- Substandard foreign products must not crush our brand
By Bilesanmi Abayomi
It’s sickening and disheartening, reading the alleged leaked mail emanating from the Managing Director of Seven-Up Bottling Company (SBC), Ziad Maalouf, noting his determination to stop at nothing, to crush Nigeria’s indigenous brand currently maintaining a huge market share as result given their brand and others insomnia.
Perhaps, Ziad underestimated the resolve of Nigerians to make their country work having discovered that aliens has been at the forefront of crushing and sabotaging the efforts of sustainable indigenous brand in the country.
Foreign brands in some cases made attempts to buy a local brand, when they observe that such local brand is doing fantastic well in the market thereby, affecting their brand loyalty and sales. However, if such local brand owner(s) can not be bought over, the foreign brand pay heavily to spy or espionage using internal saboteurs to disrupt production process or embrace other disruptive measures to push them out of business. Most importantly, to discourage other local investors from venturing into the same line of business and to sustain their monopoly and periodical price increment.
This is where local brand owners and government who are strongly passionate about the growth and development of local brand must sanction any foreign brand who may attempt to muscle our country’s brand while taken capital flight from our Nation with impunity.
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Perhaps Ziad’s job was threatened largely owing to the feedbacks he got about their competitor which triggered his unguided, deformed and perceived hate speech against the highly acceptable and celebrated BIGI brand.
On the part of the external consumers, the distributors, retailers and vendors they make more profit from B-Brand industry (Bigger pack and lower price) of international standard than any other brands according to hundreds of the testimony rather than the usual “working like an elephant, eating like an ant” relationship in the past.
As a science journalist, its bottle content when taken to a laboratory for a test for human consumption, ranked among the best and it was found to have been produced with the first of its kind, highly assembled sophisticated equipments under hygienic environment in the country.
Having good facility, welfare package and quality product by an indigenous company in a few years of existence, the goose bumps and insomnia developed by the Managing Director of Seven-Up Bottling Company (SBC), Ziad Maalouf compared to his brand which has been existing in Nigeria for decades further confirmed popularity, visibility and loyalty to the B brand. Consequently, the declared destructive war on Bigi by SBC by “any means” is not against the founder but against Nigerians as a whole and must be resisted by all.
Because if Nigerians fail to stand with an indigenous brand as a nation and allow this to go as in the past, substandard foreign products of other countries will crush it in no distant time through devious means as declared.
Over a decade age, Nigeria Music crushed foreign music in social events, clubs, Radio, TV stations as result of combined efforts of song writers, artists, producers, Disc and Video Jockey, fans entertainment media reports among others. No events in Nigeria will be “A Class” without playing Nigeria’s artist songs.
Chiefly, State and Federal Government must not kill our local brand with over taxation, Bigi and others will continue to dominate in their domain, so long the founder maintains the attested quality standard, both internally and externally and treating host community as king.