The Making - Episode 5

Tecno ran the same phone twice. One campaign got five entries. The other got 200 million impressions.

In Episode 5 of The Making, Abeiku takes on Part Six of Rules for the Marketing Communication Executive by Prof. Robert Ebo Hinson & Joel Nettey: Integrated Marketing Communications Strategy.

If you've ever sat in a meeting where someone said "we need a TikTok strategy," this one is for you.

📖 Get the book: Rules for the Marketing Communications Executive by Prof. Robert Ebo Hinson & Joel Nettey - 0591343421

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MAD Conversations - Marketing. Advertising. Digital. Design. Ghana's commercial creativity - documented.

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Chapters

00:00 Intro
 01:56 Book Spotlight: Citizen Experience
 05:21 Rule 53
 06:56 The WWII Campaign That Invented IMC
 12:06 "TikTok Is Not a Strategy"
 12:49 Rule 54
 16:06 Why Ego Breaks Integration
 19:39 Rule 61: Narrative Is Cognitive Necessity
 22:31 The Tecno Case Study
 26:30 Same Phone, Different Story: 200 Million Impressions

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Well, if you're watching this and you are a marketing communications professional or a business owner or a founder, you might have come across the word integrated marketing communications. Now, let's talk about integration for a minute because I think people get it wrong. Integration is not the achievement of any single function or a single profession or any single brilliant idea. It is a collective discipline which is the capacity of an organization and all of its communication partners to hold a shared strategic direction and express it faithfully, distinctively, and consistently across every touch point, every channel, and every moment of the contact of the audience. That sounds simple, but it's not. Because here's the situation every marketing communications executive faces. And I'm sure business owners you'll face that as well. Multiple channels, multiple messaging, multiple teams, multiple agents, multiple everything, all of which must produce at the point of contact with a consumer. The experience of a single, coherent, purposeful brand speaking with one voice. Well, welcome to the making, right here on Mad Conversations. This is where I sit with the book, The Rules of the Marketing Communications Executive. We've been running through this for the past four episodes. The book is written by Professor Ebohinson and Joe Nete. And if you're just joining us, I would advise that you go start from episode one. And if you haven't yet got the book, I also advise that you get it because there's just so much more in there that I can't cover in this episode or in the whole series that we are running. And I want you to learn along. But before we get into the main episode, I want to introduce a new book by Professor Robert E. Bohinson that he authored with the current Chief of Staff, Dr. Julius Deborah. The title is Citizen Experience, a research for superior public and civil service delivery. This is what it looks like. And if you're enjoying all the lessons from the rules of the marketing communications executive, I'll suggest you read this. If you've been following the news this week, it's been devastating for the people of Ghana. There's been flooding. And the government's response to the flooding has left more to be desired. Even has left a bitter taste in most people's mouths. When you tune in to your radio, you when you tune in your radio in the morning, you will hear news pundits and people from different divides talking about the response from government, how either it was slow or it wasn't it didn't feel relatable. The president issued a statement, government issued a statement, but people felt that he was just lamenting rather than being pragmatic about the situation. And this is why I believe this book is relevant, The Citizen Experience, because the authors argue that the book was born from a conviction that the public and civil service in Africa can be transformed, that the gap between what citizens experience and what they deserve is not inevitable, not permanent, and not beyond the reach of leaders who are willing to make the right decisions and build the right systems. The frustration is that this transformation keeps being promised, and the promise keeps failing to arrive. So, you see, as citizens, I believe that we need to arm ourselves with this if you if you know anybody in government, if you know anybody who is aspiring to be a leader of the nation. I think we all need to come to the knowledge of this. Um, even as citizens, if you're not in government position, you need to be able to get this, read it, and share the experience amongst ourselves. Let's be able to hold our government accountable. Thankfully, a government official in power co-authored the book. Again, his name is Dr. Julius Debra, the current chief of staff. Okay, let's get back to today's episode. So today we are in part six of the book, and it's titled Integrated Marketing Communications Strategy. There are 15 rules in this part, but I'm only covering three, as you already know if you've been following us. I'm covering 53, 54, and 61. And these three answer three questions. Rule 53 asks, What does integration actually mean? Rule 54 is asking us another question, which is why is it so hard to achieve? And 61 asks, how should the communication in itself be achieved so that it doesn't work against the human brain but it works with it? So coherence, alignment, and narrative. Let's get into it. Rule number 53 Integration is not omnipresence, it is coherence. The most common misreading of integrated marketing communications in practice is that it means being everywhere simultaneously, which is activating every available channel, producing content for every platform, ensuring the brand has visible presence in every media environment the target audience might encounter. This reading produces enormous activity and frequently strategic incoherence. The budget is spread thin. The creative energy is dissipated across too many executions to maintain consistent quality. The brand is visible in many places, saying slightly different things in each, leaving the consumer with a diffuse and unresolved impression rather than a clear and compelling one. The channels are selected in service of a strategic purpose. They are never the purpose themselves. Integration is not about how many channels you activate, it is about whether every channel you activate is saying the same strategic thing. Build coherence. The rich will follow. Before I give you my perspective