Monday 1 August 2011

Ashraf Oozeerally : “Mauritius should be right at the heart of our concerns”
Interview in Business Magazine - Wednesday, October 20, 2004
Most of the times we tend to neglect the identity and focus on stuffs like USP (Unique Selling Proposition), Product Benefits or Key Features which relate to traditional marketing era of the early 80s. Branding, however, has a specific methodology and is a long term process that has to start somewhere. For branding to be effective, one has to master all the necessary steps and deliver results. This is why Branding is regarded as very credible and across the world, brand consultancies are almost regarded as Professional Services Firm, adding tremendous value along the line. And this is why Branding is not as easy as it looks, says Mr. Ashraf Oozeerally in an interview with Business Magazine.

• Mr. Ashraf Oozeerally, you have recently launched eye_dentity, the first local, integrated, multidisciplinary brand consultancy. What is branding in a nutshell and what is the challenge about it?

— Before trying to define branding just consider how we are overwhelmed everyday by the influence and power of brands each and every second of our life. A brand is simply the point of interaction between marketing activity and customer activity while it is a very efficient vehicle of emotional activity. This is the definition of branding that I have personally developed over time and is the operating philosophy of eye_dentity. So, while a brand is the convergence point of a customer with a marketer, it translates relationship. You can be addicted to a brand as well as you can hate it! And Branding is the process of building persistence difference in the minds of customers about the key promises it holds and this involves integrating a number of key disciplines together.
In Mauritius we tend too often to equate advertising to branding. This is intellectually not correct and very restrictive. An advertising campaign sold to a client will at most improve brand awareness and even this has to be supported by research data! But working for a brand involves the capability to understand and master a number of variables and factors. Branding is a holistic discipline.
This is the real challenge about branding. This discipline has evolved from a methodology that allows the marketer to build distinctive visibility over time, to a real social and cultural force, as in all first world economies. Here, it’s just starting to pick off and I’m happy to have been pioneering this discipline by launching eye_dentity and creating initial awareness to that effect. But I do feel that things are quite confused as we tend to use the term branding just as a fad without understanding the depth of it and without mastering its specific methodology. This can harm the very promise of branding itself.
I have chosen eye_dentity as company name just to communicate to clients that what matters is the identity of their brands, products and services  and not only campaigns, sexy logos or slogans. Most of the times we tend to neglect the identity and focus on stuffs like USP (Unique Selling Proposition), Product Benefits or Key Features which relate to traditional marketing era of the early 80’s. Branding, however, has a specific methodology and is a long term process that has to start somewhere. For branding to be effective, one has to master all the necessary steps and deliver results. This is why Branding is regarded as very credible and across the world, brand consultancies are almost regarded as Professional Services Firm, adding tremendous value along the line. And this is why Branding is not as easy as it looks.
Brand Strategy calls for a paradigm shift in the way clients thought-process are organized and in the way brands are built on the market. By focusing on brand consultancy, I have taken the challenge to bet on the future. I am blessed to have started with some clients who have upfront understood where we could go together. The real challenge for me and eye_dentity is to make sure my clients realize the full potential of their brands and this goes through re-inventing their organizations and casting a different look on the way they operate, behave and spend their marketing budgets.
• What would be your thinking about the current debate in the tourist industry and how would you relate this to branding?

— The on-going debate is very rich in the sense that it brings forth a number of opinions that need to be shared and put in the right perspectives while taking into account that we are all embarked on the same boat in a rough sea with sharks and pirates roaming around! This debate is also stimulating in the sense that it surfaces out an essential ingredient: willingness to share views towards enhanced collaboration and synergy in finding out the right strategy for long term progress so that the country comes out stronger in the face of acute competition.
We should not forget that Mauritius is sailing right in the middle of the Globalisation Ocean. We just have to see what is happening in the sugar, textile, ICT and Financial Services sectors to note that today we cannot afford to have a behaviour that is so rightly translated in the French expression dormir sur ses deux oreilles! Now we need to be alert, aware, aggressive and extremely pro-active so as to survive in this world of the fittest.
It’s true to say that we have some key achievements. The Voyage D’Or Professional Award is indeed an achievement for past efforts in terms of visibility on the French Market. If we want to replicate such achievements in other markets, we may need to bring in new ideas and methodologies. This is where branding comes in.
Branding is known to bring about a revolution in the way it looks at things. By revolution we may also mean having a 360° view of the situation before talking about actions. We have just to bear in mind that in today’s complex world, having our voice heard on the global market place is critical for survival. In much the same way as companies compete and fight for market share in a given territory, they do almost the same thing on the international scale. Branding our country is no more a luxury but a necessity. I have been following up the possibility of such a project for the last 3 years and it seems that now some willingness from different quarters are playing in the direction of such a project.
Basically, competition is taking place in 3 areas in which we can either fail or succeed today: inward investment, tourism & leisure, and export of goods and services (where we may also include emerging service sector consisting of ICT and Financial Services).
For the past years we can say that we have been surfing on the “Mauritius success story” wave, but today’s reality is threatening. Our positions are continuously being eroded by the rise of competitive forces, deregulation, liberalization accompanied by the dismantling of protective measures and we are in open competition with nations with tremendous natural, financial, technological and human resources.
What we need for the long term future of our tourist and leisure industry is a Destination Branding project which will allow us at the same time to have a critical look both at the demand and supply side of this industry. This goes into the direction of what Eric Adams from Tourism Intelligence International was recently saying. This implies creating, sustaining, channelling and managing the demand for Mauritius as a destination and at the same time ensuring we define and position the identity of the destination consistently in specific markets. Such an approach will also allow us to be consistent and coherent about identity and image.
Destination Branding simply relies on a strategic marketing framework and implies having a look at all facets of the promotion of our destination in its ensemble, favouring this holistic aspect. It makes use of complex methodologies but simply defined Destination Branding is about how consumers perceive a destination in their minds and what should be done to capture the distinct elements through the brand components of the destination. This brings us back to identity, essence, personality, character and culture. Managing all these components at the same time to create a unique idea of the destination brand is the real challenge, and this is Positioning.
In today’s media flooded society, Destination and Place Branding implies putting into motion simultaneously and in a coordinated and coherent manner a number of communication tools and messages that would work to move the visitors from brand awareness to brand preference and finally brand loyalty, while monitoring closely the effectiveness of the brand. This is a process, and a long-term one, but it has to start somewhere.
Lets not forget than in the word destination, we have the word Nation. There has been so many nations born over the last decades, meaning that competition for destinations is acute. In parallel the visitor-consumer is now educated and well informed. If we do not position ourselves strategically, we will loose out in general terms though on some markets we may be very attractive.
Embarking on a destination branding project implies time, commitment from all quarters, massive intelligent investment and a bet on the future. But above all it implies sitting together and addressing the issues in a spirit of collaboration and making sure that at the end Mauritius is right at the heart of our concerns.
This is what is actually happening and is a great thing by itself.

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