With markedly less aplomb than its 2018 predecessor, the Guyana Trade and Investment Exhibition (GuyTIE) 2020 was officially launched last Wednesday at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre, the comparatively low key nature of the event signalling, perhaps, a veiled official concession that last year’s inaugural event staged at the Marriott Hotel had fallen well short of its widely advertised objectives, not least of those being the growing of the global market for Guyanese products and the significant strengthening of linkages between the local and international business sectors.
GuyTIE 2018 had sought, or so it seemed, to take strategic advantage of the international attention that Guyana had attracted on account of the country’s major oil discovery to showcase some of the other products that the country has to offer and to tempt potential investors into exploratory visits, at the very least. That, strategically, was the correct thing to do though the eventual outcome left no doubt that the visitor interest gambit did not work as well as might have been expected.
Among the aggressively marketed expectations of GuyTIE 1 were that the event would realize the promotion of “packaged local investment opportunities for foreign direct investment and local investment,” the “preparing and promoting” (of) export-ready firms for export markets and the highlighting of Guyana as a “preferred destination for business.” If the realization or otherwise of these objectives is used as criteria for determining success or failure then a conclusion that the event met its objectives cannot be sustained. That is a disappointment with which the planners of next year’s event must come to terms quickly.
Paradoxically, the official report on the 2018 event which materialized more than three months after its conclusion, asserted that it had “achieved its goals and objectives and met a large percentage of its key performance indicators,” an assertion that is hard to reconcile with the organizers’ own confession that out of the fifty “trade leads” that had been established during the event only one trade contract had been signed! Nor has there been any news since as to whether that contract has borne meaningful fruit.
Before they embark on GuyTIE II the organizers would do well to accept that attempts to contrive success out of underachievement amounts to little more than an exercise in self-delusion that can pave the way for a repetition of the errors of the previous event.
The fact that GuyTIE 1 did not, for example, attract a single notable high profile business entity from either North America or Europe is not a reality that can simply be wished away. Indeed, that was one of the more notable manifestations of the event’s underperformance, one that raises, for the umpteenth time, key questions about both our will and our institutional competence to effectively market Guyana and what it has to offer to the rest of the world.
Take our tourism product, for example. Officially, we have never really demonstrated the ability to aggressively and effectively market our tourism product abroad. Indeed, we have never even demonstrated a serious inclination to try.
For an event like GuyTIE to succeed it is critical that we field a team of focused professionals skilled at selling events of its kind in sophisticated and challenging overseas markets. Locally based international marketing skills, particularly in the public sector, are scarce. Making GuyTIE realize even a modest penetration of an exacting international market requires, among other things, that we press both our diplomatic missions and the Guyana diaspora (which are closer to the targeted markets and presumably understand them better than we in Guyana do) into service. We cannot hope to bring some of the ‘heavy hitters’ in the international business community on board utilizing a decidedly fragile local marketing skills base.
The outcomes of GuyTIE 1 suggest that the event never caught on in the manner that the local organizers appeared to have anticipated. Perhaps worse, as far as we know, there has been no candid post-event probe of this particular aspect of GuyTIE 1. That leaves open the danger of a repetition of the same ‘formula’ that caused GuyTIE 1 to underperform.
Perhaps the primary reason why other CARICOM countries, Barbados and Jamaica particularly, are way ahead of Guyana in the realm of external country marketing reposes in their sustained investment, over many years, in terms of both financial resources and marketing talent, in seeking to understand the nature of the global market and to take initiatives based on that understanding. Both countries, Jamaica particularly, have strategically integrated their respective diaspora, their diplomatic representatives and their tourism outposts abroad into their international marketing strategies. Guyana, over many years, has demonstrated a mind-boggling unwillingness to go down that road, opting instead for a monotonously repetitive official lip service to external country promotion rooted in high-sounding proposals (like economic diplomacy) that mostly never really see the light of day in terms of effective implementation.
In the instance of Barbados, international marketing success has come primarily through aggressive and ultimately highly rewarding promotion of its tourism product in key target markets. In the case of Jamaica, international marketing success has come, in large measure, through the near global appeal of its colourful culture, not least its outstandingly internationalized reggae music coupled with its extraordinary success in international athletics. Creative marketing of those ‘blessings’ has made the Jamaica brand amongst the most recognizable brands across the world. Guyana, unquestionably, possesses its own comparable deck of promotional ‘cards.’ The differences in outcome repose in the fact that we continue to play our cards ineptly, or, more specifically, not at all. The upshot of this is that we find ourselves, repeatedly tinkering with an inherently defective ‘wheel.’ Predictably, the shortcomings of the previous effort inevitably find their way into the planning and execution of the next one.
At last week’s launch of GuyTIE 2020 we were told that its mission is to provide a platform for local businesses to engage with foreign buyers and investors and other potential partners. That is pretty much what we were told in 2018 so that the organizers of next year’s event need to come to terms with (if they have not already done so) what their planning and execution glitches were in the rolling out of GuyTIE 1. A carbon copy emulation of what transpired in 2018 will not bring a different result.
A key lesson that has to be learnt before a finger is lifted to commence planning of GuyTIE 2020 is that events of this nature cannot be sold to sophisticated international markets utilizing under-cooked and under-resourced promotional pursuits driven by ideas that are stranger to the idiosyncrasies of the market to which the event seeks to appeal.
Planning for GuyTIE 2020 has to be preceded by a sense of mission, a clear understanding of what is likely to be the best strategic approach to the accomplishment of that mission and the selection of an execution team considered the best qualified to accomplish the mission. If these basic requisites are not seriously attended to GuyTIE 2020 could, like its predecessor, fall short of official expectations.
While the announcement on Wednesday that next year’s event will embrace the local arts and culture industry is a welcome one, the organizers will be challenged to make a determination regarding the state of preparedness of that sector to generate meaningful international market appeal to the extent that sustainable and potentially lucrative business linkages can be realized. Frankly, there may be no less robust a case for the agro processing sector which, truth be told, has ‘come on’ leaps and bounds in recent years on account of the considerable backing of entities like the Guyana Marketing Corporation and the Guyana Manufacturing and Services Association. It is high time that government respond even more to what these modest but thriving businesses have done by providing them with more incentives to raise their game further.
If it may seem at this stage that February 2020 is still several months away, the organizers of GuyTIE 11 are bound to be aware of the likely ‘competing’ national agenda between now and February 2020. That circumstance, in itself, is likely to pose planning challenges. Still, if GuyTIE 11 is to stand any real chance of improving on the 2018 effort then there cannot be any lengthy interregnum between last Wednesday’s launch and the earnest commencement of work towards the February 2020 event.