How Ruuthless Marketing and Business Talk Radio Program Triggered My Relationship and First Physical Encounter With Phillip Mataranyika.

In those days, I, by some kind of fortune, found myself on a Zimbabwean Broadcasting Holdings Spot FM (Now Classic 263) radio program called Business Talk. On that program, I posed a business expert being interviewed on business and entrepreneurial success by a host. The host, was Rodney Ruwende,. I spent close to three years on the program and shared around 200 hours worth of conversations on virtually all aspects of busines and entrepreneurship including leadership, strategy, marketing, sales, organisational performance, communication, psychology, thinking-you name it. When we started, the program aired for one hour every Wednesday or Tuesday I no longer remember. Then, I was allowed to give out my contacts details out to our listeners and Rodney routinely shared the number during each episode. The feedback from the listeners was mind-blowing. Appearance of this program did not directly generate a lost of business or money for me, but I had an incredible number of followers. Besides, the program put me into contacts with a lot of great people that, even today, we are still in contact. In addition, I managed to have few but excellent business consulting, training, education and development opportunities. From that radio program I learned a few human behaviour business, marketing and sales lessons.

We spent I think a total of around 30 weeks on Marketing because of my strong belief that marketing is the lifeblood of business and also my natural love for the subject (especially Guerrilla Marketing), mainly from the strategic, philosophical and intellectual point of view. To me, marketing is fun and gives people to make a big difference while having fun. In that respect, marketing is different than strategy and sales because there you have to be a bit more serious.

After introducing the marketing subject, we moved on to the conventional marketing basics such as The 4Ps of marketing, how to approach marketing including conducting marketing research, how to recruit the best marketers as well as the "branding" staff.

On brands we reviewed the current theory and I shared my personal beliefs and opinions of the nature of brand management work and how best to do it. Many people who are into "branding" do not have a good understanding of the meaning of branding and how to do it. They "create' fake brands by concentrating on superficial externalities of branding such as brand image management and brand broadcasting. But this is a story for another day. From around week 6 we shifted into Guerrilla Marketing and ran with it for five weeks. We coined this marketing sharing stretch "The Guerrilla Marketing Series" and I believe that, because of the overwhelming positive feedback, it was the most popular part of all my sharing on business talk. It was during one of these Guerrilla Marketing Series episodes that Rodney Ruwende introduced me to the listeners as "The Commander In Chief of Guerrilla Marketing." This moniker has stuck with me to this day. Now, I still meet some of the people who listened to the program who consider me a "Marketing Guru" and say so when I meet them.

Now after going through the Guerrilla Marketing Series, I thought it was a good idea to tell the audience that there was something beyond Guerrilla Marketing but which are off springs of Guerrilla Marketing. I said there was Modified Guerrilla Marketing and Special Guerrilla Marketing. The truth is I was cooking things up because there were no such things as yet. I promised the listeners that I would give them one example of such versions of Special Guerrilla Marketing. I was just thinking it would a cool thing to carry Guerrilla Marketing forward by innovating around it and create off shoots but still linking them back to Guerrilla Marketing.

Since I had promised our Business Talk listers, our fans, that we would bring something new and beyond Guerrilla Marketing the following week, I spent the whole week before our next episode wondering what on earth I was going to present as an example of a Guerrilla Marketing Off springs. Then one day, the word Ruuthless Marketing popped into my head and so I started thinking around the word. I generated some questions around Ruuthless Marketing. The questions included the following;

1. What is Ruuthless Marketing?
2. How is Ruthless Marketing different than Guerrilla Marketing and Conventional Marketing
3. What is the core purpose of Ruthless Marketing
4. What are the core elements and core components of Ruthless Marketing?
5. How do you measure the performance of Ruuthless Marketing in the real world marketing battlefied?
6. How does your competition react and respond to Ruuthless Marketing?
7. How do you deploy Ruuthless Marketing in your organisation and in the market place?

Thereafter I started writing answers to the questions and by the end I had create material enough not for one episode but for three on Ruthless Marketing!

I had been all along looking for other people in marketing to share the show with for the sake of variety but also as a back up plan. Many that I approached refused but one friend of mine, Gerald Chinogara (Now head of sales at Old Mutual) agreed. So I went to his office and introduced him to Ruthless Marketing and left him a write up on it. We appeared on the Radio Program and shared the unleashing Ruuthless Marketing knowledge with the listeners. Generald was on fire, so confident that one would have thought that was a Ruuthless Marketing Veteran with 50 years of experience teaching and researching on the subject. The Ruthless Marketing Series must have finally trigged a major event in my life; my first face to face encounter with Phillip because it was soon after than we called me to see him one early morning.

During that first meeting, Phillip said he had nothing serious to talk. He said he just wanted us to meet face to face because he enjoyed and appreciated the business ideas I shared on Business Talk. He said that he and his wife were some of the die hard Business Talk fans. He also showed me a big diary in which he wrote some notes while he listened to the radio programs. In addition he told me how, on the Business Talk day, he would leave his office late and listened to the program and then, after arriving at home, he would remain in the car until the end. He said, his wife, Mavis picked this strange pattern and one day she walked out to investigate and saw Phillip in the car. When she tapped on the window, Phillip said he opened the passenger's door and Mavis moved. Phillip also said from that day on, Mavis overtook him in being a Business Talk fan. When I latter first Mavis face to face, the moment Phillip Introduced me, Mavis automatically linked my name with Ruuthless Marketing.

A few weeks later, Phillip requested that I organise a Ruthless Marketing Workshop for his team and I developed and run a one day workshop for Phillip and his Nyaradzo Team at Wild Geese Lodge.

One day afterwards, Phillip send me a text that says

"I am a Ruthless Marker all because of you."

It was all humbling to get such feedback from someone like Phillip and Mavis. They are among the few. Being honest, if I did not know that Phillip is a candid person, I would take his compliments and feedback as flattery. I believe in him because he has also given me some very candid but valid corrective feedback in some things that I reveal elsewhere in the book.

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??Simon Bere, 2024