In the marketing community, to neglect or abandon old, established, loyal and trusted customers mid-stream in a competitive industry for new ones is a grave fundamental marketing error, which no well trained and experienced marketing chief executive officer has the luxury to make.
Such officer will automatically lose his job. Apart from the negative impact of such tactics on the bottom line, the fact is that it is very expensive to recruit new customers.
Mr Andy Uba’s flanking tactics of buying members (without even a feeble effort to rebrand himself) for his party a few months to the 2021 Anambra governorship election, was a fundamental error that can never produce the result he desires.. Instead, it will create illusions of success and frustration. Hopefully, time will heal the self-inflicted wounds.
Apparently smarting from a hugely disputed direct primary election and buoyed by a phantom APC membership strength, Mr Uba and his team had the warped notion that they could buy members who could in turn buy other members. Whoever has been carrying the can of their party in the state was immaterial to them. The mercenaries they bought off the shelves as members, they figured, would give them victory and get out of their way.
While the macabre dance was going on, the old and long suffering members sulked. They felt left out, abandoned and deflated as they watched the mercenaries masquerading as APC members prance around the state, dropping crumbs here and there and arrogantly drumming sounds of war in place of contestations of ideas and values.
They boasted they would ‘ capture and conquer’ the state for Mr Uba, to the dismay of well meaning Ndi Anambra.
What we observed in most towns and wards, as Mr Uba busied himself purchasing new members, was a disaster bound to happen. The old members walked away in droves, while Uba was on air gleefully and intoxicatingly celebrating his newest catches. It was easy to decode his inner mood, even in the facade of his now infamous taciturn mien.
Obviously Mr Uba’s fascination with this single tactic was a display of ignorance of the multiplicities of factors that shaped the outcome of elections. We will not for free take him and his team through a short course on voters’ behaviour and habits.
So if Mr Uba’s reason of going to court to challenge the outcome of the freest election in recent history is premised on the ground that he bought mercenaries who should give him victory, he should for his own benefit perish the thought as it is both silly and puerile.
It will further erode his brand equity, which, sadly, is in the red. We can do an image perception audit for him, again on a fee and get a cut of his cookies. But on a serious note, he needs such audits going forward.
*** By Joe Anatune
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