Marketing for establishing global brand amiss in Pakistan

[Naveed Yaseen]

By Faryal Najeeb
KARACHI: Managing Director of SGS Pakistan Private Limited, Syed Farrukh Mazhar believes that non-serious attitude towards marketing by top management of local companies has left a significant gap in the huge potential the country has for marketing products and forming a brand of its own.

Speaking to The News, the former president of Marketing Association of Pakistan (MAP) said that advertisements are considered as the only marketing technique in this country. “In the true sense, marketing is something you need to conceive on the basis of ideas, the projects at hand, the brand and others.”

“It has a large portfolio including the company’s vision and mission to present a much bigger picture than only creating awareness of a product. Effective marketing requires dedication of the whole team rather than an individual as it’s not a one-man show,” he continued.

Mazhar pointed out that in Pakistan proper emphasis is not given to this very important aspect and unfortunately even the top management of local companies prefer to do away with the marketing budget of their organizations than increase it. Consequently, Pakistan continues to remain significantly amiss in creating a brand image for its products in the international market.

Mazhar held that awareness at the organizational level is extremely vital, for which repetitive efforts are necessary such as holding meetings, seminars and workshops. “During my tenure at MAP, I organized many events including sessions with international speakers but the response from the public was not as expected and continued to remain poor despite repeated attempts by me to make these events successful.”

Mazhar held that this proved the indifferent attitude of organizational leaders towards marketing which was a grave point of concern as their tasks should be to train the lower level staff to speak the language of marketing rather than do away with it.

“It is a proven fact that you create customer loyalty whenever you come in contact with your customers and in Pakistan the impact that advertisements have are tremendous as our society is a largely influence-led community,” he said.

He provided the example of the telecommunication sector, whose success he attributed to the mobile service providers who invest heavily into marketing their services, thereby creating a healthy competition in the sector, catering to consumer needs and at the same time also contributing to the local economy in the form of taxes and revenues.

For Mazhar, the sad part is that whilst marketing is ignored, market research is also very poor, as top managements do not consider it as an aspect towards business development either.“Pakistan is a 180 million economy, which is a huge market in itself as we are a consumer based society.

The prospect for segmentation and niche is more here and we do not need to look at other countries if we target our own people,” he added. However, the problem remains that lack of interest by companies in conducting market research has not identified the potential areas of consumer penetration and neither have they being able to create a rapport with their customers and their needs, he said.

Referring to the global recession, he observed that Pakistan could have marketed itself in the international front as not having been deeply affected by the financial meltdown and hence, gained confidence of investors to invest here.

He commented that on the contrary, local businessmen had cried alarm over declining exports and further highlighted the weakness of the society such as poor law and order.Citing an example of his own company, Mazhar said “At SGS, we stand at a position where we meet with people from all walks of life as SGS caters to a varied variety of sectors such as manufacturing, chemicals, services and more and therefore we also have an experienced insight into the minds of foreign businessmen.”

He continued to say that Pakistan had an ideal opportunity where local businessmen could have turned the world recession to their benefit and availed the chance to invite foreigners to deal with them.

The former president of MAP stated that though cost of doing business was higher in Pakistan than elsewhere, controlled production and proper diligence by the government towards the sector could have overcome this issue.

Speaking about the efforts being made by MAP to create awareness regarding the importance of marketing, Mazhar said that MAP had launched an educational course in advertising and communication skills in collaboration with the Institute of Business Management.

MAP had designed the curriculum and also selected the teachers for the course and already one batch of students had graduated last year. He informed that MAP was also working towards a new project called ‘Pakistan Brand Initiative’ to promote Pakistan as a brand in itself and the “purpose is to show that Pakistan is a great nation.”

He said that the initiative was at its very first stage and “in just five minutes of this development, we got 125,000 dollars pledged by different organizations which shows that all hope is not lost and we can still do much for Pakistan.”

http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=168732