One of my last activities at Mamba was to work on a pitch for the launching of a new brand of rice in Mauritius. In fact the importing company was a well established one, but even though wanted the help of a communication company to help them introducing the new product. Once the necessary information had been gathered by the company manager and the brief received, all the staff started to work on that specific campaign which was an interesting one.
It was to last for six months, accompanied by a very interesting budget, moreover the challenge was very exciting as a product like rice, a day to day product can hardly be replaced. Thus we realized that a lot of efforts were necessary to make the launching memorable.
After a good briefing with our manager, I started working on some slogans for the rice. Mamba decided to work on a campaign quite close to the European style but at the same time keeping a Mauritian touch to it.
After three weeks of nice team work, the pitch was finally ready. After the presentation, we were all astonished of the comments made by the rice company marketing manager. He really appreciated the work but concluded that this pitch was not made for the Mauritian context. He added that there was too much of European characters in the storyboard for some advertising spots and that event the texts was too close to Europe and that his target market would not be attracted with such facts.
This is where we all realized that Public Relation in Mauritius will take much more time to improve due to the Mauritian habit to stick to culture and to be deep rooted and on the other hand, the world of communication is improving rapidly globally. This event was a rich experience for me. Until that day, I was really thinking that cultural problems like the one stated above was only present in theory.
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