Gilbert Manirakiza is chief executive officer of the Newmark Group; an African strategic communications and business consulting firm cutting across 30 African countries.
Gil spends most of his time in Newmark Group’s hub city of Nairobi, but travels extensively across the continent and globally where he gets to meet the clients and also get to meet very interesting people like himself.
In this interview with Techeconomy, this panafricanist, passionate entrepreneur, strategic and multilingual communications specialist, traces the steps to where it all started with the establishment of Newmark Group about 14 years ago:
TE: It is great to know that Newmark is in its 14th year. Congratulations on your anniversary! Kindly tell us about Newmark- The journey and achievements over these years?
Gilbert Manirakiza: In terms of our journey and who we are as Newmark, we are a strategic communications company and business consulting firm. And essentially, as such, we specialize in building the influence of organizations and individuals for them to be able to have an impact in their markets, in their societies, in their communities.
This journey and this work started about 14 years ago, and we just blew our 14th candle last month, and I couldn’t be prouder about this achievement simply because it has been full of so many blessings.
In terms of the journey and the milestones we have had over the last 14 years; I started with my co -founder, Raisa Ajiakir, who is one of the greatest pillars of our firm and set about to build what I consider one of the best teams in strategic communications and business consulting, particularly insights and digital marketing, creative content, as well as other practices that we have. We are very proud of the fact that we have served more than 100 clients over the last few years, and we continue to serve many clients across all these markets.
There are so many things to be proud of actually over the last few years, not least of which I would mention the fact that we have over 100 experts on this continent that work within the Newmark Group who are serving many, many businesses across many projects, and this we believe contributes to the sustainable development of our continent.
TE: Influence is a critical theme in today’s multi-polar and poly-crisis world. Can you explain why influence is so important in this context?
Gilbert Manirakiza: Influence is very important as a concept but also is an area of practice. So let me just give you a sense of how we define influence at Newmark. We believe that influence is the ability of a company or an organization to persuade or convince others and others could be other companies, other individuals to either hold a certain belief, agree with them or behave in a certain way.
So if you have the ability to convince your friends to agree with you on something or to behave in a certain way, then you have influence over those people. Businesses influence their customers by using various techniques, such as advertising, such as public relations, such as digital marketing, et cetera, et cetera. And therefore, in a time like this when channels of communication are complex and are crowded and there are many, it’s much more difficult for individuals and brands to actually get themselves heard, for them to stand out.
Therefore, it is actually very difficult for these brands to get the attention they need for them to be influential. Because when you’re scrolling on your Instagram page, for something to hold your attention for more than a second or two seconds, it has to be something interesting. And that’s how people come to us, because they have realized that to gain the attention of the public these days is becoming very difficult. And therefore, it is becoming very difficult to be influential, to make people believe you, or to make people adopt a behaviour that you would want them to adopt.
And therefore, it’s becoming more difficult to achieve business objectives, to have impact in society, which is ultimately what we are trying to help various organizations achieve currently.
And you’ve talked about a poly-crisis world. Basically, the fact that there are many crises contributes to the noise and to the multitude of content that people have to contend with.
And therefore, it’s slightly harder to cut through the noise. But when you work with agencies like ourselves, you can actually be able to get the necessary advice and support that you need to be able to achieve the attention you require for you to be influential.
TE: Can you give an example of a successful influence strategy Newmark has employed in any African country?
Gilbert Manirakiza: In terms of examples of influence strategies that have been successful, it would be like asking a parent to choose a favourite child. We have executed hundreds of campaigns, worked for hundreds of clients over the last 14 years. And it would take a bit of a process to select the best example. But I can mention a couple of them.
Actually, let me just mention one right here, here in Nigeria, where we’re working with a client to implement a financial literacy program that has trained hundreds of young people on how to use money, how to invest money, and how to manage their own financial future. And the reason why we designed such a program for this particular client is because they needed to build their influence, they needed to build a relationship with young people in Nigeria, but a positive relationship.