on this rule, let me take you somewhere quite unexpected. The book I'm breaking down with you is by Professor Henson and Joanetti. But there is another book, Integrated Marketing Communications by Don Schultz, Robert Ludaborn, and Stanley Tannenbaum. The book traces the origin of integrated marketing communications as far back as World War II. Schultz argues that the first true integrated marketing communications program may have been the massive propaganda campaign that overcame lingering American doubts about foreign involvement and enlisted every man, woman, and a child in the war effort. Every media element that existed at the time, and a few that were specially invented, had one single theme defeat the AXIS powers. So newspapers, radio, newsreels in movie theaters, posters, billboards, comic books, serial boxes, even classrooms, every printed surface, every moving image, every sound source, all saying the same thing. And the result? It wasn't just awareness, it was a change in behavior. Young men lined up to join the army. Children carved aircraft shapes for sporter training. Housewives collected cooking fats and went to work in war factories. An entire nation moved in one direction, not because the campaign was everywhere, although it was, but because everywhere it was, it was saying the same strategic thing. And that is integration. It's not omnipresence, it is coherence. Do you get it now? That's what the book is talking about. Now, fast forward to today and look at what we call integrated marketing in this market. You walk into a strategy session and someone says, We need a digital strategy because they're probably a digital marketer. The other one says, Oh, what's our social media strategy? Another person says, Oh, we need a TikTok strategy. Oh, we need a WhatsApp strategy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And before you know it, you have five separate strategies for five separate channels with each having its own objectives, its own tone, and its own creative direction. And it feels like it's not thorough. Because we've been told that consumers consume differently on different platforms. And they do. I do. If you post anything funny on LinkedIn, I'll probably ignore you. I'll tell you, you don't know what you're doing. It depends on the context, though. But we all know their format is different. We agree. Their attention span is different across uh platforms. The context in itself is different. And it's not wrong in itself to think about how each platform works differently. It's not. You should actually think about it. A 15-second TikTok is not a billboard. An Instagram story is not a press release. Understanding the mechanics of each channel is part of the job. But here is where it goes wrong. When you build separate strategy for each channel, you can lose sight of the one thing that should never change, which is the brand meaning. The expression can adapt, the format can shift, but the strategic meaning underneath all of this must be the same everywhere. And when it's not, when your digital team is saying one thing, your advertising team is saying another, and your PR is operating in its own world, and your customer service team is communicating something entirely different, the consumer doesn't experience five well-crafted channel strategies. They experience confusion. The book gives an example of a telco that was doing exactly this. If you read a book, you'll find out communicating across multiple channels with high activity. But advertising was saying one thing, digital was saying another, and service teams were saying a third. The consumer encountering these three incoherent signals could not form a stable brand impression. High activity had produced low impacts, and when they finally established a unified positioning, which is dependable innovation, and they reoriented every channel around it, the communication had become genuinete for the first time. Not because they added new channels, but because existing channels were finally saying the same thing. Think about the difference between the telco and the World War II campaign. In 1942, every channel, from newspapers to serial boxes, was unified under one theme. In 2024, a telco with a fraction of what of the complexity couldn't get three teams to say the same thing. Their tools have gotten better, their discipline has gotten worse. That's the distinction the book is making. Integration is not about how many channels you activate, it's really about whether every channel you activate is working towards the same strategic meaning. A campaign in three channels with perfect alignment is more integrated than a campaign in 12 channels where each channel is doing its own thing. And here is a line from the book that I want you to hold on to. The channels are selected in service of the strategic purpose. They are never the purpose themselves. That means TikTok is not a strategy. Instagram is not a strategy, digital is not a strategy. They are channels. The strategy is the meaning you are building. Their channels are just how you deliver them. So the next time someone in a room says, or as a business owner, someone comes to you and says we need a TikTok strategy, the right response is what's the brand strategy that TikTok needs to express? If you can't answer that, you don't need a TikTok strategy. You need a brand strategy instead. Build coherence. The rich will follow, as the book says. Now let's get into rule 54. Rule 54, the consumer does not see your organizational charts. They see one brand. Inside most large organizations, marketing communications is a territory divided and subdivided by functional boundaries. There is an advertising team, a PR team, a digital team, a social media team, a CRM team, which is customer relationship management, and a content team. And in many cases, each of these teams has its own agency, its own budget, its own objectives, and its own definition of success. These boundaries exist for a legitimate operational reason. They produce work that within each faction's own terms can be genuinely excellent. But the consumer sees none of this. The consumer does not encounter the advertising team's campaign and then separately encounter the digital team's campaign. They encounter the brand. They see a television spot on a Wednesday evening, scroll past a social media post on Thursday morning, receive an email on Thursday afternoon, and walk into a brand or store on Friday. They are not mentally separating these into distinct functional communication streams. They are assembling them into a single accumulated impression of what this brand is, what