Twitter to the rescue

When it rains it pours; the world was in a recession the stock market in Nigeria had collapsed and we had lost a president and were in a state of flux waiting for elections .

Yet the price of raw materials kept going up squeezing already tight margins and the competition refused to raise prices , choosing instead in some cases to drop quality

Betting on the power of our brand we increased prices in line with raw material increases to protect our margins

Tightened our belts to deal with the loss of turnover

And with the lull in sales we had time give the business a good look. We had always read voraciously about business and economics and kept up to date on best practice etc and then twitter entered into our lives!

Twitter was indeed a revelation all of a sudden we had this amazing resource, this pool of people to learn from, we followed a broad range of specialists and a chance comment would send us on our next journey .

White label! was the comment made while discussing branding , it would stick in our consciousness until we had to do something about it. At first this sounded like rubbish why would you white label a product that depends almost entirely on the power of your brand to sell ? but slowly it became clear that the brand and the product needed to be differentiated

We already had a product list as long as my arm and we knew their were several tiers in the market for quality and prices we decided to play all fields as it said on our twitter page “we make paint”

By commoditising our product we decided to be Toyota instead of being a Rolls Royce we would make products to fit every criteria from price to quality streamlining our product list to compete with the cheapest in price ensuring we were at the entry point and not shut out , and also the best in quality .Power resides with the customers , so let the customer choose.

Good design

Reduce Reuse Recycle

A new logo was required to simplify things. As we had grown ,and developed, all the new products they had mostly been launched with adhoc eagle images coupled together by the in house team.

We needed new signage for billboards, vehicle, and print adverts; one logo to bind us and set us free was the cry..... and the brief went out for something that expressed our philosophy ,was universal across our product range and still kept our traditions going strong . We stumbled on a company by chanceNiNor architects who where just branching into logo design /branding they were perfect great professional and intune with our way of thinking which meant they could understand our brief rapidly.

The new logo was a huge success gathering many nicknames immediately my personal favourite being the Jesus eagle (because it looked like a cross ) it also looked great on tshirts and all promotional material it showed we were open for business welcoming accommodating and serious ,it also inspired us to think out of the box. Instead of just printing the same logo on different coloured buckets we decided to take a good look at the problem of packaging inventory which was becoming a bother , the price of a container had sky rocketed with the price of crude oil and now accounted for a whooping 10% of the product cost more in some case’s ,added to this was the inventory we had to keep for the various brands which resulted in quite a lot of capital being tied down .

We came up with a novel way to solve this problem we would develop a translucent container with an opaque colored nylon bag which once filled was heat sealed and held the paint. In this way the;

1, containers were universal solving our inventory problem

2, we could keep the color association with the brands keeping customer loyalty without diluting the brand

3, the seal sorted out adulteration problems , the finish product also looked good enough to lick .

4, the Containers and the Nylon sleeves are recyclable helping the bottom line while making us look good and showing we cared

We were almost back at the table , we were rolling the economy was booming and everything seemed to be going fine , wrong the world was in a recession and it was about to come home to bite us the banking system would all but collapse at the same time as the political system would freeze up .

The market was about to test our resolve and we were ready

in business you reap what you sow

With the bar for standards so low we found we were shut out of the entry level , we couldn’t possibly compete with such low standards without damaging our hard earned reputation irreversibly, we would have to seek higher ground.

We turned all our efforts into R&D in an effort to distinguish ourselves from the pack. We brought out a series of premium products , while everyone was going cheap, and diluting their brand we concentrated on marketing ourselves on our core principals “good product better price” In the past we had only made standard products ,we now went for high value niche products at huge discounts to the prevailing market prices

This proved very successful in our core decorative niche, we also launched a product “xtra” especially designed to cope with the peculiar hot wet salty coastal conditions. This took us well over 5yrs to develop but would become a market leader

Running with the colored container idea, we brought out different products in different colored containers further differentiating ourselves from the pack

The coloured containers were a cheap and effective way of branding as the eye catching colors and the ubiquitous use of buckets due to water shortages would ensure we were everywhere once again .

