The Chief Executive Officer of Brand Research and Agency Ltd (BRA), Mr Maurice Ukpong, in this interview with Akin Adewakun, put the figure the nation’s marketing communications industry lost to the recent oil subsidy crisis at about N2billion, adding that the crisis would have been avoided if the Federal Government had enlisted the services of marketing communications experts to sell the idea to  Nigerians. Excerpts:

In your assessment, what do you think the marketing communications industry has lost so far to these protests and strike?
 To start with, most of the firms that are supposed to invest money in marketing communications have not been able to do so. And if you are talking about the several billions the economy had lost so far, then I don’t estimate anything less than between N1 and N2billion of that, being lost by this industry. If you consider the fact that our industry last year did make between N60 to N62billion, and if you divide that by the number of the months in a year,  you would see that we have done averagely more than N2billion in a month last year. And if that is the case, it is very safe to assume that we have lost close to that in the industry as a result of the crisis.

 What do you think went wrong? Is it that those that handled  government’s communications did  not do enough, as argued in some quarters?
 The situation was avoidable, if it had been well managed in terms of communication. Even though the idea is not condemnable, but we sincerely believe that it could have been managed better if the government had toed the line of using marketing communications professionals to manage the information. In advanced countries of the world, no government wakes up one day and introduce a policy without planning on how to market these policies to the public, especially policies that have wide range implications for its citizens. I believe that government should have consulted with practitioners, and told them the idea they had, and enlisted their services on how to go about marketing the idea. The time frame would have been set. A lot of agitations that if government is going to withdraw subsidy, let them put in place palliative measures, would have been part of those things the agencies would have suggested. For instance, from our own agency, most of the things that we do  start with research. We would have probably done this research by talking to a cross section of Nigerians. The expectations and  anger would have been expressed, may be in a focus group, or in  research findings to us. When we have this kind of findings in this research, then we bring it into our marketing communication planning. And I tell you that government would have passed through  this process of finding out what the people would think, what would be their reactions and expectations in terms of fuel subsidy removal and all that. And to summarise this, I think it would have been done better than this if agencies were involved in the management of the entire communications process

 Don’t you think that practitioners are not participating and positioning themselves enough when it comes to governance in this country?
 Well, I don’t think I would like to agree with you here. It’s like having a case, and you want to seek  legal advice, you go to legal practitioners and do this. Don’t forget that brand managers are professionals. There are no two ways about it. If you are not being consulted, how would you now offer such services? When I talk about consulting marketing communications experts, it’s not like coming to Brand Research and Advertising Agency (BRA). It is about looking at the agencies that are there in the country and seeking their advice on how best to handle your brief. This is public communications and there are experts in that field. So government has to come to us for us to offer that service.   But the question is: are these people looking the way of the agencies when it comes to marketing their policies in Nigeria. Until the government begins to recognise the industry as very critical in the nation’s political and economic development, then we would continue to have this kind of protests and strikes most of the time.

At times like this, what do you think practitioners should be doing to help brands recover quickly from this setback?
We would do what we have been doing for our brands. For us, we have our own brands, we’ve already planned for 2012, the only thing is that some of these plans and  programmes for each of our brands probably may not have been executed on time due to this crisis. For us, we know  clearly what we intend to do for most of our brands, the execution may have been delayed,  but we will only start from where we stopped. The only thing is that the money that you did not spend in the last one or two weeks, there is no way you can spend the money back. And I think the government should also listen to us and see what they can do differently from what they have done in the past.

 What is your assessment of the 2012 budget in respect to the industry?
 If you look at this year’s budget, there is no place where government is budgeting X amount of money for marketing communications. It simply means that government does not just believe that this is an industry that has to be looked upon seriously, otherwise there would have been provision for it. Though I also understand that some of these are embedded in some ministries’ or parastatals’ budgets. That again still goes to show the level of importance government has attached to marketing communications. Until government begins to look at this industry as a critical partner in terms of marketing their policies and their programmes, then we will continue to have this kind of agitations.

So, from the government angle, there is no hope for us. And I don’t think a brand like Nigeria can grow without us. Though they didn’t have a specific budget for us, we would, as we’ve always been doing in the past, continue to play critical roles in the execution of programmes, if not at the government level, but at our client level. The various companies that we are working for obviously have their marketing budget; the triuth is that any government macro economic policy that  will affect the entire industry is going to affect our brands and affect how much they are going to put into marketing communications. So, though we don’t have a clear cut provision at government level, but at government-agency level, our clients have budget for us.