it stands for, and whether it can be trusted. The consumer assembles all communications into one impression of one brand. Make sure every team that contributes to that impression knows what it is supposed to be building. When I started working at the agency, my first real agency job would go for client meetings at the client's office. I don't want the name drop, but it was very prevalent, it's very prevalent in big multinational campaigns. And I remember walking into these meetings for big campaigns and seeing a room full of people from different agencies. At the time, my agency was handling digital. So my account manager and myself would go in there and have these meetings. You'd find another team or another agency handling BTL, another on PR, another on Media Buy. Each agency had their own team. Each one reported to a different person within the client's marketing department. And I want to be fair here, in my experience, the system worked. There was usually a big idea, a central strategic concept, and every agency's job was to translate that idea into their channel. Digital expressed it one way, BTL expressed it another way, PRO expressed it another way, but their core meaning was the same. And when it worked like that, it was cohesive. The consumer received one impression because everyone was building from the same foundation. So I'm not going to stand here and say the book is describing every organization. Some do it well. Some have the discipline, some have the leadership to hold it all together. But I've also seen what happens when it breaks. And it doesn't break because of incompetence per se. It usually breaks because of one thing: ego and politics. It happens when one agency decides that their interpretation of their big idea is better than what was agreed upon. It happens when a department head wants to put their stamp on the campaign and pushes their channel in a different direction. It happens when someone in the room says, I understand the strategy, but for this platform, we are going to do it our way. And in that moment, which is the moment that one team prioritizes their vision over the shared meaning, their coherence fractures. And the consumer would feel the same way immediately they encounter your brand. They can't tell you what is wrong, they can't name the fragmentation, but something feels off. The brand they saw on social media doesn't feel like the brand they encountered at the activation. The tone shifted, the energy changed, the promise is slightly different, and that inconsistency, even if it's subtle, erodes trust. Because listen, as we've established throughout the whole series, the consumer is assembling every touch point into one impression. We just read it. And when the pieces don't fit, the impression doesn't hold. And inside most large organizations, marketing communications is divided by functional boundaries. Advertising team, digital team, PR team, social media team, even a customer relationship management team, each with their own agency, their own budget, their own objectives. And each one is producing work that within its function and its own terms can be genuinely excellent. But excellence in isolation is not integration. If nobody is managing the overall impression, if nobody in the room has the authority and the discipline to say this doesn't align with the big idea, let's take it back. Then you get what the book is describing. Four good pieces of work that the customer would experience as four incoherent signals. And sometimes it may come up as noise. And incoherence is not neutral. Let's get it straight. The book is clear about this. The consumer's assembled impression of four slightly different messages is not the average of four communications, it is confusion. And confusion actively erodes the brand's ability to build the kind of stable, trustworthy meaning that drives preference. So it comes down to this. The architecture can work, multiple agencies, multiple touch points, one brand. It's not inherently broken, but it only works when every person in that room puts their big idea above their ego, when every agency translates faithfully instead of interpreting freely. And when someone on the client side has the authority and the backbone to hold the coherence together. The consumer assembles all your communications into one impression of one brand. Make sure that everything that contributes to that impression knows what it is supposed to be building. And make sure that nobody in the room is building something else because they think they know better than anybody. Ego is the enemy. Let's get into the last rule, rule number 61. Rule 61. Narrative is not a creative preference, it is cognitive necessity. The human brain is not optimized for processing information in lists, specifications, or abstract claims. It is optimized through millions of years of evolutionary development and thousands of years of cultural practice. That is, for processing information in the form of stories. Narrative is not one way among many of organizing communication. It is the way the human mind naturally makes sense of experience, forms memories, constructs identity, and transfers meaning between people. The campaign that delivers information through narrative is working with the brain's architecture. The campaign that delivers information through pure rational arguments or future enumeration is working against it. Every brief should ask, where is the story here? Not as a creative decision but as a strategic one. What is the transformation this audience is experiencing or aspiring to? And what is the tension they are navigating? What is the role the brand plays in moving them from the one to the other? These are story questions. Answer them, and the brief will generate creative work that moves people because it is aligned with how people actually process meaning. Narrative is how human beings make sense of experience. The campaign that delivers information as a story is working with the brain's architecture. The one that delivers it as specification is working against it. You know, when I read this rule, it reminded me of our season one uh episode, one of our season one episodes. And it is the one with Eriqua. You can check it out on in the description in the description below. She said something that I think every marketer needs to hear. And in fact, if you're a business owner, you need to hear this as well. People don't care about your products. Do you know what they care about? They care about how you make them feel about your product. These are two different things.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

