Obsession with awards
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Good awards, bad awards, fake awards … Sri Lankans are obsessed with awards and getting recognition for ‘achievements’ at whatever cost. The corporate sector is filled with awards being presented across all segments of business: There are awards for the best citizen, the best exporter, the best HR company, the best this and the best that! The ‘we are the best’ carnival, it seems, never ends. Yes, while there are awards’ schemes run by organizations with a high level of integrity and credibility, quite a few – many from abroad – are in ‘for the money’. Pay up and you get an award: It’s like buying fast food or taking a self-photo at an overseas amusement park with an instant sticker on your clothes saying ‘I was there’.
Check out the newspapers and not a day passes where a company has either issued a statement or taken out an advertisement on an award it has won, secured or being conferred with. Are consumers really interested? Maybe, maybe not but the fact remains that somewhere down the line this self-glorification borders not only on absurdity but affects the credibility and integrity of the real ‘awards’: Those categories that have been respected and revered for years by society. Rather than self-praise, the best rewards and achievement must come from the public in endorsing a product or service. That is the real thing.
Achievement and fulfilment are through receiving letters or other communication from your customers praising a product or service. What is the Sri Lankan experience? After-sales service is one of the biggest problems people have with companies, many belonging to the ‘we have won many awards and honours’ category. At the end of the day, these claims cheat and deceive the public into believing that company ‘A’ or product ‘B’ was hailed by some organization for being an exemplary company, exemplary citizen or a good product. When in reality, it is not. Here are two examples: A couple of years ago, a foreign organization was promoting a ‘best brands’ scheme.
What surprised many was that when the best brands in Sri Lanka were declared, some of them were simply not the best. Further investigation revealed that while the ‘best brand’ label is bestowed on a company at a gala ceremony, those selected were asked to pay a ‘fee’ to use that ‘best brand’ tag on their product. Inclusion in a coffee table book on best brands was also based on a ‘generous fee’ to the organization, a well-known gimmick in many countries. Last week a friend related a similar story. Working in the financial services industry, he got a call from a UK-based media group saying the company had been picked as an award winner in a ‘best…” competition.
“I asked them on what basis was the selection made when we hadn’t even applied?” he said and the response was: “Oh we went through your company background (on the web).” What also aroused his suspicions was that the call came on a free Skype line when high-profile organizations like this would normally pick up a phone and call any part of the world irrespective of the cost. Then came the catch; “We are pleased to present your company this award. However to be able to use this ‘tag’ in your own promotional activity, there is a one-off fee of 2000 sterling pounds,” the caller said.
Are these genuine achievements that one can be proud of and boast about? Isn’t it unethical and goes against good governance principles corporate Sri Lanka keeps persistently talking about? Many are the examples of such awards where companies spend millions of rupees, firstly to apply for the award and secondly to fly overseas to receive the award. There is one particular award presentation in Spain where some unknown Maradana/Panchikawatte shops have also been winners. Companies are respected for good, clean, quality products and services. There are also companies in Sri Lanka that do social service silently, sharing their profits with those in need.
There are others where service to humanity is their philosophy in business. These are your winners, the ‘best of the best’ but who also don’t indulge in self-praise or self-glory. Good service is like the response I got from the Abu Dhabi Airports Authority within a month of my complaint about a particular service area at the Abu Dhabi airport. On a stopover in July, I filled one of the customer service forms raising some issues about service and submitted it and forget about it (thereafter). Exactly a month later, with an ‘apology for the delay’ the authority provided a satisfactory answer to my query. Fancy asking the Colombo airport to respond to a customer query or for that matter some Sri Lankan company? There are nice ‘contact us’ or ‘write to us’ on company websites but the response is slow or there is no response at all.
A couple of years ago, a now-defunct telecom company informed the media about being crowned ‘the best HR company in Asia’ at a grand ceremony in Mumbai. Hidden in that accolade was the fact that it was one of the worst HR practitioners, having informed its staff – at that time – to look for new jobs, cutting benefits and looking for a buyer! Following this ‘craze-for-awards’ syndrome for many years, I was drawn to an article appearing in a foreign magazine in January this year by Amir Kassaei, chief creative officer of ad firm DDB Worldwide, whose opening line was “You’ll be seeing less work from DDB at award shows in 2016. Here’s why.” He said: “There is something fundamentally wrong in ad land. Everybody knows it but nobody has been willing to fix it or really even talk about it. Until now.
As of today, we’re more than just talking openly about it, we’re going to walk the talk. And hopefully recalibrate some of the most important values in our industry to show the way forward in terms of how this industry should think, act and create.” He went on to say: “Too many of us in the industry have bought into the idea that winning awards is proof of creative effectiveness, so much so that we’re willing to sacrifice our integrity to get them. And in turn that has lessened the integrity of the awards themselves. So if we believe that we are a great creative or an amazing agency or a great network because we won such and such meaningless award in a sub-sub-sub-category at an advertising awards show where ad people award ad people’s irrelevant solutions for problems that often do not even exist, then we’d better think again.
The article drew bouquets and brickbats and stirred a lot of debate. Was the writer trying to be the ‘nice, honest guy’ in a crowd and pick a few clients with this masterpiece of self-criticism or was it a sincere effort to raise a serious issue? The jury is still out on that discussion but this is one illustration of what a fake world we live in where misleading and payment-driven awards meant to deceive the public are acclaimed in a rugby scrum-like-behaviour of ‘ who is the best of the best’.