And therefore, we designed for them a program that would help young people to be successful.
And this has been extremely, well received and has helped this particular client gain tremendous goodwill among the target audience that it was targeting. So that’s just one example. There are many, many other examples I could mention across many countries. But let’s just stop there. Otherwise, we’ll spend a couple of days here
TE: What, in your opinion, does it take to build a business that successfully operates across multiple countries?
Gilbert Manirakiza: Building a business that successfully operates across multiple countries is not as difficult as people might think it is. I believe that one of the biggest challenges we have in Africa is that we grow up believing that there are 54 countries, and I’m just from one of those 54 countries, and all those countries are foreign, and my own is the only market I can serve. We actually ignore the fact that not very long ago, maybe more than a century ago, we were all one land.
Yes, we did have kingdoms and we did have communities, but the borders that we see were not really our reality.
So why should they continue to be our reality today? So the first place to start is your mentality, your approach, your thinking about who you are. If you think you are just Nigerian, you’re going to limit your perspective, but if you believe yourself to be, yes, Nigerian, but you are also global, you’re a global citizen; you live in a global world.
You can, if you want to, cross the border and go into a neighbouring ECOWAS country and you won’t even have to get a visa.
That’s the starting point, just realizing and changing your mindset from just what you see and what people tell you you are to what you feel you should be. So the first starting point is the mentality.
And once you’ve adopted that mentality, the second step is what I call the four P’s. The four P’s start with purpose.
Every business has to be rooted in the purpose, and the purpose is simply the solution that you’re bringing to a specific problem you have identified.
If your business is not based on a problem that you’re solving for someone, and therefore it is a problem that you can possibly solve in another region, in another country, in another continent, then perhaps the scale-up journey may not necessarily be the thing for you.
If it’s a hyper-local problem, then you probably don’t need to bother about doing cross-border business.
But if your ambition is to have a business that is Pan-African, regional, global, then you need to make sure that your purpose is tied to a problem that is either universal or a problem that is being experienced across the board in many different countries.
And once that happens, once you find that purpose, then the next thing will be fairly tactical, which is to define the products.
And that’s the second P, the products or services that you are going to build. And you may have to customize your products and services to the various realities of countries, and that’s one of the things we’ve done. Our teams in the various countries tend to find local problems, local priorities that our clients would be experiencing in those markets, and they set out to solve those challenges. So that’s one of the things that we do very well.
The third P, actually, would be the people. You have to surround yourself with people who ideally are willing to be open-minded, willing to operate across the board. Sometimes, like what we have done, is we’ve built a team that is multilingual.
You find francophones, you find multilingual people, you find even lusophones, and you find people who speak Arabic.
We really have a team that cuts across all the language identities, all the linguistic profiles of the region that we cover, which is Africa.
And that has made it easy for us to be able to scale. Myself, I speak multiple languages, but that doesn’t mean that if you don’t speak multiple languages, you can’t scale across regions that do have a language other than your own.
You can bring within your team someone who can navigate both languages. So we have people who speak, for example, both French and English. We have people who can translate from Arabic into English or French, and therefore bridge the gap between our clients in Arabic-speaking countries and our partners and our ecosystems in those markets with ourselves. And just being able to have a team that does that is crucially important.
The last P is what I call processes. You will notice that one of the keys to scale is actually having processes that can allow you to do things more efficiently, to automate things.
And this, I believe, is one of the things that many people are not able to do up front. So just think about your recruitment processes, how you do things, your finance management processes. You have to be aware of various taxation policies in different countries because you have to be compliant with those laws and policies.
So this last P can actually grab people by surprise when they find themselves being sued by a government for not paying taxes or for not doing something specific.
So make sure you invest time in processes that allow you to safely navigate the foreign markets where you are not necessarily considered as your home market.
TE: With Africa being so diverse, how does Newmark tailor its influence strategies to different countries and contexts?