You know, sales-driven jingles, which filled woefully.

SPEAKER_01 22:04

And did it teach you that people don't really care about your product?

SPEAKER_00 22:07

Yes. It's actually made me realize that.

SPEAKER_01 22:09

Yeah, they care about how you make them feel about your product. And she didn't say it as a theory, she said it as someone who has lived it. Not once, not twice, three times. She was working with Techno, you know Techno, the phone brand. And at the time, Techno had a perception problem. People knew it as a feature phone. Most didn't even know that they made smartphones. So the team's approach was logical. Let's sell the specifications. Because when you have an iPhone or Samsung Galaxy, you know the specs, right? So they created jingles. They said, let's sell the specifications, let's show people what this phone can do. Their jingles were product-heavy jingles. I'm not gonna sing it, but essentially what it lined up was Camon 16, that's the name of the brand, 64 gigabytes, this camera, that battery capacity, all of that. They had a mascot dancing and all of that. It works. But sadly, it failed. And it didn't fail once, it failed three times. One of those campaigns got less than five participants. A brand as big as Techno. Five. The jingles were technically accurate. Every specification was real, but nobody could remember them because they didn't care. Nobody could sing along. Nobody truly felt anything about it because the brain doesn't process a list of specifications the way marketers think it is. Or it does. And that's exactly what this rule is talking about. The human brain is not optimized for processing information in lists or specifications or abstract claims. It is optimized through millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of cultural practices for processing information in the form of stories. Before we had the writing, we had stories. Before we had the schools, we had griots sitting under trees. Before we had PowerPoint presentations, we had elders passing down everything a community needed to know through a narrative. And as SMCU CSURA, you remember? That's the architecture. And you can either work with it or work against it. The choice is yours. But techno specification jingles were really working against them. Their brain heard 64GB RAM and processed it rationally, critically, and sadly, forgettably. Because that's what their brain does with specifications. It evaluates them like claims on a spreadsheet. People want to be in touch with nature. And in the market where every competitor is shouting similar specs, or people know the specs of your competitor, there's nothing to do. There's nothing to hold on to. No emotion, no story, no memory. When you think of the big brands, you didn't buy the phone you're using because it had 256 gigabytes. You didn't buy an iPhone because their camera was, most of us didn't buy an iPhone because the camera was high spec. So Eriqua changed their approach. After their campaign failed, the jingle campaign failed, the spec heavy jingle campaign failed. She took a trending Stone Boy song, We Move, and instead of stuffing it with every specification, she stripped it down to almost nothing. Just super powerful camera and the more don't need because people must know that it is come on 16. That's it. Two product references in the entire song. Everything else, a feeling, energy, movement. You know what's interesting? She wrote the script herself. She wrote the script that fits Stone Boy's natural style and attached a dance campaign to it. And she let the audience participate. Remember, I told you how the previous campaign received only five participants. For this, the result was staggering. They anticipated 10 million impressions, yeah, because it's Stone Boy, right? Do you know what they got? 200 million. They were expecting 100 campaign entries because come on, you you were from five. You don't get ahead of yourself. So they didn't even say 500. He said, 100 should be good. They got over 5,000. And here's what matters the most. The facts about the phone didn't change. It was the same Common 16. Not a single specification was different between the Django that failed and the song that exploded. The camera was the same, the battery was the same, the RAM was the same. What changed was the frame. What changed was the narrative. The information went from specification to a story. It went from abstract to fail. And from something their brain evaluates to something that the brain experiences. The book says when a person enters the state of narrative transportation, when