The power of visibility (1)

“You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.” Matthew 5:14-16

 

Forty years after he fled Egypt and was fully settled into the life of a shepherd, totally perishing the thought of being a defender of the nation, the man Moses found himself in the backside of the desert looking for pasture with and for his sheep. Looking forward to the return journey home at the end of the day in the heat of the desert, he was not anticipating an encounter of the shocking kind. Suddenly, he saw smoke rising up not too far away with the unmistakable crackling of a fire. He was prompted to turn towards that direction. What he saw was unprecedented. He saw a fire in the bush not too far from where he was. Desert fires were obviously not a strange sight to an experienced shepherd. But there was something different in and about this fire. The fire was characteristically hot, but the foliage retained its colour and texture, as if there was no fire! The shock effect was not the fire but the fact that the bush was not burnt! Naturally, Moses was hooked and he moved closer to see the “wonder”! By the time God spoke through the fire, Moses was sold!

For a long time, I belonged to the school of thought that if you were doing anything positive or if you have created a value that you consider relevant to the society, you needed to be discreet and self-effacing about it and just let the value speak for itself. This is because I was so convinced that value is self-advertising. For this reason, for the first three or four years after we started a ministry, we had no signboard. I was so sure that news of what we were doing would spread organically and bring people.

I was wrong. It is true that value has a voice. However, unless it is projected and amplified, only few, if anybody at all, will hear it!

I always wondered why sometimes, bad products with good advertisement and relentless communication with the market easily outsell the very good ones. Truth be told, the good ones may not even necessarily be more expensive! How do books with horrible content – and I have read a few! – become bestsellers while others with very excellent content barely sell a thousand copies? It remained a mystery to me until I understood the power of positioning. When a service, value or product is created, it is of no value to either the creator or the market until there is a communication of such value to the market. But communication of a value to the customer does not equate a sale. Communication is of no value if it does not result into a connection that produces a cash-backed decision to buy. In today’s marketplace, where competition is very stiff and monopoly of any idea or business can hardly be sustained beyond a few months at the most, visibility is king! In the cacophony of the market, the product must stand out and offer a very strong value proposition that not only makes it irresistible but positions it to occupy an indelible place in the consciousness of the market. The market responds to what it sees repeatedly. Can you recount how many times a product was introduced to you and you said you were not interested, only to turn round and buy the same thing later, perhaps at a higher price? Why do you think that happened? Either through adverts or through word of mouth, word about and the image of the product always found a way of coming before you.

Coca-cola is the world’s best-selling beverage. Yet, the parent company continues to spend huge sums of money on advertising. The goal? To fulfill the vision of having a bottle or can of Coke in every household in the world! I believe it is safe to say that that vision is being fulfilled. I doubt if there is a household anywhere in the world that does not know what Coke is, even if it does not have a bottle or can of it at home. In some rural parts of the world, every cola drink is promptly called Coke!

Nobody buys what he has not first convinced himself that he needs. No matter how much you think the world needs the value you have created, they cannot reach out for it if they have little or no idea about its existence. Value must be tangible before it can be visible. And it must be visible before it can be profitable. For substantial patronage to happen, a value proposition must attract, arrest, engage and sustain the attention of the market before it ever becomes economically rewarding. Our eyes are the gateway to our heart. We learn more by what is demonstrated than by what is narrated.

You can only behold what you see. What you behold long enough, you become.

Sometimes, for the value you have on offer to be significantly noticed, there must be a shock effect in the manner of communicating it to the market. This is the “burning bush effect”.

In 2013, the government of Nigeria introduced the policy of mobile number portability which allowed anyone who was not satisfied with the services of his current network provider to “port” to another network while retaining the number he had on the current one. Before then, a Nigerian comedian had been the face of Etisalat Mobile network (now 9Mobile) for which he had appeared in many adverts that made the network highly visible and popular. However, he was only retained as a freelance artiste and so was not remunerated in a way commensurate with the social and economic value he brought to the organization. That was all that a competing network, MTN, that was having issues with its public image at that time needed to know in order to craft its own message of moving away from dissatisfaction. It promptly engaged the comedian popularly known as Saka as its Brand Ambassador on very generous terms and came up with the masterpiece advert copy known as “I don port o”. It was a socio-economic coup that left Etisalat Mobile literally gaping and brought huge socio-economic gains to its competitor.

The world notices and celebrates DIFFERENCE. If it is common, it is not celebrated. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Just roll it in a different direction and let the world see it! Visibility is the engine of fads! You will be surprised that the same world that wants you to conform is the one that only gives significant attention to and celebrates deviants and dogged non-conformists.

If you doubt it, take a look again at social media and see those who command the largest followership!… continued.

Remember, the sky is not your limit, God is!