Chinemerem Ikechukwu (Nigeria)
Nigeria has a good record of positive achievements in various areas including entertainment, sports, and literature. Despite that, there is little projection of our positive stories. Is it that the stories are not told as they ought, or are the stories barely amplified by the media?
According to a Q3 article by BusinessInsider, Africa’s most populous country has a corruption perception index score of 24. The Global Peace Index ranked it the world’s 17th least peaceful state. Media reports that 16 Nigerians were deported from Ghana for cyber crimes in 2022. These and many more negative stories make the news and we know about them, and yet, somewhere in this truckload of negative stories that we most often hear about, there are other stories like:
- Noel Ifeanyi Alumona won the 2022 AFS Award for Young Global Citizens, and became the first African to win the prize since its inception in 1914.
- Eight Nigerian Americans were elected to top political positions in the US.
Positive stories do come out of Nigeria. The problem is not that we don’t hear these positive stories. The problem is that we do not leverage storytelling in a way that benefits us. The second problem is that we mostly do not choose the best angles to tell our stories, and the third is that we do not tell our stories in a way that they are thought-provoking enough to form a lasting perception or change an existing negative perception.
This is why businesses, brands, and organisations struggle to build connections and humanise their brand in a way that customers will remember and reference long-term. Everyone has a story, but what makes it stand out lies in how we choose to tell it. Because we haven’t found the best ways to tell our stories, we have to work twice as hard.
Our stories may be similar, but how we choose to tell them sets us apart from the crowd. The result of a well-told story is that everything else becomes easier, including sales and marketing. There is little need for an advertising splurge when a brand story is told to connect with its audience.
According to Statista, global advertising spending in 2022 is expected to reach $781 billion – a ridiculous estimate if PR and positive storytelling can do the job.
The story angle is the specific viewpoint or perspective from which a writer tells his or her story. This is particularly important because the same story can often be told from multiple perspectives. Consider the “Three Little Pigs” fairytale. The story is traditionally told from the perspective of the pigs, who are angry at the big bad wolf for destroying the first pig’s straw house and the second pig’s stick house. The wolf is unable to destroy the third pig’s brick house. However, the same story can be told from a different perspective – the story told from the wolf’s point of view in Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith’s “The True Story of the Three Little Pigs.”
Finding the right story angle is as fulfilling as discovering your best photo angle for a photographer. If your target audience is the wolf community about the aforementioned story, you know you are choosing a story angle that puts them in a better light.
The importance of good storytelling in PR cannot be overemphasised. In reality, people buy into people, not products. Sharing stories about your business and the people behind the scenes, gives your brand a personality, making it easier for people to know who you are, understand your values, and trust you. It is also important to note that you don’t necessarily have to write a story to spread a perspective. You can even as little as whisper it to someone, and that would be enough to form a perspective and a popular opinion.
Exploring PR as a way of life in Africa
Oftentimes, we formalise PR in a way that people think is something out of the ordinary. We need to advocate for PR in Africa in the sense of inclusivity; in a way that people understand that their little chitchats, whispers, tweets, captions, and comments are points to storytelling, and are in fact, strong enough to change an opinion or form one. There is a need for people to understand that PR is a way of life. By this, they will know that they do not necessarily have to work in the PR industry to spread a perception because they have the power to do that in their everyday life through normal conversations online and offline. By this, people are more cautious about the story angles they choose to tell. When we prioritise inclusivity in PR, we realise that we are the first Public Relations point for our products and services, and not the PR agency, the media, or other third parties.