Gilbert Manirakiza: So in terms of how Newmark tailors influence strategies to different countries and contexts, we have put in place over the last few years a set of frameworks and tools.
There is something we call the Newmark Trident, which is a very scientifically-based framework that allows us to, first of all, diagnose the landscape, the sector, the market to make sure that we know exactly which influence interventions are needed for a given client, which communication strategies, which brand design strategies, which reputation management strategies.
This tool, once we use it to diagnose that profile, to diagnose the identity, reputation, level of understanding, trust levels, collaboration levels, stakeholder ecosystem in a given market or location, then we move on to another tool which we call the programming tool.
The programming tool allows us to go from setting objectives to putting in place messaging frameworks, to putting in place all these different elements that a brand, an organization, or a client will need to actually implement an influence strategy that gets them the impact in the market that they need.
The last one is a tool that allows us to plan for channels. As you know, you have to think about what kind of channels should the particular organization or brand communicate with the intended audiences for them to exert their influence or for them to achieve their objectives and communicate and things like that.
So really, our approach to answer your question is to use these frameworks because they are designed to be adaptable in every single market where we operate.
And really, when we use them, we rarely fail.
Obviously, we also work with teams in each one of the countries. That’s another very important principle. We don’t import anything.
We don’t impose anything from outside. We do have some great case studies from other past projects that we have done and that have been highly successful.
We also bring in great expertise from abroad, from the US, from our partners in Europe, from Asia and other places to make sure that we really give the best solutions to our various customers.
TE: In the context of a poly-crisis environment, what unique solutions has Newmark offered to address multiple crises simultaneously?
Gilbert Manirakiza: This is one of the most important questions of today because we are not out of the crisis as a region. We are still facing economic crisis in most countries with inflation being out of hand in most African markets with a lot of challenges to do with political upheaval. Some of this could be caused by the economic challenges.
We have also seen what happened with COVID-19. It’s not so far behind us. But aside from COVID-19, there are other minor crises in the healthcare sector such as doctor strikes and other challenges that we see with non-communicable diseases and so forth.
So number one, a poly-crisis environment is an opportunity for us to be a true advisor to our clients because the thing about a crisis is that it brings about unexpected situations.
So we do have a very specific set of frameworks, a messaging framework, we do have a strategy framework for crisis situations, and we apply these frameworks very efficiently, very strategically to help our clients navigate the various crises.
Actually, I’m glad you’ve asked the question because one of our main hub markets is Kenya, where, as you know, currently there is a major crisis that is facing the nation with a section of the public, especially the Gen Z generation in the country having gone to the streets to demand a better deal in terms of the taxation package, in terms of governance.
We believe that communication professionals such as ourselves, influence architects and influence strategies such as ourselves can really play a key role in helping various stakeholders in society not only navigate this kind of situation, but also to adopt the best strategies for them to come out stronger. Because we believe this is a major opportunity not just for the Gen Zs, but also for companies and other stakeholders within the economy to be able to position themselves.
As you can tell, there is a major shift in Africa in terms of the influence that constituents such as younger demographics have. And this will continue to become the trend where we’ll see more contestation, more activity online as young people who are using these various tools will learn the power of mobilizing using these tools. And therefore, we can help companies who are the bulk of our clients navigate this situation, learn how to be part of the conversation.
Because otherwise, they will find themselves out of relevance because the movements are quite strong. And if you are not embedded, if you don’t speak the language of these young people and use the platforms that they use, and you work with people they trust, you’re going to find yourself very quickly out of relevance. And we actually offer a lot of solutions to help brands in this kind of situation.
TE: How does Newmark’s impact extend beyond Africa to the international stage?
Gilbert Manirakiza: In terms of Newmark’s impact beyond Africa, we have always had very strong global partners that allow us to have global scalability.
Currently, we have affiliates across every single continent, across 44 markets outside of Africa. And that means that any company in Africa that wants to scale into New York or into Paris or into Copenhagen or into Brazil or Mexico, they can just come to us and we’ll help them to actually conquer those markets.
