

I think they should focus more on adding value. They shouldn’t focus more on what each party stands to gain but the focus should be on the brand. Personally, I am not in a hurry to change a winning team. It is only when it becomes obvious that the brand cannot be enhanced that you set up plan B to gradually ease out plan A.

Now the new offer, how did you get there?

You know things that you do have a way of adding up. That is why I tell myself that every interaction should be learning because you don’t know when you will need that learning. It was actually on a weekend that I got a call from my former boss. He said he knew I was doing very well and thought I wouldn’t want to consider another offer. I asked what the contents were and discovered it was a marketing director’s job and I developed interest. After a telephone conversation, I was invited to Dare Salam and everything happened within a month. Given that the offer contains a full marketing job in Zamtel (Zanzibar telecoms) in Tanzania, I resigned my appointment in Zain. So we parted on a very good note.