Orchids and Onions: Bull’s-eye for SA Tourism

One of my greatest pleasures is a road trip. Getting up before sunrise, packing, then the aroma of the bacon-and-egg sarmies wafting through the car, almost as heady as the anticipation in the air. And this country, South Africa, has provided me and my family with some amazing memories.

In the old days, the then SA tourism body, Satour, used to have a slogan which talked about a “world in one country”. Even though that’s not used today, it is still apt. There is so much to see and do within the borders of this country that you sometimes have to wonder why you would go anywhere else.

I’ve sat amazed when friends and colleagues talk to me about trips overseas, yet they have not travelled the Garden Route or looked out over the Blyde River Canyon…

And, when I see a great advert which speaks to the idea of a road trip, the accelerator foot gets itchy again. Such was the case for me with the latest spot for SA Tourism’s Sho’t Left campaign to get people to see their own country.

It’s all so familiar: the early morning, the car packing, the sarmies, and, especially, the excitement. The advert takes us across the breadth of the country, from beautiful beaches to magnificent mountains, to exotic eateries. All the while, it’s about fun. The interesting thing about the advert – and one cannot ignore this in a country as obsessed with race as we are – is that the only people in it are black. Now, in anticipation of the howls of “racism!” from whities, I think it is intelligent marketing.

The reality of the South African tourism scene is that black people are only now – 24 years after the end of apartheid – starting to travel more inside their own country. They will be the lifeblood which keeps the tourism industry growing into the future.

Yet, the long-awaited “freedom dividend” for the industry is still some way off. There are still places in South Africa where black people feel uncomfortable because they are dominated by white guests. The advert doesn’t correctly address that, but seeks to convey to young, black, upwardly mobile people what they have on their own doorstep.

In doing so, there is a vibe and energy which should really make even the old fart whiteys like me yearn to get out there. And I did, despite the fact that the first time I saw the SA Tourism advert, I had just got back from a magic weekend in the Groot Marico (read all about it in our Travel section).

So Orchids to SA Tourism, FCB Joburg and Ola! Films. And I only have one thing to add: Forests! Having seen your footage, I need to breathe again the clean air of forests and mountains …

I have tried not to comment on the controversial listing/non-listing on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange of the Sagarmatha Technologies group … mainly because they will accuse me of attacking them because they are our competitors (the company is involved with Independent Media).

I cannot comment on the very convoluted and technical financial stories I have read about the so-called tech behemoth which should have had a market capitalisation of R50 billion. However, there are a couple of curiosities from a marketing point of view which, while they might not deserve an Onion, certainly deserve a comment.

The use of words in a marketing context is critical because they say so much about you and your products – and particularly in ways you never intended. And there are a few words used by Sagaramatha which make you wonder if they had any professional advice on corporate identity.

First, the big noise about the group is that it is going to be Africa’s answer to Google, Amazon, et cetera. So why on earth name the company after an Asian landmark, Mount Everest, and use its local name? What would have been wrong with Kilimanjaro, or Zambezi, for instance?

The next curiosity is the insistence that the group is a stock market “unicorn”. In other words, a tech start-up with a market capitalisation of more than US$1 billion. The unicorn is, though, a mythical beast, existing only in the imagination, no matter how many fine words are written and said about it. Much like Sagarmatha’s JSE listing, which was abandoned this week when the exchange said the group had failed to meet the technical requirements.

If words are not really that important, why not rename the group “Titanic Limited”?

Brendan Seery.

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