Thanks to a great network that we are part of. It’s called the Public Relations Global Network. And we are a very active member in that particular network. It’s one of the strongest, largest networks globally of independent agencies. And we are one of those agencies that is proud to be associated with fantastic experts.
I invite all the big companies of Nigeria to come talk to us because we can actually bring to them fantastic insights and expertise from all these agencies, from hundreds of thousands of professionals that can lend a hand and show them how certain things are done.
We might not have expertise in some areas, but you might find that that expertise is available in New York or is available in Seattle or is available in Hong Kong. And we can bring that to Africa. We are bringing that to Africa.
We’ve just launched a global expert panel for tourism where our global colleagues will be helping African tourism organizations understand global tourists because the global tourist is becoming a rare commodity.
There’s a lot of competition for those global tourists. So we have put in place that global expert panel to help Africa. And we’ll do that for more sectors and for other stakeholders as well.
TE: How has it been navigating Newmark through these tough economic times?
Gilbert Manirakiza: Tough economic times are hard for all companies and all organizations. One of the advantages at Newmark is that we have a very strong team and that team continues to attract very strong clients, very good clients.
So we have experienced some challenges like everyone else. But because of our prudent management, our diversification of services, the fact that we are located in different markets, we continue to see resilience and we continue to invest in our teams and in our ability to adapt because also adaptation is very important for anyone to stay in business.
Anyone who thinks that they have to stay the same, that they have to do what has worked yesterday, will very quickly find themselves struggling for their life.
We are constantly adapting, constantly finding how to bring value to our customers in a manner that is relevant to them.
So if their needs change today and we see that, we come to them and tell them, we think this is an emerging problem that you need to solve.
TE: Looking forward, what are Newmark’s goals for further expanding its influence in this intricate global landscape?
Gilbert Manirakiza: Well in terms of our goals for the future and our expansion targets, really our purpose is to build the influence of African companies and brands, be they personal brands or corporate brands and help set them up for global success.
So as long as we continue achieving that, we are already happy. But we also would love to continue expanding our global capabilities and I believe that we are on track to doing that and we want to bring on board more partners, more investors, more experts and colleagues and to be able to build this dream together.
I am one of those big believers in Africa.
At no point has it occurred to me that there is any other place on the planet which is better, at least as far as I’m concerned, for growth, for those who have aspirations to grow because Africa has a lot of potential.
But it does require us to see Africa as the opportunity that it is. So if you are in business and you are not thinking about scaling across Africa, you may be short changing yourself and we will continue to scale in Africa and we will continue to scale globally as well.
TE: Finally, how do you see the role of influence evolving for organizations like Newmark in the future?
Gilbert Manirakiza: In terms of the evolution of the role of influence for our organisations and others in the future, I see that we will continue to see a redefinition of certain fundamental sectors of society. For example, we are seeing right now a redefinition of what statecraft is because young people are changing how they interact with statecraft.
They are changing how they view the state. They are changing how they view social mobilisation. They are changing the intermediation role of certain government entities and this will continue to erode and diminish the influence of governments and the influence of those major entities that up to now had a lot of influence.
We are going to move into what I call the democratic influence era where you will have to earn your influence and the influence that you have.
We can certainly help organisations define this and do this very, very well but those organisations and companies that don’t learn to do this well and even governments that don’t learn to do this well, believe you me, they are going to be running into some serious problems, particularly the biggest problem of all which is irrelevance.
They are going to stop being relevant. So, we don’t think that anyone can afford to be unintentional about the influence that they have and about the attention they are able to command because if they are, if they choose to ignore these fundamental realities, believe me, their impact is going to be reduced to almost zero very quickly.
TE: Thank you for sharing these amazing insights and congratulations once again on Newmark’s 14th anniversary.
Gilbert Manirakiza: Thank you for having me and thank you to all your listeners for giving me the time of day today. Thank you.
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