Desmond Henry TREASURE BEACH:
MY SYMPATHETIC heart bled with much understanding after reading Dr. Akshai Mansingh's article in the Financial Gleaner recently, on the gaping lapses in the marketing of West Indies Cricket. It was my professional heart, however, that came close to suffering fatal haemorrhaging. Truth is, what Mansingh wrote about cricket is also true of most other products which we peddle in the international marketplaces.
Imagine if you can, the emerging global community as a kind of modern sophisticated supermarket. Now picture Jamaica as a vendor on the sidewalk just outside the main door. For that is exactly the position we are adopting, and the message we have been sending out about ourselves as international competitors. We are higglers to ourselves and, to a great extent, the rest of the world as well. In many respects we are still using old orthodoxies and following antiquated rules and attitudes about international marketing.
When the new West Indies Cricket Board was formed a few years ago, led by Pat Rousseau, I personally welcomed its formation and commented on some of the modern sports management and marketing concepts which I thought he would have brought to his office as president. I had worked with him in marketing before, and remembered when as PR manager at Desnoes and Geddes where he was a director; together we conceived the idea of the Caribbean Horseracing Championships, not so much for the event itself but as a quid pro quo for getting Red Stripe into Trinidad.
By all accounts Rousseau started out right at WICB, but soon earned the wrath of the narrow insular types who saw the game more as preserving personal power, than seizing commercial opportunities. And so in order to enjoy status rather than make money, they got rid of Rousseau. At least that's my impression.
What is true of cricket is also true of the way we market most other activities and commodities to the world. We mis-apply talent, product and resources and then wonder why we lose or never gain market share. Nationally, we create high-profile marketing institutions and then staff them by a process of bureaucratic musical chairs, completely ignoring the fact that marketing does better with specialists, rather than generalists. I have said it a thousand times: we defy the horses-for-courses principle by putting the wrong horses on the wrong courses. So we end up with the wrong results. Like importing sugar, ill-protecting our spices, and donating our musical trademarks free, gratis and for nothing to the rest of the world. We haven't quite reached that stage in our tourism and bauxite yet, mainly because of the strong leadership corps at tourism's investment centre, and that the bauxite companies do their own marketing. Left mainly to Government's lack of boldness and assertiveness, we'd probably be much worse off than we are today.
Some years ago, in a piece to try and play marketing catch-up, I had raised the idea of creating a small marketing elite group from among the brightest minds graduating from our schools, sign them on and send them off on field learning assignments to South East Asia and the Pacific, to study how they have accomplished what they have, in the world's market places. We have done nothing of the sort and continue to peddle by trial and error across the world.
In addition, I had challenged our teaching institutions to begin the creation of a kind of academic case studies of certified examples of local marketing achievements, as prelude to the publishing of a local textbook for teaching marketing in our schools. A great deal of the legwork could have been done by students as research assignments. Because of the absence of such reference material however, most of our young minds believe that there is nothing edifying or worth studying about marketing accomplishments by our own businesses and governments. We have succeeded in creating a huge intellectual vacuum and entrepreneurial disrespect, in the minds of our own people. And then we wonder why we are non-competitive.
Right now we have the good fortune of having our tourism and sports under the same Ministry. We should be way out front with plans and ideas to piggyback our tourism on the fortunes of sports, just as we should on the growing demands for our spices and foods, or the universal recognition of our popular rhythms.
As Dr. Mansingh pointed out we have failed to recognise that we are now operating in a world in which the marketing parameters have been changed considerably by technological marvels called satellite television and the Internet. Add to that the power of persistent merchandising and the never ending benefits from trade-offs, and we should be putting ourselves right back in the fields of huge economic pay-offs.
When for example, as Director of Tourism in the 1970s I ordered the establishment of the annual Reggae Sunsplash, it was aimed precisely to take advantage of a unique local product that had a worldwide appeal. The same could be done with many other products, but only from a perspective of management and packaging by marketers who understand marketing.
THE BOTTOM LINE:
Performance that is rewarded, tends to be repeated.
n Desmond Henry is a marketing strategist based in Treasure Beach, St. Elizabeth
