The Rebranding of Nigeria through Marketing Communication Strategy after Endsars and Covid 19 Lockdown

Any decision by the Nigerian government to pursue the comprehensive programme of packaging and rebranding Nigeria most especially after the violent #Endsars protests of October 2020, will come as a welcome development. Branding involves adding values, creating a unique feature, market or identity for a product, service, nature or place, in order to differentiate between it and another, and to stimulate the customers emotional attachments. Unique brands exists in the market and amongst the nations of the earth, e.g. Jerusalem, Mecca, and Washington DC. The mention of few brands leads to some emotional attachment e.g Prado, Hummer, and Pajero jeeps, Glo, MTN, magi, panadol, sharp and national electronics. Panadol pain relieving advert in the past states that “IF IT IS NOT PANADOL, IF FIT NOT BE LIKE PANADOL”. We have God’s own country (The United States of America), the Queens own country (United Kingdom), the Samba nation (Brazil), carnival city Brazil and London, Lagos, Rio de Janerio, Bahamas Island all connoting are positive or negative feature or the other. The focal point of this paper is to evaluate the brand Nigeria, its special features, attributes, challenges and advance solutions on how to Rebrand the nation, which is the largest secured investors destination in Africa. It uses opinion survey, conducted on respondents both online and personally. Simple random sampling was adopted in selecting respondents in the six geographical entities of Nigeria and Abuja. The results shows that respondents tree that Nigeria as a nation requires rebranding especially after the violent #EndSars protests and Covid19 lockdowns. These protests dented Nigeria’s image locally and internationally so rebranding becomes an essential feature. The essence is to create brands that will instill patriotism, loyalty, trust and discipline among Nigerians. The paper identifies the image problems of Nigeria such as armed robbery and banditry, violent crimes, extra judicial killings, romance and advance fee frauds and scams, assassinations, terrorism by Boko Haram, kidnappings, internal insurrection etc. It advocates that through a concerted use of quality, positioning, repositioning, long term approach, being first, well blended communication, Nigeria national brand can be repositioned for greatness and to attract local and international investment, and to instill patriotism amongst the citizenry.

Keywords: Branding, Positioning, Brand, Image, Competition.