Marketing Excellence Awards must build credibility

For example, once again this year Standard Bank has won the Marketing Organisation of the Year award, which might well have a lot of people wondering how on earth a bank can win a marketing award. Especially when South African banks are generally perceived to be high on charges and low on that very foundation of marketing – customer service.

The answer is simple. There were only five entries in this category.

And the reason is equally simple. Because the organisers so badly wanted these awards to be regarded as beyond reproach in terms of judging, they not only established a judging oversight committee, which is to be applauded, but also made the entry criteria extremely detailed and complex. Something else that should be applauded.

Confidential

The judges required an enormous amount of information – a lot of it quite confidential as far as a lot of companies were concerned.

The consequnce of all this, though, was that a lot of companies simply did not have the time to spend on the complex entry formalities and elected not to enter in spite of a lot of requests for some of them to do so.

Now, all of this impinges on the integrity of the awards and gives companies such as Standard Bank something of a hollow victory. What should have been the best marketing organisation in the country was only the best of five companies out of the thousands in the country.

Overhaul

This applied to other categories as well. But, it seems that the organisers intend having an overhaul of entry criteria for next year's event to make sure of the maximum number of entries and that when all is said and done, the winners will indeed be the best in the country and not just the pick of a very limited bunch.

It seems to me that the only way this can be achieved is for these awards to follow the same methodology as a growing number of awards overseas and that is an initial general selection process by consensus. And then a request for more information on which to base final judging.

The way this seems to work, successfully I am told, is that a fairly extensive selection panel of independent and non-aligned marketers (or at least with aligned marketers recusing themselves from certain categories) would simply sit down with a bare sheer of paper and discuss marketing campaigns, organisations and people that have stood out significantly in the preceding year.

From this process a shortlist is drawn up and further information is requested from the shortlisted companies usually by interview rather than complex form-filling . Again, once this information is made available to the judges, consensus is used to pick a winner.

It will be no easy task but one must applaud the organisers for at least admitting shortcomings and having the determination to iron out the glitches. Instead of just leaving things as they are like so many other awards in this country that are either bought or lobbied.