JoBurg Part I Customer Management World Africa Conference

Posted on March 11th, 2007 by Geno and currently 1 commenting.

Well it took me about a good 24 hours to get over 24 plus hours of travel. As I staggered into the welcome reception for the JoBurg conference the friendly smiles and engaging talk warmed me up and gave me the burst of energy I needed to pull off a 45 minute presentation on Word of Mouth marketing to probably the most diverse audience I have ever spoken too.

I found it very refreshing to float around the welcome reception and be invited into so many conversations. A quick check with the conference IT guy to make sure my MacBook would work with their projection system, and I was good to go. I went back out to the reception scanning around I settled on the only table with a mac user, she turned out to be a blogger from Cape Town. Graham Mansfield of Oracle, SA was the Chairperson for day one, I thought this was an interesting twist to have the chairperson’s role be almost a hosting role. Graham would introduce and engage in conversation and start the questioning sessions off with his own questions with each presenter.

Session highlights. First off the subject matter was amazingly diverse. Clem Sunter, Chairman of the Anglo American Chairman’s Fund and you can read more interesting stuff about Clem at mindofafox.com kicked off the conference. Clem’s presentation made me realize quickly how differently America is viewed outside the States. Clem in no way talked badly about the US but hearing a more worldview was educational. Clem deals with scenarios. Big scenarios. In his June 2001 book, Mind of a fox, it included a letter to President Bush predicting a nuclear terrorism attack on US soil. Three months later we suffered a conventional terrorism attack on our own soil, needless to say Clem got my attention quickly.

Clem’s talk mainly centered around the new economic role of China and the future role they hope to play, to be the Superpower by 2040. One interesting note from Clem as China is building this new force out of the far east can you name one Chinese brand? So what’s Clem’s new prediction a coming US recession, he now is predicting a 40% chance. And he sees this as a very bad thing for South Africa.

Another interesting presentation was by Kevin Utian of Nando’s. These guys do some very cool stuff. What’s interesting about Nandos is how the transfer their brand globally and I mean globally. Nandos allows their brand to be locally relevant in countries from Angola to Zimbabwe. Basically they work at the local level to make their brand relevant with employees and then their customers they do it with humor. Kevin took all us on a tour of funny advertising that help their brand be culturally relevant in any country. One interesting twist is researching their employees worldwide and then using their ideas to develop Nandos apparel that the workers wear. Lets just say you could sell it in Urban Outfitters.

Another presenter I really enjoyed was Helder Perreira, Managing Director, of Southern Sun Hotels. Seeing as I was staying in a Southern Sun Hotel The InterContinental Sandton Sun. I highly recommend by the way. Service A+. Helder took us on a journey of the past present and future of Southern Sun. I found it fascinating. The Southern brand reaches from the one star all the way to the five star but I would say their version of a one star is superior to an American one star hotel. Southern Star went through an exhaustive customer insight process across their entire brand. What Helder talked about made great sense. Re-defining hotel value and coming to the simple understanding of the fact that as the world economy has grown expectations of hotel amenities and service has been slow to match. When you have a business person, or a family used to having 60 television channels, don’t give them 12. Hotels have to get back to providing an experience better than you have at home. Helder went on to talk about the Starwood brands like W and the A Loft concepts but he sees Southern Suns role as providing this more engaging experience across their entire brand, no small feat. Not just provided cliché touch points but valuable services and needs to its customers.

As far as my presentation went, I tired to have a little fun opening up my presentation by asking the audience to pose for a photo. The friendly engaged audience seemed to enjoy the presentation and my southern accent. As I was presenting the Fiskars case study a ‘yeah’ came up from the crowd. As I searched the crowd my eyes found an excited Jaclyn Venter a scrapbooker from SA who wants to be a Fiskateer. So at least I made somebody’s day. My Q&A session quickly turned to the Fiskateer Brand Ambassadors and how they could benefit form this approach in Africa. The major obstacle in South Africa for any business is a diverse population of cultures and languages that complicates things a bit. My trip around the world was an eye opening view of the world and how I view it as an American. I thought that we owned customer service, we don’t. I thought we knew how to provide a great customer experience, we could learn a thing or too. I would also like to thank Terrapinn and the CRM World Africa conference for inviting me. It was a  great experience one I will always remember.
Now that the work is over and it was so much fun I can’t wait for my African playtime.