Managing Mass Communication

 In today's world, it is unthinkable to run a business without involving oneself into intensive PR (public relation) through all the available outlets. A company needs to have a public face and it needs that face to be recognizable and distinguishable from all other players in the market.

In order to have that lonely voice heard in the competitive market, marketers use advertisement, sales promotion, events & Experiences and Public Relations to position a company and its products/services.

Advertisement: is defined as any paid form of non personal presentation and promotion of a product by any identified sponsor. Advertisement is used to disseminate a message for with brand building or for educational purposes. In the early days of my start-up company, we did advertise with the distinct purpose to inform anyone who care to read our messages that there was a new company in town offering translation services.

For an advertisement to have any success, two things need to be kept in mind, first - always remember who is your target market and second what are your buyers motives. These two point helps in keeping the marketer's message clear and on the point.

The next step is based on some common sense steps dubbed the 5 M's when one is building an effective mass communication for a company:

1. Mission; 2. Money; 3. Message; 4. Media; 5. Measurement.

I can relate with these five in retrospect of my first try-out with my start-up company that got suspended pre-covid.

1. Mission: our objective was ill-defined but we knew nevertheless in a foggy way what we wanted to do. And the more we clarified our own objectives, the clearer the message became and the less repetitive and elongated the wording were. By the end of the first year, we understood that without a time limit to accomplish a given objective, that objective would never become a properly defined goal.

2. Money: since our start-up was service oriented (and we chose it by design to avoid big working capitals), we didn't need a big budget for marketing the company and the advertisement came at an especially low cost through the internet.

3. Message: Thee message kept changing and refined as we went on with the business. Somethings that seemed obvious to us at the beginning kind of loss its appeal as we met the resistance and difficulty of the market. We expressed our desire to be able to do everything including translating books in a record time and at an affordable price. But soon, it became clear that we didn't have the staff quality to undergoes these type of projects. So our message started changing and became more realistic per our capacity. We still wanted to be recognized as the best on what we do, hence the need to optimize what we could do well.

4. Media: Advertisement were done using our Facebook page and the social media mostly know in Rwanda called 'Kigali-Life' yahoo group.This spot of the net offered us many opportunity of jobs since it is well attended by foreigners and expatriate always in need of a translation of docs and else.

5. Measurement: this one was the toughest to ascertain. Since our advertisement were done through social media and cold email, we received  sometime positive feedback from those two outlets. But truth to be said, it was a very unpleasant experience as tones of emails were sent on a weekly basis to only receive a handful of potential customers responding and even less a fraction who would buy our services. As i recall my memory, even though it was less expensive to advertise through the social media, the respond didn't add much to our bottom line.

The hardest thing we had to face was to objectively present our services without straying the path of over exaggeration to the point of becoming untruthful. I do hold to corresponding theory about truth, which states that truth is that which correspond to reality. Our messages always strove to maintain that level of authenticity and realism. It came with its cost but this was the ethical price to pay.

Despite the hardship i had to go through with my business and subsequent failure, i am still interested to back to business and apply more of the marketing tools and advertising philosophy that i have learnt since i close/suspended my business. Matter of fact i am working on a couple of projects and advertisement will be at the forefront of its launching when the day comes.