One of the stories appearing in this issue of the Stabroek Business has to do with the strides that Jamaica has made over the years in the agro-processing sector, particularly as it relates to the country’s marked success in having its products realise an impressive level of market acceptance in the United States and parts of Europe among other places.
Jamaica, of course, is perhaps the standout country in the region insofar as fashioning tools with which to popularize its international image is concerned. It has done so, previously, by pressing it Rastafari and Reggae into service in a manner that has served to attract a great deal of attention to the country as a whole. That said it has also benefitted from an outstanding marketing tool in the form of the Jamaica Products Corporation (JAMPRO) which has won widespread acclaim for the work it has done to put Jamaican products ‘on the map,’ so to speak. JAMPRO, from all reports, derives its success from studying and understanding its targets and fashioning as its marketing tools some of the internationally recognized images of the Jamaican culture.
Back in November 2017, then JAMPRO President Diane Edwards used a media interview to provide some sobering insights into Jamaica’s “country branding strategies,” exploring the power of Jamaica “as country-of-origin and its potential to become the business hub of the Caribbean.” It was, to say the least, a clear-headed rationalization of how the tool of international marketing can be used to bring a small country to the table in terms of promoting a country’s products and its culture, simultaneously.
Here it is worth assessing JAMPRO’s product marketing success against the less than impressive outcomes of the efforts of our own Guyana Marketing Corporation. (GMC). While successive political administrations have sought to ‘present’ the GMC as the country’s premier product marketing establishment, there is, truth be told, no evidence, at least up to this time, that the GMC possesses what is required to raise the country’s product promotion standards to a level that compares, even remotely, with what JAMPRO has done for Jamaica.
Over time, there has been no persuasive evidence that the GMC, a decades-old state-run institution, has invested meaningfully in training its staff in the fundamentals of international marketing (in an environment where market behaviour shifts continually), the entity seemingly functions to a greater extent as a ‘facilitator’ that does little more than oversee product displays.
The tragedy here is that the GMC’s apparent lack of fitness for purpose coincides with a period during which the local agro-processing sector, is sorely in need of international markets as domestic demand can no longer accommodate the ambitions of local agro-processors.
JAMPRO has thrived because it has been equipped with functionaries whose focus has targeted, unerringly, an understanding of global markets and whose product promotion strategies interweave the products themselves with Jamaica’s widespread ‘cultural’ popularity. For its part, the GMC finds itself encumbered by a functional superior, the Ministry of Agriculture, which, all too frequently, appears not to have clearly defined the GMC’s real role so that the GMC would appear to have become a sort of ‘Jack of all trades’ in circumstances where it provides no persuasive evidence of being a ‘master’ of any of those.
The challenge of fashioning a strategy for connecting what Guyana has to offer (not just in the agro processing sector) to the international market reposes in embarking, a priori on a regimen of high-level training that familiarises our product promoters with an acute understanding of target markets and fashioning an institution (perhaps a clone of JAMPRO) that understands the playing field on which we are required to perform. In circumstances where the extant approach to international marketing is bearing no really meaningful fruit the solution to the challenge cannot come from repeating the same process over and over again.
