First lets start off with the definition of a brand. Our good friends over at oxford dictionary define a brand as, "A type of product manufactured by a particular company under a particular name" (its also defined as "An identifying mark burned on livestock, criminals or slaves with a branding iron" which I think is far more relevant in todays Ghanaian society").
So brands are all about products & names.
A definition for personal branding does not exist in the oxford dictionary (for good reason) so i had to rely on good-ol-wikipedia for that. So wikipedia has it that personal branding is "Personal branding is the practice of people marketing themselves and their careers as brands. While previous self-help management techniques were about self-improvement, the personal-branding concept suggests instead that success comes from self-packaging."
Packaging ... so essentially personal branding is salad dressing. And i don't know anyone who opens a bottle of salad dressing and drinks it as a meal.
But the best definitions for personal branding comes from the Urban Dictionary (which has loads of satirical definitions which are oddly apt). It has two definitions:
What you create when you want to be honest about lying about who you are.
The persona created by public figures or their handlers, which can then be marketed, sold and traded for gain by the owner.
At the end of the day, personal branding really boils down to how you portray yourself to the outside world and has very little to do with who you actually are. I have noticed how in Ghana the concepts of branding and personal branding are really kicking off. I have noticed that all the examples given when there are talks on branding/personal branding are of famous people, big companies and the like.
What all those entities have in common is success. They are all good at what they do and they are already known for it. Being good at what you do, or at least being famous/infamous, should be thought of as a requirement. Mensah Otabil and Afia Swartzenegger are, to me at least, classic examples of good personal branding.
On the other hand, A guy fresh out of university talking about personal branding makes me want to laugh. I think we should put the horse before the cart instead or running with the cart and leaving the horse behind. The foundation of a brand/personal brand is a great product. And if you don't have a great product then all the branding in the world would just be like putting icing on mud and calling it a cake.
Just the other day i was passing by Tetteh Quarshie and i saw a relatively large billboard promoting a "brand expert" called Sylvester Phish. I just wondered how he became a brand expert and what he has done to merit that. Hopefully there is serious bite behind the bark or else he would be a perfect example of everything that is wrong with the was we handle personal branding in Ghana.
In todays Ghanaian society, the well educated and well placed upper 10% seem to believe (even though they say they don't) that Ghana works like America or a highly developed European country. Truthfully to say we are a third world country with middle income status. If you dont believe me just look around and see the conditions people are living in and tell me that that is an example of "middle income" people. Our market and the way things work are fundamentally different and if we think we can cherry-pick fashionable online trends and think they will make a viable difference on the ground we might be in for an unpleasant surprise. To give an example to my point i attended the Occupy Ghana "march" last year, the publicity for it was predominantly through social media and the turnout was far less than they had hoped. Contrast that with the trade unions strikes where thousands upon thousands of people refused to go to work and were out on the streets to protest. Ghana is rapidly developing at an appreciable rate, but i feel that we are not completely ready for some of the things that are becoming popular with todays facebook people.
The latest trend in Ghana these days is being an Entrepreneur. The days of the doctor, engineer or even musician have been superseded by the newest fad; "I'm an Entrepreneur". It does not matter what you do as long as you work for yourself.
I have numerous opinions about this current trend, and to be honest many of them are negative because i feel that my generation is just looking at the whole entrepreneurship thing wrong. In that regard let me begin my rant/monologue.
I have decided to donate my two cents; So these are essentially what i thing is wrong with the way many of us seem to be doing business.
The ominous rise of social media
Social media is the opium of the people. Everyone wants to be present on every platform, from the Ghanaian favourites Facebook, Instagram and twitter to the lesser used networks like G+, LinkedIn and Pinterest. Then there are the over-glorified mobile chat apps like Whatsapp and Viber that people presume to be social networks (insert laugh here).
Social networks are the place to be, everyone needs to be seen, and seen they are. Especially the GhEntrepreneurs. They have profiles, pages, business listings that they keep posting to and talking about how amazing their business is and how everyone is patronising whatever it is they do.
