Can a Continent become a Brand?

Yes, it can.

I got a chance to prove that the strategy for such a brand is actually quite easy to arrive at.

It's the implementation that will take a lot of work.

That's true of all great brands.

Egypt can possibly lay claim to the longest-running 'tourism' campaign in the world.

The idea must have happened in a flash. Building those Pyramids so that they are still an iconic symbol 4,500 years later took some doing. They took years to build.

So it is with brands.

But does that apply to a continent as well?

Invited to speak at Africa Rising 4, an online leadership conference organized by IAA, I chose to convert the 30 minutes allotted to me into a workshop.

Fortunately, the organizers at Accra, Ghana, chose a great conferencing app called Zuddl that made such a 30-minute workshop possible.

I basically got the participants to answer the first of the Univbrands' five brand-building questions. Those of you who have been following my articles will be familiar with these questions.

Every brand needs to answer these questions. In one form or another.

What I did not know is that the rest of the answers are so easy once the answer to the first question has a resounding majority.

It took us 30 minutes to arrive at a pretty decent brand strategy for Africa, the continent. (Coming up later in this article.)

It took Google 12 years to work out these answers.

I was fortunate. I had over 100 top thinkers participating who knew Africa well.

So after I had warmed them up and had shown them how they could participate by just using the chat function, here's what I used to get everyone to understand how I wanted an obvious emotional truth for a brand to be written.

These two slides made it easy for them to understand what I was looking for when I asked for answers to the first two common-sense questions for Brand Africa.

Starbucks' answer to Question 2.

Starbucks' answer to Question 1.

Once that was understood the participants had no problems 'chatting' up some great obvious emotional truths for Brand Africa.

All I had to do is show them these two slides.

Out poured the answers. (It helped that this was a leadership conference! Some of Africa's best thinkers must have been there.)

Once the participants had poured their hearts out in axiomatic emotional truths that were truly universal, I just had to ask each participant to choose one that they had not written themselves, but which they thought was very true of Africa as well.

The participants must have scrolled up and down the chat thread quite a lot.

Here's what came out as the most resonant truth: Every human wants to be treated as equal.

After that, it was very easy to work out these answers to the rest of the questions.

I had heard of Ubuntu before. And I was thrilled to know that everyone, representing many nations in Africa, knew it, too.

I am because we are.

Ubuntu. It's what the world needs. And it could come out of Africa.

Will this be easy to implement?

Of course not.

Did I say that the Pyramids or the Sphinx were easy to build?

But once done, the world spreads the good word. For centuries.

Yes, Word of Mouth is the world's most powerful medium. We often forget that.

Will this become the next iconic idea from Africa?