Challenges of The Nigerian Technology Brand…Top 10 in 2010

According to the egg heads in the branding and marketing communications arena, the term ‘Brand’ is not just an expression or even a vague description but a living thing. It is believed that the concept of a brand goes way beyond slogans and creative artistry to become the very live-wire of a corporate entity. In fact an elementary definition of a brand is that it is “the promise you make to your publics (internal and external)”.

According to a popular Wikipedia definition, a brand is the identity of a specific product, service, or business. The word brand has continued to evolve to encompass identity as it affects the personality of a product, company or service. Brand is the personality that identifies a product, service or company (name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or combination of them) and how it relates to key constituencies: Customers, Staff, Partners, and Investors etc.

Some people distinguish the psychological aspect, brand associations like thoughts, feelings, perceptions, images, experiences, beliefs, attitudes, and so on that become linked to the brand, of a brand from the experiential aspect. Enough said, but a big ‘but…’ sticks out whenever one wants to examine the ideology along the lines of Nigerian brands (?) within the technology sphere. Basing the thrust of this commentary on this 'promise' analogy, it is obvious that most so-called technology brands in Nigeria do not qualify to be called brands. Aside the usual 'mission and vision' claims, it is obvious that our tech companies are a long way to metamorphosing into real brands.

Perhaps branding is easier within the realm of retailing and consumer products. The nature of consumer products is basic and simple, and the target of the branding exercise is a single, individual consumer. Effective branding derives its power from the multiplier effect, i.e., an individual purchase of N10 standing on its own doesn’t amount to much but multiply that purchase by millions of consumers and you are talking about a huge amount of money.

In the technology sector, classic branding is somewhat at odds with the nature of the product – the intellectual content is high and not easily understood, and the buying audience comprises a select group of people, small in number but high in buying power. When looked at from a volume perspective, high-tech sales are small compared to the consumer products market. But from a price per unit perspective, high-tech sales generally have a huge money value. Being able to measure the impact and, therefore, the value of marketing activities, has always been a major problem, according to Verstand's Price. Beyond the problems with measurability, positioning and the brand have to be on the same page, Price maintains. "If the brand and the positioning being used to support it are out of alignment, it will have a negative impact on the brand," she says.

Price cites the Intel Inside campaign as "a very good example of positioning being very much in sync with the brand." The Intel Inside campaign – geared toward advancing the proposition that a personal computer is not much use without an Intel microprocessor – has helped the company gain traction over the last few years. Other tech brands have had varying success in connecting with consumers and establishing a position in their minds.

IBM’s US campaign takes the form of an e-business message squarely targeted at CEOs and corporate presidents who must make multi-million dollar decisions about the use of information technology. IBM speaks directly to the acid-reflux-inducing situation where the decision maker is faced with conflicting advice from various internal teams. The pitch within this context is simple – you can trust us to solve your problem; after all, we’re IBM – we understand all this complicated stuff.

Both Oracle and Microsoft are concentrating on their respective corporate brands. Oracle’s branding effort has focused on casting itself as the database software provider of choice. Microsoft’s branding strategy has been more diffuse and designed to strengthen its grip on the PC market.

So to what extent does Nigerian indigenous brands like Chams, Zinox, Computer Warehouse, Resourcery, Omatek, Progenics, Beta, Signal Alliance, Weco, Telnet, Teledom, etc, connect with consumers and establish a position in their minds? Better still, is it possible to expect a branding message from someone that does not produce anything? Can a company make a promise that is not theirs to give in the first place? How can a branding/PR expert tell the story of a company without any real or that has a chameleonic identity? These are the questions that must be tackled before we can be sure that there can be any sense in branding for the Nigerian technology brands.

Taking the submissions above literally, the only technology companies in Nigeria that satisfies the attributes of a real brand are those with the following qualities:

• Ownership of some distinctive properties - companies that “own” nothing usually are not good candidates for brand classification. Being well known is not enough to be called a brand, so that disqualifies majority of the trading technology companies that resell other companies’ products.
• The property owned by the brand is important and provides a competitive edge – when companies state ‘mission and vision’ and spice it up with ‘excellent service delivery’ and other difficult-to-measure indices, it still shows the fact that what they really own is not that important that it can be a tangible competitive advantage. Its just words, nothing more!
• When there’s a relationship between fit and leverage – according to Brand Extension Research, if a brand brings little strength other than recognition and a general good feeling, it may have little leverage. So the fact that your IT firm has ‘signed-up’ to represent Microsoft, Oracle, Dell, Cisco, etcetera, doesn’t do your own brand much good because there’s still no realistic leverage you are bringing into the equation other than just name recognition.
• Avoidance of ‘Great Reputation’ trap – when most technology service firms tout the reputation mantra, they seem to forget that the reputation you bring in one area of technology services is bound to be different from the one in another business region. In fact, when it comes to technology branding having a great reputation for quality is not enough.

Based on the above submissions, it can be adduced that there is a wide gap when it comes to the probability of most Nigerian ICT firms progressing into real brands. Take for instance a case of a technology service provider, otherwise called a ‘Systems Integrator’ (another name for: I-don’t-have-any-product-or-service-but-I-can-do-all-things) that hopes for an identity as an authentic technology brand in Nigeria, one of the most challenging aspects of this quest is what is commonly termed as ‘identity confusion’.

A situation whereby Nigerian IT Company ‘A’ is affiliated as a trade partner to a global IT brand like Cisco or IBM, the brand aspirations of ‘A’ is invariably tied to the apron strings of their global partner. And it is referred to as a state of confusion because should there be any change in the relationship between both parties, it will surely necessitate a change in the identity of our Systems Integrator. A typical example being a Cisco partner that has a falling-out and decides to partner a Huawei – they can no longer use ‘Premium Cisco partner’ to leverage on their ability to execute a networking project. Therefore their inability to have their own product or solution has limited their ability to be a viable technology brand.

At the moment, TBR® can only identify the following as possessing the traits that are in consonance with real technology brands around the world. Part of the criteria for selecting these Nigerian Technology brands include, but are not limited to, efforts made to promote their cooperate traits, marketing and branding activities as well as publicity management of their brand messages. Thus we present the following as the Top 10 Nigerian technology brands:

• Chams
• Zinox
• Omatek
• Veda
• Telnet
• Progenics
• Anabel
• Direct On PC
• Interswitch
• Swift Networks