Every media house has been pulling all stops to sell its newspapers on all platforms it owns.
So The Standard advertises the following day’s headline on evening prime time news, hours before the paper hits the streets.
The fellows at the Twin Towers on Kimathi Street are never far behind.
Each of our national newspapers carries a tag line as a sales pitch: Nation has “The Truth.” The Standard has “Kenya’s bold newspaper”.
Then there is, of course, “Smart people read The Star ” pale Lion Place on Waiyaki Way. The People Daily has the tongue-on-the-cheek slogan: “Setting the standard for the nation.”
It is a cheeky slogan when you look at it closely: replete with the standard in red (The Standard’s colours) and ‘the nation’ in blue. Here, People Daily is simply poking fun at its two largest competitors.
Well, we are not in the business of setting standards for advertising here, but this slogan reads like a desperate attempt at drawing attention.
It reads like those Coast buses that seek to outdo each other with slogans such that when one boasted, “We lead. Others follow,” its main competitor called in the painters to do a job in bold on every rear of its buses screaming: “We lead the leaders.”
Now, we do not doubt the standards of PD’s reporting or the boldness of The Standard, the truthfulness of the DN, or even the smartness of The Star.
But any good salesperson, including those at Grogon, will tell you something for free: That the best sales pitch is not trying to outshout your competitor with a cheeky slogan.
The best sales pitch is quality, and you do not need to shout this from the rooftop: you show it, prove it!
This, especially in the media world, that is basically a game of musical chairs where the fellows ‘Setting the standard for the nation’ are likely to have worked for The Standard and Nation at some point.
For, indeed, whenever the PD falters in its reporting, the slogan becomes laughable. Then, any wag out there might even point out that if PD sets the standard for the nation, then the standard of our journalism must be very low indeed.
Or maybe our newsrooms might start making their reporters subscribe for The Times, Wall Street Journal and other international publications. Then we might just start setting the standards for, say, The New York Times?
