This was South Africa’s very first campaign where everything was translated into eleven official languages! It was 1994, and our newly minted democracy had respect for minority groups built into its constitution. It was quite a challenge finding translators for some of the languages, and dissent was rife amongst them as to who was translating correctly, since several of the languages had never been formalised in writing. There were some wild claims as to what other translators were actually saying due to rivalry between different cultural groups. Some of the translators claimed that others had said: “blow you nose in your paraffin bottle” instead of “place it safely on a high shelf”: “stir your cap on” instead of “twist the cap on”: “throw your paraffin bottle on the floor” instead of “put your paraffin bottle on a flat surface.”
Educating Senior Management: The Benefits of Benevolence
The true cost and suffering caused by using paraffin as a domestic fuel cannot be quantified. If this was a culture more inclined to litigation (such as the USA) and the South African oil industry had to be held accountable by genuinely recompensing citizens for the damage caused by distributing its products with hitherto little concern for public safety, it would be bankrupt.
Original methods were developed whereby promotional resources integrated the aims and principles into the campaign’s execution. Ideally these should be environmentally friendly, reusable and recyclable; useful enough not to be thrown away and designed specifically to be manufactured by the disadvantaged communities who are the ultimate ‘target market’. They should focus less on marketing hype and more on important messages. In this case they revolved around well-researched safety information that had never been exposed or even acknowledged before. The Red Cross Children’s Hospital had for some 30 years been unsuccessfully pressurising the oil industry to take responsibility for the truly appalling consequences of respiratory disease, accidental ingestion and devastating fires associated with the domestic use of paraffin.
