Authored by: Simeon Taiwo

While my heart goes out to the management of Bokku Mart, and I genuinely pray for their recovery from the recent PR storm they are navigating, there is a lesson I would like to share on matters of brand strategy and proactive brand management.

This is something many businesses don’t understand, including many creatives who just toy around with the matters of brand strategy without proper training.

Background of the story

To provide some context for those who may not be familiar with the story, a recent video published by the supermarket featured a hired influencer who remarked, “So I can get beans and Garri Ijebu at Bokku without any Omo Igbo cheating me.” This statement implies the use of ethnic stereotypes to enhance the brand’s credibility. Unfortunately, many netizens, particularly individuals from the affected tribe, did not find this humorous and reacted strongly against it.

Lessons for Nigerian Brands and Creatives

Brand strategy isn’t just some fancy buzzwords that anyone should mindlessly play with. If you do, it will bite when the rubber hits the road and things get serious. Now, from my professional experience, three key stages of brand strategy are very crucial to the long-term success of any business: the brand core strategy, the positioning strategy, and the implementation strategy. I’ll talk a little about these three in a bit.

The truth is, to be an excellent creative, you need to understand strategy, be able to interpret it, and be able to convert it into tangible communications that connect directly with the intended market and that portray the brand in the desired light.

On no occasion should a creative get on a task for a brand without understanding the personality (character, tone, and voice) of the brand, which is derived from the positioning strategy.

And for every brand implementation, there are supposed to be guardrails. These guardrails help to identify the scope of creative freedom you have as a creative and the boundaries you shouldn’t cross.

Even at BrandingSchool.NG, we have a brand document that clearly communicates many of these things. Of course, as a branding school, it’s only a baseline for us to have it. And it’s important that as a brand, you have something like that.

Three key cardinals of every solid brand

1. The Brand Core: You can’t call yourself a brand if you don’t have a corporate vision, mission, brand story, and core values. Not the ones you lifted from Google or generated with AI, but the ones that came through proper introspection, retrospection, and research. These are the things that form your brand core strategy.
2. The Brand Positioning: You can’t call yourself a brand if you don’t have a brand messaging and positioning statement that points to the unique market you serve, the other existing players in that market, and what makes your own service different. These are the things that form your positioning strategy.
3. Brand Expressions: Finally, you can’t consider yourself a proper brand if you lack a clearly defined brand personality that reflects the character, tone, and voice of your brand. This aspect of brand strategy includes the guardrails (dos and don’ts) I previously mentioned for your routine brand communications and creative expressions. These are the elements that fall under your implementation strategy, and without them, you won’t maintain a consistent voice or tone, which could lead to PR disasters like the one Bokku Mart is currently experiencing.

Now, you only get all these things when you invest in a solid brand strategy and not just logo design, business cards, branded t-shirts, and websites, which are the only things many think of when we mention branding.

In conclusion, we need to know that a brand is an entity with a spirit, a soul, and a body. And branding is the routine work of carefully building and nurturing your brand in the hearts of people. As such, even after designing the document, there needs to be an intentional management system in place.

That’s why companies have brand managers whose job is to ensure they monitor every communication that goes out to be sure it’s in alignment with the brand strategy. And it’s not even in the title, but in the understanding of what’s at stake with that office.

Are you a small business owner, and would you like to learn more about branding professionally? Start your journey with this free course.