When the dust settles

Image courtesy Flickr – Mark Morgan

That feeling of Christmas is hard to come by because lurking in the shadows of my mind is the nagging question: What will it be like in January?

2014 will be remembered as the year of giveaway and freeness.  Come 2015, the pensioners will have spent their extra $5,000.00 Christmas gift; the prices of staples would have crept up beyond their pre-Christmas-gift level; the price of oil and gas would be even lower and the “Kamla promotional giveaways” would be laying around the house.  In the world of marketing, branded promotional give aways are sometimes called consumables.

The Communication Gurus behind the UNC’s political campaign have invested their entire spend in the notion that good brand visibility signifies the ability of your products/services to attract the attention of your target audience and therefore stimulate re-sale.   In this case, the feeling is that the more you see of the Prime Minister and the UNC, the more likely you are to vote for them at the appointed hour.  The literature also suggests that there is a saturation point – that point at which the audience becomes numb to the message.  There is no formula to prescribe that point.  The decision is informed by data and a good dose of common sense.   All that is happening in this Yuletide season can be summed up as “voter inducement” and the society is paying a significant price.

After the dust settles on the 2015 general elections some leader will be responsible for changing the way we do business in T&T and that culture change is probably the single biggest headache that will be experienced for years to come.

How will we move away from an attitude of entitlement?  How will we recalibrate the society into remembering that work precedes success?  How will we get our leaders to live the value that people do what you do and not what you say?  How will we inspire our people to give a fair days work for their pay?

These are complicated questions with no silver bullet answers. Our single assurance is that these questions must be answered and provision made to ensure that they are answered in a way that will benefit our society.