UBL UNVEILS THE NEW LOOK BELL LAGER BOTTLE!

The new Bell Lager bottle

Uganda Breweries has unveiled a refreshed Bell Lager complete with a slim long neck bottle, in a move brand officials say will reinforce the premium quality attributes that the flagship brand has been

associated with over the years.

Unveiling the refreshed Bell Lager bottle to the Press at Serena Hotel - Kampala, EABL Marketing Director Marion Muyobo said, "Uganda's oldest brew which has been perfected to international standards by the best brewers in Uganda has now reached the height of quality with the new look." She

attributed the innovation to Bell Lager consumers. "As we follow Bell Lager's foot prints over the years, we owe the brand's success story to its loyal consumers. It is you who have made Bell what it is today. It is you who have continued to define the direction the brand will take. As you hold the new Bell Lager bottle in your hands, we can tell you agree that the brand has achieved what it set out to achieve.eight of quality", she said.

The old Bell Lager bottle

Bell Lager has spanned over 60 years in the Ugandan market as a premium quality brand of international repute that epitomizes Ugandan heritage and has won numerous Monde Selection awards. EABL Uganda Managing Director Alasdair Musselwhite said the Brewery found it inevitable to refurbish the packaging to match the ever changing consumer preferences, lifestyles, and trends. He was quick to note that the new look Bell does not in any way compromise on the taste and quality of the brand.

"The premium quality lager is made from only the finest barley, hops and water to produce a world class beer, unrivaled in freshness. All our processes work together to give you a world class beer, now in the new longneck bottle.

The Bank, Competitions & Awards

What have I been up to? Well, a lot apparently.

On Thursday 12^th I was invited on behalf of Speakers Without Borders to attend a stakeholder workshop hosted by the Bank of Uganda on rolling out a National Financial Literacy and Consumer Protection Education Policy to provide insights gained from working among young people on how to approach “these things”. Basically, the “banks are fucking the consumers” and we need to tell people to avoid getting well, screwed. The discussion ranged from simple things like the cooling off period between loan applications and funds disbursement to the glaring gap in the report on how to actively engage and sustain the financial literacy discussion among the young adults in Uganda despite the sheer weight they exert on the demographic tables.  Also there are over 150,000 Ugandans on Face book. Most of those are not my parents’ age. So, why not?  Use everything available as long as they are getting the message. I gave my two cents there.

On Friday the 13^th, I was invited by Mambo Guy, an old buddy who I’ve known for forever, President of the The Lantern Meet, connoisseur of fine things, and architect - to attend the Final presentation of Kitenge Spaces. This cat is really smooth. About a year ago he won a grant from The Youth Action Fund under the auspices of the Open Society Institute (EA) to run a competition for architecture students to design Afro-centric spaces. His belief that architecture is culture and therefore a reflection of our common identity is a debate that’s raged on over the years between him and I. Basically because I think that the spiel that spaces define people is academic hogwash but rather that people define the spaces they live in. Anyway over the course of a year he has had the contestants design and submit objects and space designs to a panel of young and rather erudite architects. This competition is Kitenge Spaces.

Mambo Guy

"Just as a noun is only a noun if it possesses a “verbal companion,” a house is not a house unless it has a proper primary function, from which it will derive its spirit. So the house gives, and the house takes, but the house cannot be unless needs qualify it... like a genie that one summons out of a lamp, to answer to ones needs."

Yesterday, as I sat at the National Theatre and listened to a young man talk about the communality of the African meal and why, that, of all spaces, should be the most well lit space in the house, I knew that Guy had done it. He’d come from where 3 of us sat 5 years ago and talked about being “that man” and taken the road. “That man” is the guy who does not take what he is given, but rather will consistently, infect, affect and effect everything around him with change; constantly saying “NO! This isn’t enough” and asking for more soup, re-defining his own boundaries, pushing the horizon a little further and, without knowing it, making the lives of many, many people mean so much more. Now the world has to watch out. He is coming.

Later in the evening I attended the Public Relations Association of Uganda (PRAU) Excellence Awards Dinner where they were awarding the best PR campaigns, practitioners, companies, agencies and organizations. In what was an almost serendipitous occasion, URA swept three awards all in the corporate communications category, The “ONE LOVE” Campaign by ZK Advertising for UHMG (the “sexual network” campaign for those of you who don’t know it yet) was voted the Overall Best Campaign of 2009/2010. I for one was happy because having personally worked on the submissions for  and designed the communication materials for two of the winning entries –Best Event PR, The Johnnie Walker Launch in Uganda (covered aptly in this post here but also very well taken care of by Google. Hehe!), and the Best Crisis Management Award for President Lager - a Uganda breweries product that was interdicted right before Christmas last year by Nile Breweries from bottling the product in a long neck bottle.

