Choose wisely how we brand Jamaica

Hilary Robertson-Hickling, Contributor

In the world today, marketers, corporate entities, individuals and even nations are making strenuous efforts to ensure they manage their brands.

The efforts to distinguish one brand from another may mean success or failure as consumers decide how to spend their money and what to leave behind on the shelves. It determines where people invest their money, and which country they visit as the world is filled with cut-throat competition.

We are now told of personal brands which distinguish one applicant for a job from another. Is it any wonder that celebrities and wannabees out-curse, out-trace, out-dress, clash and expose each other, literally, as two of our female artistes demonstrated at Sting?

Meanwhile, Tessanne Chin was enhancing the name of her country, her family and herself by placing number one on The Voice. Her brand is about excellence, preparation, virtuosity and hard work.

In Jamaica, like everywhere else, we have to decide who we are and how we honour and protect our identities. Jamaica has had a see-saw ride between those activities that tarnish the national brand and those that honour and make it shine. Instead of depending on the individual icons who we have in our midst, we must demonstrate some collective consciousness about who we are.

We can choose consciousness, slackness, violence, peace, hate, love, self respect, self-abnegation, independence, dependence, reason or irrationality as some possible polarities. But decide we must.

In The Sunday Gleaner of January 5, there were three articles which highlighted how the family creates name brands. A wonderful one about the brand-name Bolt, which had a family reunion for 200 people in Trelawny including farmers, ministers of religion, Olympic athletes, the young and the old.

family values

Another highlighted the importance of the family in the development of healthy young people ready and able to learn in the evermore burdened educational system, written by Esther Tyson, an experienced educator.

The third was about the work and successes of Dr Polly Bowles with some of her foster children. She demonstrated how some young people flourished in the environments of love created outside of their own homes.

Ours is a society in which brands were burnt on our bodies to identify the masters who owned our bodies, minds and spirits. Today, we can rework those brands of shame, suffering and bondage to become something creative, healthy, and wholesome.

We have to make the choice about ourselves, the goods and services that we produce. We have to decide who we are.

We can be hewers of wood and drawers of water, we can occupy the visceral, we can become masters and mistresses of our own destiny. We can choose and 'rule our destiny', according to Buju Banton.

Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.