Culture clash and Public Relation.

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.

Reached the middle of my internship!

Friday was my tenth day of internship at Mamba Ltd. and I do not need to wait more to say that I've been learning a lot of interesting concepts. Some days ago, I was introduced to my first client brief. Quite amazing event compared to all those stereotyped briefs on which we were working during our tutorials. Surely, in real life, the brief is more interesting.

A well-known company in the island had sent briefs to different communication companies for the re- branding of one of its products which is rice. This is where I started using all I studied for three years, but I was also helped by the director.

First of all, I had to use the internet to read some texts about the history of this type of rice. Then, according to the brief, we had to situate the positioning of this brand of rice in Mauritius. The client highlighted that one of our tasks would be to avoid brand cannibalism, as he is a supplier of three differently branded rice on the local market.

All the other steps which are to come seem to be interesting, as we will have to work on the concept, image and work out some interesting slogans. In other words, more time to develop my creative skills.

Some secondary tasks which I had to complete were the typing of some texts for a brochure, and the search for images online. Once more, one interesting step in the search for images, is that when you take an online picture, you need to pay for it, which is very different from what we were doing in class (copy and paste from google with references). So if I have found an appropriate picture, I need to send it to the designer, who will see whether all the technical details such as the size of the picture are what we need, then send it to the director, who will buy the photograph.

More to come in the next post.

My internship at Mamba Ltd.

Hi everybody, I'm Olivier Sénèque, 23 years, student in Mass communication at Charles Telfair Institute. I'm presently doing my last semester and also my internship at Mamba Ltd. Well, Mamba is a communication and marketing company which exists since 2007. The company does a lot of PR but also marketing and advertising.

As usual, the first days were not so hard, as any new trainee, I had to adapt to the daily life of the company. One easing factor is that there are only four employees at Mamba, the managing director, the designer and the marketing assistant. Fortunately, I'm directly followed by the director,as he is the only one dealing with public relations.

Cups of tea, photocopying and filing are still not part of my internship after two weeks at Mamba. One interesting factor about monitoring instead is that I'm not only doing simple press cuttings but searching for low image companies, conveying the message to the marketing assistant, who will contact the spotted company to present the services of Mamba.

More information will come in the next blog.

Good luck guys.