Cheers catch up later!

Thought Leadership: The Game is changing.

Uganda, the land of milk and honey, corruption and money. A beautiful kaleidoscopic picture of zen view sunsets and the gory dod-eat-dog world of modern-day capitalism. To the naked eye, the country is preparing for elections in 2011 but to the trained eye the powers that be are in anarchy.

Over the past few weeks there have been relatively few ads in the newspapers. Well this is what has been going on…

A couple of months ago all the media houses in Uganda got together and decided that agencies who book, sell, and plan media buying for the corporate machine owed them too much money and therefore they were going to stop running all adverts. They called a meeting to talk about this and they were right; agencies and clients together owed the media houses a whopping [Red Pepper style] UGX 5.9 Billion! They gave the agencies, who foolishly agreed, 90 days in which to address the delicate matter with their respective clients and get back to them. 

 90 days later.

A couple of weeks ago Robert “KaBush” (from here on known as Bush), summoned the mother of all meetings, he and his Nation Media Group counterpart Dr. Githinji (did you know he was a gynecologist?) had amassed all their smaller and diverse media cronies and, seated at the head of the table, announced that all advertising was going to stop running. They had done what scholars and industry watchers had thought was unthinkable, let alone undoable. They had blacklisted all media agencies; a blanket ban.
The review meeting following this announcement showed that the agencies had managed to bring down their debt to about UGX 2.9 Billion claiming that some of their clients were adamant to pay or had stricter payment procedures and therefore had not been able to remit the balance in the 90 days pending. So all advertising was going off air.

He shouldn’t have

One, been positioned as the leader of the fight against the corporate machine because that evening nearly all MDs, CEOs, and CFOs of the corporate machine met separately to discuss this new turn of events while simultaneously the agencies also met to digest this new twist to things.

Two, put a blanket ban on the all the agencies because not all agencies had failed to pay. Therefore the whole industry being victimized for one agency’s lack of fiduciary wisdom was not perceived as just or bright.

Three, stood together with his competition to try and “Enforce” a measure that he felt was for the “greater good” because in the end he will still be standing alone to his shareholders to account for what’s happening to their investments.

The results of the meetings.

The Bush meeting ended up with an alliance signed in blood committing all the media houses to a cooperation where if you owe any single media house money e.g. Observer, you will not get be able to run your advertisement in any other newspaper. Of course this would mean increased cooperation amongst the media houses but it also posed the precarious question of commitment and solidarity. In a time when the market is shrinking and print media budgets are quickly being replaced you don’t want to be caught biting the advertisers’ hand. 45 extra days were given and ZK Advertising, the second largest spender of advertising in East Africa 2009 and Ignition were blacklisted. All their advertising was blocked and no work would be coming through them from anyone. Instead, the media houses circumvented the agencies and went directly to the clients and got the adverts directly.
The MDs and CEO meeting resulted in reimbursement bills to their secretaries for coffees and networking time spent discussing “industry re-formation”. They all however agreed that what Bush had done was undesirable and they would have to find a way of punishing the bad boy for his behaviour. “Let’s pull all our advertising from him”, someone whispered, but just like the whisper, he was asked to speak quietly because they all needed Bush.

The agency meeting yielded slightly more than the above because they ended up forming something called the Agencies’ Association of Uganda. (AAU? Kind of funny considering how much weed and alcohol those guys consume no?) They, on the other hand decided to coalesce and give a united position to the Media Owner’s Association, which had triggered all of this. Some radicals said they should get together with their clients and force the media houses to apologize and come to more amenable terms of payment and relationships.
What does this mean for the future?

The Bush and the Gynecologist are definitely not being loved in a lot of client circles and if you are keen there will noticeably be reduced invitations to them to attend corporate functions in the period ahead. 

A certain guerilla caucus has come together to find all the ways in which the Vision conglomerate and the Nation behemoth are replaceable starting with the newspapers. Starting at the top, they are re-doing the research, figures, rationales, and psychographics to justify why all the FMCG companies and the corporatocracy should shift from mainstream media and now invest in more audience-driven forms of media. Perhaps new media even; blogs, Facebook, websites, twitter, You Tube, mobile phone ads, etc. We know that Fireworks has a team dedicated to online/new media; surveying, analyzing, studying, experimenting. Are they about to propose a radical shift to their clientele that will extend the advertising frontier, once again?