Blowing your own horn is relatively lame. Does the Coca-Cola owner go on twitter everyday positing pictures of people who drink coke?
I have noticed that everyones business looks perfect on Facebook, giving a false sense of achievement and the misguided notion that "all is well" with the industries we work in. The truth of the matter is that we all know that doing business in Ghana is hard. But social media is not the place for realism, its the place for idealism.
Don't get me wrong, social media is an excellent marketing tool for the right kind of businesses. Social media makes me money, and a pretty decent amount of it, but its not applicable to all kinds of businesses. Some may ask why are all the big businesses on social media? Well the truth is that many of them make no money from marketing and "socialising" on social media and rather use it as a means of communicating with their social media hungry clientele.
The One-Man Show / Famous Personality / CEO
By the looks of it, many Ghanaian startups fall loosely under the category of sole-proprietorships. Not in the legal sense of the word since everyone likes to register their businesses as Limited Liability Companies but rather in the sense that they are everything in the business. To tell the truth its really understandable, when you are starting a business you often don't have many people who share your beliefs and thus you may have go it alone. But there is sense in the old adage that there are strength in numbers, but financial and intellectual (when it comes to businesses). I have found that many (effective) partnerships do well because the partners can share the load, even though this is not always the case.
Another thing i have noticed is how everyone likes calling themeless a CEO.
Wikipedia defines a CEO as: A chief executive officer (CEO) is generally the most senior corporate officer (executive) or administrator in charge of managing a for-profit organisation. The CEO of a corporation or company typically reports to the board of directors and is charged with maximising the value of the entity.
What was that? In charge of managing/administrating? Reporting to a board? Hmm, you are the only "entity" in your business, you have no employees, no board, nothing... so how exactly are you a CEO? At least use a better word like Founder. Wait a second? Is your business even profitable? Anyway, just saying.
Everyone is a celebrity these days. Or at least they appear to be on Social media (see previous section). We spend so much time online that we are slowly beginning to believe our own well crafted fictions. Maybe we should spend more time working than appearing to succeed and we might just be able to make more money for it.
Oh and don't let me forget all those "back-to-school" inspirational career talks. And i must say I'm a bit of a culprit here. You might not have really achieved anything beyond a Facebook page and a Blog. Wait till you have something to show for what you have done instead of becoming an example of someone who once has a "promising future".
Everything is about Branding
EH? You say wot? Its all about branding eh. Please lets not be confused. No amount of "branding" will get a useless product or idea to sell in the long run. The true basis for every business is ... a viable business. The salad dressing is put on a salad and not eaten on its own.
People will tell you about Coca-Cola, Nike, Rolls-Royce, Facebook, Apple ... what do all these companies have in common. They are multi-billion dollar entities who can afford the best advertising agencies and "brand experts" in the business. They also have MASSIVE businesses with well established and awe inspiring products, distribution channels and everything else i cant think of at the moment.
To have a good feel of what i think about branding in general, have a look at this beautiful parody video below. It's both a scathing laugh at millions of commercials as well as my favourite commercial of all time. Period. This is branding, the best way of selling a great product. Not cheap salad dressing.
If you want your branding to succeed you must first and foremost have a product to match or exceed your branding efforts.
A viable business for the wrong market
This is going to be relatively short. You have a great business idea but essentially Ghana just isn't ready for your awesomeness yet. This will result in frustration and feelings of depression. In fact many "returnees" (Ghanaians who have lived abroad and just moved back home) get that shock when they come to Ghana to start a business. They have great skills in specialised fields that just don't exist in our economy. Simple as that. In that same vein i feel sorry for all the wonderful mobile app developers in Ghana, they have great ideas but a really small market. and if you think i'm lying just take a drive out of Accra to any surrounding colonies like Pokuase, Oyarifa, Kasoa, etc and see how many people there are using smart phones.
But we need these people. Their ideas are going to be the cornerstone of the next Ghanaian revolution ... whenever that will be, zzz.