Due to the long life span of plastic very soon it became a problem (try explaining to auditors you are not doing as well as it seems...... it’s just plastic is nonbiodegradable )

There was also the added complication of having to hold so much packaging material inventory in order to cope with the various brands

In the mean time we had gotten certified in various categories and with various standard organisations

Once we had all this set up and our reputation was saved and strengthened it was time to give them a taste of their medicine we would launch our own low cost label “Basic” this was better than the rest in terms of quality and we sold it at a premium to the rest .

The reasons were as follows

1, we needed to ensure we were not shut out of any category

2, to act as a spoiler reducing available market share

We would set strict rules to guide us through the murky waters of introducing a “low quality” product

1; Sales target based on a % of total volumes produce ensuring we were just using downtime and not getting distracted from our established lines

2; Establish a different distribution channel for this to reduce confusion in the market place

3; Make education of our customers on the different brands our focus for advertising campaigns .Which created a stronger tie with our customers as it initiated dialogue.

But all this would have been impossible without a united committed work force after the bloodbath of sacks and cuts it was time to start rebuilding we would achieve this by planting a garden .

A garden is a wonderful thing, everyone joins in, no special skills are required. Everyone can follow its progress which is short term enough to give hope but long enough from sowing seeds to flowering to have its full share of doubts and fears

Also a garden is a journey not a destination once you start you can’t stop which is exactly what good business should be.

oops! there goes my cash flow

In a bid to hold onto what remained of our Brand intergrity (the quality we were suppose to stand for)
Once we found out where our lunch was going we slashed our distributors list taking back control and changed the color of our buckets from generic white to green.

Two quick fixes which would expose the under pinning’s of our world.

The first thing noticed was a huge drop in our cash flow: this would cause us to look inside for the first time in years , everything was rotten and antiquated from staff ,to accounting methods to dealings with suppliers

We will take a surgical view to everything wring out savings from our suppliers , fire redundant staff and begin writing custom software to better handle our unique needs
Once we had been stripped bare by this exercise we were able to take a critical look at ourselves and access our strengths:
Good brand , good staff, location, loyal customer base .
And weakness :
narrow range of products , tight distribution network, no certification .

One of the consequences of the adulterators was there was now a whole new product category “crap” which the painters loved, what you saved on paint you spent twice on labour.

Meanwhile the whole of the industry was in the same position , one of the premium players would make redundant their head of R&D , we hired him immediately and began to create a state of the art R&D department .

who is eating our lunch

we were everywhere and no where sales were tanking but every where you looked you saw our "product" being used , We had two large stores in the two largest markets that handled our retail distribution , a brand that was Known all along the west coast of Africa, and stood for a fair price for a high quality product, word of mouth endorsement like the church, and an economic situation that had just shaken off the stifling dust from over a decade of military paralysis and was jittery with democratic hope.
What could possibly be wrong ? a chance meeting with a customer/friend who complained about the quality of the product he bought from the market ,caused us to pause and for once not assume the painters had tampered with the product but question whether their could actually be something amiss.
We had recently lost one of our main Distributors who controlled our biggest market, Mushin, in the heart of lagos mainland , His death would leave us at the mercy of the market the adultrators had free reign as there was no one to effectively replace his oversight functions.
We at that time where copying the brewery/pub model where we developed a site and gave it to a distributor to run , rent free ,dealing exclusively with our product.
on further investigation and a bit of sleuth work we discovered the new freedom , and rule of law had enabled a host of new players to enter the market ,these new players were capitalising on the loop hole provided by the ubiquitous white plastic buckets that where used to package paints and the simple screen printing process .
Many of them had grown up in the markets and had ties to brands like ours which they now exploited .They simply made their low quality paints filled it in to the buckets and printed our name and presto they were in business .
We now knew who was eating our lunch but the battle had just began ,the damage done to our reputation was critical .But once we had our enemy insight the war could begin in earnest ,their have been many battles fought so far but finally the war is over and the process of rebuilding has begun .