The smaller players in this convoluted power play have failed to get their erections up to speak up for their rights and so they are doing what they know to do best; going behind the big boys and saying ”Those guys are doing their own thing, you just give me my thing.” The disconnect this has created is not to be ignored. The agencies have not and will not. What they do next with this crack will probably shake the media industry like we have never seen. Perhaps a total advertising blacklist of New Vision, or the Nation Group?

Let’s wait and see.

The agencies have become galvanized under one umbrella body. Whether this is a good thing or not can only be seen with the passing of time. The Scangroup behemoth (East Africa’s largest spender and biggest marketing services provider) is in search of a Ugandan Telco to bolster its ranks. They already have the East African Breweries and the regional Lafarge business to cater to. When I spoke with CEO to one of the agencies that handle one of the Telcos, she said, “What I think we should do is organize as the big agencies and squeeze these small motherfuckers out of business. Because if we dare try and stand against the media houses, they will go behind our backs and confuse our clients and next thing you know we will be royally shafted here. They can do it.” What she meant was squeeze the agencies without big clients out of business by negotiating better commissions from the media houses through bulk buying. What this would do in essence would be to force the industry to re-align reporting, billing and fiscal control procedures. So one uniform billing document recognizable across the industry, one process. A clear signal of progress in the industry but what does it truly mean for the clients? In a world of organized and unionized advertising, there are no surprises, no game-changers, and definitely no lowered costs. The client looking for clear, distinctive and outstanding advertising and market presence will have to literally go rogue, but which agency will, or can? The argument can be made that a lot of agencies will think out of the box and go rogue. That is until they become isolated by fellow agencies, over charged by the media houses and soon rejected by the corporate machine; killing creativity, and dulling the sharp, incisive edge that it takes to cut through today’s’ advertising clutter. What is dizzyingly clear though is that the industry will never be same after this. 

Bush promised the powers that be a platform on which he would deliver the 2011 election. He gave them Bukedde TV, has opened a radio in every mainstream local dialect and is on a roll to revamp the local language papers. This happens amidst an environment where all media houses are trying to acquire more media houses. KFM, currently the most listened to station in inner and greater Kampala, is shopping for upcountry stations to bolster its arsenal of listenership and footprint, while Dembe FM recently acquired the rural based Rwenzori FM. So as the media landscape’s tectonic plates continue to shift and change one thing is for sure; we are on the cusp of something that has happened in very few other countries: Uganda is preparing to leap frog – Again!

How Do You Define a Great Idea?

For a lot of people a great idea is /comes down to one word. That one word represents a concept, an idea, a strategy, a rationale.Coke. Mac. Guinness. Sex. Mercedes. New York. Paris. It could mean the world and more. It just has to tie back into the brand strategy, goals and ideas. 

For a lot of agencies today and especially in emerging markets like Uganda, the challenge is in defining and understanding the market dynamic. It’s not just enough to understand the demographics or the motivations; it’s equally as important to do a psycho graphic profile. Understanding whether in a time of crisis the consumer will choose to spend on your product or not is just as important as building the product or brand that they will not get rid of when times are hard, and they are hard here.The war moved from the market to the the pocket but that's a discussion for another time.

That is where an iron clad strategy comes into play. It is hinged on one great idea; in some agencies called the big idea. When you crack this, you have the lifeblood that will cascade through the line to all your materials, both below and above the line.The truth is that to execute some truly great concepts, agencies around the world have had to have an almost impulsive understanding of their consumers and publics. And to truly have that impulsive touch, look and feel of an audience for an idea, most times comes from the consumer/ public themselves.

So let the audiences define their own touch points, what it means to them to have relevant, measured, direct programming delivered at the time they want it, when they want it. Fact is a lot of the materials that go up on your TV or radio are hoping that between you and your 5 roommates or office mates; only 1 of you gets the message and acts on it. Often, that’s just good enough. But no one has ever asked, “What goes through the mind of a  viewer or a consumer the instant they see the visual sof an ad or a TVC?” It is my firmly held belief that this question will never truly be answered because audiences are as diverse as they are uniform.

Experiences, ideas, influences, passions, desires, pet peeves, perversions all play together to make each viewer/consume different. So we can’t know what each of them is feeling. So how do we tailor this message? We move on to the next best thing; their shared feelings, stereotypes, or ideas towards a common object, idea, or value and sometimes just a word…PAKALAST. CHOW. DISCOUNT. FEAR. ELECTIONS.

This is exactly what we did recently when we were trying to define a brand repositioning for Bell Lager, a product of Uganda Breweries Limited and flagship brand for 60 years. On top of all the above, we had to find the consumers to define what they wanted in order to define where we were going. We did. And the rest is history….

Here, the research:

Here, the new brand postion:

CONFIDENCE