Embedding cultural element helps brands resonate with consumers
By Felicia Nwosu
Emotions, decisions and behaviours are informed by culture in driving engagement, brand recall, and purchase intent. Understanding and infusing culture in advertising helps to define the relevant emotional palette a brand can use to resonate with consumers’ needs.
As a result of this, some professionals in Nigeria’s marketing communications industry have underlined the imperative of having a strong understanding of the general attitude and characteristics of a particular society by infusing cultural elements in their marketing strategies to enable them create messages that resonate with the needs of consumers.
Commenting on this, Dr. Lekan Fadolapo, Director-General of Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria (ARCON), charged practitioners to gravitate towards cultural content that will resonate with consumers’ pain-points. According to him, people are defined by their culture, so practitioners must tow that line to meet that need.
“Within globalisation, we need to have a space for localisation, as much as we are a global community. Our local elements must play a role in advertising; it must resonate with the community. It must promote religion, culture and recognise the people for who they are. We need to understand that agency operators resonate with the people,” he said.
Steve Babaeko, President of Association of Advertising Agencies of Nigeria (AAAN) a creative guru with several years of experience understands the value of being culturally-savvy in leveraging marketing campaigns that will create fond and enduring memories. He advised that creators should understand the multilingual nature of Nigeria and tread carefully.
“We must infuse our culture in our campaign to impact the consumer. The consumers are actually insisting on it now. Advertising itself is buried within the social and cultural context of the people, which is why it is difficult for me now to go to Russia to advertise there. Firstly, I don’t speak Russian. Secondly, I don’t understand Russians. So, it’s the same thing in Nigeria. If you really want the people to be able to embrace your message, you have to communicate with them in the language they understand, in the kind of cultural context that they understand, without offending them. There are raw materials and gems buried in every part of our culture. We should be able to just extract them and be able to put it to use,” he said.
Jude Odia, the Managing Director of Starcom Media Perspectives, a digital-first integrated media solutions company, urged advertisers to incorporate culture in every story to enable them craft compelling advertising concepts and ideas that can go global even if it is locally made.
“New studies have shown that consumers’ retention span is dropping, showing that on an average, a typical consumer sees nothing less than a thousand plus videos in a day – I mean audio in thousands. The question is: how could we effectively connect with this guy that has fragmented media all around him, especially when you now add the social media platforms, the blogs, and all of that.
“The only solution to it is storytelling, the ability to tell people difficult things in simple story-like formats, and I believe that Africans can only be best in storytelling,” he said.
Kenny Ogungbe, CEO of Kennis 104 FM/ TV, concurred that culture determines consumers’ experiences, beliefs, and values, which in turn translate directly into decisions. He encouraged professionals to leverage it optimally to help preserve culture and also shape the society with the right norms and values.
“Culture is very germane because we have to celebrate and sell our own either through music, fashion, movies and many others. Afrobeat, a Nigerian genre of music, is everywhere now. If you do not believe in it before, you have to start now because we need to embrace it in all our marketing messages not just to get audience attention, but also to inspire them to take action,” he said.
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