ecbp Capacity Development: Branding and Marketing

One of the key issues for the development of Ethiopia’s industries is to address the image of Ethiopia through marketing and branding on international, national, and individual company level.

Branding Ethiopia

Representing Ethiopia through pictures

Workshop given to students and journalists about the concept of branding Ethiopia

On the one hand, this means to create a common national vision. Empowering the industry sectors and their players as well as local companies as part of the business re-engineering process is what Ethiopia as a whole stand for. By developing their own corporate and product brands, these companies can increase their recognition as suppliers in the national, regional, and the world market. They will be able to tie into the global marketplace more easily, but also to position themselves on the national market against sub-standard import products from other countries.

As part of this capacity building process, the Ethio-German Engineering Capacity Building Programme (ecbp) is offering a training session on marketing and branding addressing companies from all sectors on September 22, at ILRI. Two senior experts from Germany and the United States will hold the training and open up the discussion with the participants in order to determine further demand-driven actions. The aim of the seminar is to focus on the core issues of branding: what is branding and why should we care.

It involves the method of developing branding strategy for an individual company in 4 steps:

• intelligence gathering (customer, competitor and self-analysis)
• strategy (brand identity, image, positioning and positioning statement)
• communication (brand name, logo, packaging, consistent communication)
• management (management and control of the activities)

The experts will conduct over 30 interviews with Ethiopian companies until the workshop so that they can give special insights and work on concrete examples of the specific companies taking part in the workshop.

You are kindly invited to join a session of the training (4pm-5pm) involving a wrap-up and the conclusions from the discussions of the day as well as the cocktail offered at the end of the event. There, it will be possible to directly discuss with trainers, participants and the representatives of the ecbp.

The Ethio-German Engineering Capacity Building Programme (ecbp) established under the Ministry of Capacity Building is designed to foster the on-going economic development of Ethiopia by improving the competitiveness of local industries.

Please inform us in advance the names and number of journalists and camera men that you are going to send.