they are immersed in a story's progression, they engage emotionally and cognitively at the same time. They lower their critical resistance. They're not too resistant to it. Their attention goes toward what happens next, not necessarily toward evaluating the claims being made. And the memories they form are more durable and more emotionally charged than the memories that are formed through the factual exposure. That's exactly what the Stoneboy campaign did for them. People weren't critically evaluating techno specifications. They were just dancing, they were having fun, they were singing. Because they felt something, because their brain was experiencing something. They were participating in something that felt good. We all want to feel good. It's why we take vacations, don't we? And in the middle of that feeling, the brand embedded itself. Not through an argument, but through experiences. Techno went from outside the top 20 smartphone brand in the market to the top three within the same season. Not because the product changed, but because the story changed. Think about what that means for your work as a marketing communications professional. How many campaigns in this market are still leading with specifications? Fastest network, lowest rates, best coverage, 4 gigram, or we hear all of those. Those are claims. And in fact, in Germany, you can't even do that. So we'll talk about that later. They are not stories, and the brain would process them as just claims. Critically, skeptically, and like I said, forgettably. The book says that every brief should be asked one simple question. Where is the story here? And you shouldn't ask it as a creative device or a creative decision. You should ask it as a strategic one. What is the transformation? What is the transformation that we want the audience to experience? What is the tension that they are navigating? What is the role that the brand plays in moving them from one to the other? Answer those questions and the brief will generate work that moves people because it is aligned with how people actually process meaning. The campaign that delivers information as a story is working with the brain's architecture. The one that delivers it as specification is working against it. So what is part six really telling us? Let's bring it all together. Integration is not about being everywhere, it is about being coherent everywhere you choose to be. So nobody is saying, oh, choose three channels, choose four channels. You can choose all 16 channels if your budget allows you, right? But that coherence doesn't happen by accident. It requires every team, every agency, every function to be building toward the same impression. For medium and small scale enterprises, you might have a lean team, but even within that, you still need to apply this. Because the consumer doesn't see your organizational chart. What they see is one brand and they assemble every touch point into one judgment about whether you can be trusted. And the communication itself must work with how the brain actually processes meaning, which is through narrative and not specification. The campaign that tells a story is working with this architecture that we've established. But the one that lists features is massively working against it. Remember, one person's strength alone is not enough. Integration is a collective discipline. And the collective only works when everyone is telling the same story. So let me ask you this. If the consumer assembled every single piece of communication your brand has put out this month or in the last month of June, the social media posts, the billboard, the radio sports, the customer service call, the email, all of that, would it feel like one brand or would it feel like five different teams who never talked to each other? If you're not sure, this episode just showed you why that question matters. And I need you to get the book, The Rules of the Marketing Communications Executive. It's only 200 CDs. Uh, you should be seeing it on your screen now, and it's by Joel I Nete and Robert Ebo Henson. The details will be in the description. There are 15 rules in this chapter. I mentioned it at the beginning. We've only discussed three. There are 12 others that you need to discover for yourself. It's waiting for you in the book. So please go get it. So thank you for staying till this point. Share this episode, drop a comment, tell me which route challenged you the most, and subscribe so you don't miss when uh the next one is coming. This has been The Making, right here on Mad Conversations, and I've been your mad friend. Abeku.