The We-don't-have-anything-to-put-on-TV-shows & The African Success Story
I for one feel that our Tv-Stations have barley enough viable content to stay afloat, but in a country which has a literacy rate of roughly 72% (and even that may be un-confirmable) on average i guess bad content on TV is to be expected. But with the rise of the Ghanaian talk shows we will inevitably run out of real successful people to interview and start interviewing every Facebook CEO we can find. They in turn get an inflated sense of self worth since everyone saw them on TV, which then gets pasted on Facebook, which then makes them seem more important and then the vicious cycle continues.
On the foreign spectrum the large news networks like BBC and CNN are interested in promoting the African success story and randomly pick African entrepreneurs and "put them out there". But it does not really seem to make much of a difference either.
The Un-Registered business
Your business is illegal, in fact under that technicality you are actually engaged in a paid hobby. Your are part of Ghana's large and undocumented informal sector and as such in many cases cannot do real work with other corporate entities. Nuff Said.
What I think is a successful Business
Well thats a no brainer, Its a business which is actively making profits, not money, profits. One thing we need to learn as new GhEntrepreneurs (a group to which i am a staunch member of) is patience. We look at our parents and see the houses and cars, we look on the internet and see Kim Kardashien Mark Zukerberg, Everywhere we turn we see success stories forgetting that not a single one of them happened overnight. We need to know that in most of our cases it will take years and years (possible decades in some cases) for our business to really achieve what we want it to.
Facebook was founded in 2004 (10 years ago), Google in 1998 (16 years ago), Twitter 2006, Coca-Cola 1892 (1.22 centuries ago). Give your business time to grow, don't expect to be famous and making oodles of money in a year or two (unless you inherited a fortune, are a politician or stumbled across an oil container).
The good news!
Real businesses need to be profitable to survive. That means that all the jokers will be weeded out in a couple of years and be replaced by the next set of gullible treasure hunters. On the other hand people who are taking their jobs seriously will be seen 5 years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now and they will still be there, their business will still be there and they will be the richer for it.
It's been a while, maybe ages, possibly even eons since this blog saw an update. why? Pure laziness perhaps, or maybe we have been busy. Nah really its just laziness.
Well just to start things off ... "Wow it's 2012", yeah a new year has come where people will as usual make numerous resolutions that they wont even remember by March. We also heard that the world may end this year, we have heard that many times over, the world will "end" one day but i can assure all readers that it will definitely be a surprise.
A lot of things have happened since the last post. Fuel in Nigeria ain't cheap no more, doctors in Ghana are now on the single spine, harmattan is turning my skin to sandpaper and Santa Clause didn't make it to Ghana again for Christmas.
Well there have been some developments in VirtueReality, we have gotten another partner so we will likely see some more progress, we are working on the possibility of getting a physical office, so now instead of being lazy in our homes we can be lazy in an office! Our website that has been put up and abandoned is almost remodeled and should be re-released in February. Things are looking bright.
Even though we have not posted in the last 10,000 years we have been updating our Facebook page, if you look to the right sidebar you can see a link to it, some of our new images are up there for a good look. And even if you don't wan't to jump to Facebook you can just click the "like" button :)
We also have a new schedule for posts, a number of them are in progress and we will be loosely sticking to a two week release schedule.
Anyway this Quarter we are focusing on Photography and Film, hopefully by the end of the month we will have some stuff to share with you all.
Take care and see you soon.
P.S. the picture above was taken last week, and no the sky was not that blue :)
Not to sound excited but ... WE HAVE A WEBSITE! achem...
Anyhow that is the plain truth, we at VirtueReality thought that it was high time we invested in a bit more of an online footprint and have just set up our website. Now it is still under construction so don't get your hopes up too fast but hopefully in the not too distant future we will have a fully functional website up.
For all the people who follow this blog, DON'T WORRY, because we are still going to be maintaining it for a long long long time coming and have no intentions of ever closing it. You would be able to access the blog from the website and the other way around too.
Ciao,
The VirtueReality Team
Just in case you thought we forgot to put up the websites address .... well ... we did! Here you go:
Sometimes we get caught up in all the things we don't have; money, time, skills. We are so quick to point out the things we think we should have. But today the question floating around in my head was;
"What do you do with what you have?"
