Rethinking effective communication strategy in managing organisations

Communication is the blood and live-wire of any organisation, the righteous vein that conveys directions with authority. Communication is a relevant tool that provides a leader an avenue to survive with honour. Peter Drucker stated in his book, “Management”, revised edition published in 2008, that: “The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said”. Communication strategy bereavement is probably one of the most missteps of leaders and organisations today and it is the basis of disloyalty by the general public. More often than not, givers of messages give messages that are misconstrued by receivers in the exact opposite way as intended. That is why it is better to make errors of tautology than to suffer from “misunderstanding” or “communication strategy bereavement”, which may be costly!

“Jesus Paid Your Debts, Not Your Taxes”, is an acclaimed offensive advertisement published on Easter Sunday of April 7, 2024, by the Federal Inland Revenue Services (FIRS) of Nigeria that has been criticised by Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN). CAN described it as “provocative and offensive”, while it demanded an apology from the FIRS. The FIRS apologised, unreservedly, claiming it was unintentional to denigrate the message of Easter. Likewise, Sterling Bank’s Easter message of April 17, 2022, to its customers, and Nigerians at large, has continued to receive backlash across social media over the bank’s comparison of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the messiah of Christians, with Agege bread. On Easter Sunday of the year 2022, Sterling Bank wrote: “Like Agege Bread, He Rose”.

Agege bread is a popular brand of bread in Nigeria known for its stretchy, solid and chewy nature. Most people that commented on the “innocent” advert described it as “insensitive to the belief of Christians and blasphemous”. “Imagine this blasphemous message from Sterling Bank to customers on Easter day which was retracted because of outbursts. This is distasteful and an outright mockery of our risen Lord – Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the world. It is reprehensible and condemnable in every sense of the word,” a faithful tweeted. “Dear @Sterling_Banking, it is very insensitive to compare the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ to Agege Bread. You won’t dare do this with Islam. Withdraw that message now and apologise,” another faithful tweeted.

On Friday, April 7, 2023, FrieslandCampina WAMCO Nigeria Plc, the manufacturers of Peak brand (liquid and powder milk) and yoghurt, published an Easter message with a dented tin of Peak Milk pierced on two sides with a nail to depict the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) knocked the company for denigrating Jesus with the advert and threatened to boycott all the products of the company. On Monday, April 10, 2023, the management of FrieslandCampina WAMCO Nigeria Plc, apologised to the Christian Association of Nigeria for using the crucifixion of Jesus Christ as a metaphor to promote their product on Good Friday, saying the social media advertisement has been withdrawn.

While acknowledging the sensitivity of the social media post “considering the sobriety of the season,” the organisation said it was “neither intended to make light of the significance of the season nor to inordinately exploit the unmatched sacrifice of Jesus Christ.” The executive director, corporate affairs, of FrieslandCampina WAMCO Nigeria Plc, Ore Famurewa, expressed remorse in a letter to the President of CAN, Archbishop Daniel Okoh dated April 10 2023, titled, “Apology for the Good Friday social media post by the Peak Brand”. “We hereby restate our commitment to our unwavering mission of nurturing Nigeria while maintaining the respect of all religious laws, tenets and guidelines. Once again, please accept our deepest apology and pledge to prevent a reocurrence of such in the future. Do accept the assurances of my esteemed regards.”

It is not only Christians that are feeling the heat. On September 6, 2004, the Muslim community in Switzerland and the Federal Commission against Racism condemned a controversial advert about Muslim birth rates. The advert titled, “Thanks to automatic naturalisations – Muslims soon a majority?” appeared in the weekend editions of several Swiss newspapers. If you visited the New York Times’ homepage on April 14, 2014, and before the page loads, you may be shown a 15-second full-screen advertisement warning that unnamed, “Islamist groups” are “undermining America’s security, liberty, and free speech,” with a photo of the World Trade Center towers. The advert is implicitly Islamophobic message, suggesting that Muslim-Americans may be enemies within, and its timing during the opening of the September 11 Memorial Museum, raised questions about why the Times decided to allow it such a prominent display on its homepage.

The advertising unit, called an interstitial, is typically one of the most expensive because it requires users to view the advert or click away before they can see the New York Times homepage. A spokesperson for the Times, asked why the advert was permitted under the company’s policy against adverts that “are gratuitously offensive on racial, religious, or ethnic grounds”, responded that the advert had been internally reviewed and approved and that the company had decided to slightly alter the adverts’ wording. “However upon re-examination, we think the phrase ‘radical Islamists’ would have been better than ‘Islamists’ in this advertisement,” she explained. “The advertiser agreed to the change and the ad has been updated on nytimes.com.”

It is very bad to generalise a people, or their faith, tribe or ethnicity, as bad, or to toy with their beliefs! ‘The opium of the people or opium of the masses’ is a dictum used in reference to religion, derived from a frequently paraphrased partial statement of German revolutionary and critic of political economy, Karl Marx: “Religion is the opium of the people.” In context, the statement is part of Marx’s analysis that religion’s role is as a metaphysical balm for the real suffering in the universe and in society. Some schools of thought believe religion is an addiction and should not be toyed with. Organisations should be selective of what they communicate to the public so that they are not misconstrued or viewed as “discriminatory and offensive”.

There is power in the words we speak and write. McLibel case or McDonald’s Corporation versus Steel and Morris (1977) is a good example of “corporate miscalculation”. The McLibel litigation was a public relations disaster for McDonald’s. As one British lawyer noted, McDonalds “turned a flea bite on its big toe into a postulating boil all over the body corporate”. Corporate organisations should engage media agencies and media advertisers for their messages, both internal and external, so that they will not have “bereavement of communication strategies”. Any Dick, Jack and Harry “can draft a press release or come out with a caption; it only takes a communication strategist to do the-thought-to-finish-process” according to Onome Okwali, a communication strategist.

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