Let’s say that you are an entrepreneur. You know that the American market is saturated, and that little growth will continue there. You’re sitting home, and you receive a call from the President of Rwanda and he asks you to invest in his country.
Rwanda is known for two things, Gorillas, and the 1994 Genocide, this is their brand. So you say no. Five minutes later, you receive a call from your best friend who is also an entrepreneur. He tells you that he has located an operation in Rwanda and that it is producing profits off the charts. You now are attentive. You’re best friend is attesting to the brand of Rwanda.
You then get a third call. This is from Rick Warren, the evangelical pastor, and he asks you to invest in Rwanda. You may or not be a person of faith, but Rick Warren lends an air of credibility to Rwanda. It creates a brand for Rwanda. Now, you have an interest in investing. Why? Rwanda has had a brand created for it. This is reverse branding.
The President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, faced a dilemma. He wanted his African country to thrive. To do this, he knows that he had to create investment in his country. His country had a sordid past that Western investors simply couldn’t ignore. President Kagame is using Reverse Branding to create investment in his country.
Reverse branding is when the customers brand the entrepreneur, and this brand, brands the products. When Steve Jobs creates a new product, it instantly has credibility. In the social media era, reverse branding is becoming an important branding strategy.
In the social media era, there is so much content, so many players. There is so much scale created in social media. It is hard to create that significant brand. Customers have to do the branding to create credibility. This is what happed in Rwanda. Successful investors told their story on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. This created a brand. Rick Warren, the evangelical pastor, created a YouTube video. Rwanda, a nation with a dark past, now had credibility.
President Kagame wanted foreign investment and not foreign aid. Investment has a profit motive---in a very unusual way, this has created ethics in an economic-business system. Foreign aid is government to government and it creates corruption.
Simply looking at numbers will bear this out. In the last 40 years, the West has spent $1 trillion. Just looking at the continent of Africa, it can be seen that this is unproductive. With a lot of money flying around and no controls, corruption is a natural consequence of aid. Corrupt leaders siphon it off. Inefficient leaders merely squander it, and this is just as bad. Millions of people get hooked on it. Economic development created by private investment is the engine that is needed to drive African economies. Private investment creates jobs---foreign aid does not. Jobs create a middle class and a stable, uncorrupt government.
President Kagame seeks to build his nation through reverse branding and a social media strategy.
Dean Hambleton
dnhambleton@gmail.com
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