Fashion store engages KPRC for Manda Hill launch

We have to mention here that promotion for the unveiling of the Manda Hill mall has been a tad disappointing with no more than an outdoor, radio and sprinkling of press releases here and there. As one of the hotly anticipated retail launches this country has seen in a while, we'd have thought a much more robust approach would have been used. Festive season is no time to muck about with consumers but its probably expected that Lusaka consumers will flock to the mall regardless. 


Wonder how this pans out for Arcades Shopping Centre. Well,the rational approach for Arcades would be to leave it to Beaver and let Arcades maintain its feel as a 'natural' shopping centre with its Sunday market, Christmas and special events at the centre of the mall. 

Anyway, on the back of the unveiling of the mall, we pitched a launch gambit to a new tenant at Manda Hill on Thursday last week. After impressing in a 5-minute pitch, we were asked to deliver a multi-layered campaign to engage fashion-focused consumers, handling media relations and a launch event to support the official opening of the store. 

KPRC has lined up some delicious ideas that will generate traffic into the store on the opening weekend. We're confident this won't be replicated in any other store as we're all about pushing the envelope. 

We'll focus on hyping the brand’s current reputation for excitement and urban fashion, with a PR-led integrated campaign, including the event, media relations and social media output. We've also been engaged to audit the brand, which means toying around with the logo - its something we're looking forward to. 

The brand, a local outlet offering international fashion apparel and accessories, focuses on urban fashion by keeping the store stocked with fresh merchandise brought in weekly.

Dumbing Down the Communications Agenda

One of us has been re-reading The Catcher in the Rye, a classic novel by JD Salinger. It touches on issues of disaffection with society where even the bland has become an accepted, sometimes heralded, norm. And boy, have we dumbed down in this country. We like to say, “tolerating Zambian adverts is a PhD in international diplomacy.” The stuff is, quite frankly, utter bollocks but you deal the hand you’re dealt in life.

Last week, we pitched to a global player in the hospitality industry. They don’t need advertising and in their own words, “we’d be paying a small fortune to have our brand laughed at.” So what do you do when a company is not spending its advertising budget but would still like to have media and customer engagement?

You look at the plausible alternatives.

That means you give your brand social currency with a very high exchange rate. Getting the public to talk about your product is the best endorsement any company can get. Anything else is porkies, a hard sell from a well-prepared script. The brand must become the message, not the interface.

Where advertising – in his words – ‘has us spending money we don’t have on shi* we don’t need’ its done well enough to build today’s biggest brands. But as the attention span of the 21^st century individual continues to dwindle (try competing with iPhones, cellphones, Twitter, Facebook, iPods), its clear that micro-communication is the way to go.

All this means brands will have to become subliminal in their approach. More above the line and less below the line. Reading that last line today doesn’t make a compelling argument for rational communication but who ever got anywhere great by being rational?