I mean, do we really make use of everything we have and completely exhaust all possibilities before winging and complaining? For instance i now and then drop a barb about how in Accra our skies are so dull compared to other places in Ghana and other countries like South Africa. But then again, did i take the time to look for the beauty in the sky right above my head before looking for the sky above someone else? Nope, well until yesterday really. So today i decided to wait a bit for the sun to come down and walked right out my back gate and set up for a picture or two and this is what i came up with ... feel free to look up for a second, okay that's enough.
It got me thinking and my mind returned to the parable of the talents (yeah that boring old one that we have all heard) but the principle is the same. Mathew 4:25 says;
"Whoever has will be given more; whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him"
This is echoed in Matt 13:12, 25:29 and in other places as well. It kind of got me thinking, if it was twisted a bit to say "if you make use of what you have, more will be given to you, and if you have something and allow it to be 'small' by neglecting and leaving it alone, even that small thing you have will be collected".
Ah well I'm just talking plenty trying to say that we should not forget the things we have and make the most of all the opportunities that we get, and then we might be surprised at what we will get our hands on. Bible don't Lie!
Hi guys, in the spirit of progression VirtueReality is now beginning to progress into the realm of video. Soon (i hope in less than a thousand years) we will be releasing video packages for events, clips, weddings and all sorts of stuff. Currently we are expanding our skill sets so as we progress we will be posting our videos to our blog, this is just a teaser, i hope you like it. And even if you don't, no biggie. Ciao.
Just the other day was browsing the best lighting site in the world STROBIST and they showed me some really interesting technique for balancing light between the sky and a person (or object).
So i decided to borrow some familiar faces (what is family for) and used them as "ghana"-pigs and this is what i came up with.
There are some of us who take pictures at the highest size setting on their cameras at all times just because they can. Like me. So if i happen to be holding a 12 megapixel camera, all my images will be ... you guessed it, 12 megapixels. so when i feel like posting my larger than my screen images i run into a dilemma.
I use an Expresso bundle and I am on their 1 gigabyte plan (its cheap GHS 15, who can blame me?). Now why would I want to put up these fat images on Facebook and get all my data chewed up so that a few people can click "like"? No way! (and this is not because i am cheap).
For anyone else who has this problem there is the smallest software in the world you can download to solve all your problems and its what I use to upload ALL my images, yup ALL of them. its called "PhotoResizer" and you can download it from this site: http://www.rw-designer.com/picture-resize
Its small and all you have to do is change the number at the end to give you a bigger or smaller image. i think the default is 400 but if your raise it to 1600 your images will still be small in size but look good. Then you select all the pictures you want to SMALLIFY and drag and drop them on the icon of the program. Thats it.
All the new compressed images will be in the same folder as the originals so after you upload them you can just delete them. So its just something cool and it could save your bandwidth a little.
Our Facebook page is alive and kicking and whilst our blog has over 2000 views our page has about 9, this is a vast improvement over last week when we had 6 likes ... c'mon people go to the page and like it small so that our ego's will be fed small, if we are not making money at least people should like our work n'est pas? cool, this is the page:
Some exclusive images are on it so feel free to check them out!
Just so you know you can access our Facebook page from right inside the blog, just look to the panel on your right and feel free to press the LIKE button without even bothering to visit the page ... >>
In fact i have finally realized that my old post on vehicle safety is a very good one. whist parked next to the gate at LEGON BOTANICAL GARDENS, my beloved pickup was broken into. Fortunately (thank God) nothing too expensive was left inside the car but the thieves still managed to make off with my cousins towel and a lil bit of this and than.
This post is just to brown the botanical gardens small :)
DON'T THINK THAT LEGON BOTANICAL GARDENS IS A SAFE PLACE TO PARK. It is not. In fact if my car could be broken into when it was 1 meter from the main entrance then the security there was either asleep, drunk or complicit.
Please make sure when you leave your car parked somewhere anything important is on your body and not in the car! Paranoia pays off once in a while!
