Philippines — The Bangsamoro Region in the Mindanao area of the Philippines is now adopting the ‘Make It Happen in the Philippines’ (MIH) campaign brand for the region’s overall branding, including its investment promotion activities.
This, after the region, underwent training on the development of an Investment Marketing and Communication Plan. The Philippine Board of Investments (BOI), the country’s lead industry and investments promotion agency conducted the training together with the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao-Ministry of Trade, Investments, and Tourism (BARMM-MTIT) recently in Cotabato City.
The MIH campaign is the Philippines’ newest investment promotion brand campaign launched in November 2020, serving as part of the country’s post-COVID-19 economic recovery strategy. Inspired by the Filipinos’ genuine “make it work/make it happen mindset”, the campaign is designed to generate more investments into the country to grow the country’s economy and increase employment opportunities for the Filipino people.
The campaign targets investors in 18 markets in the Asia-Pacific, Europe, and America and focuses on promoting the country’s key industries as represented in three global value chain clusters that have the most potential for foreign investment namely in industrials, manufacturing, and transport; and technology, media and telecommunication; among others.
As an autonomous region, the BARMM will use Make It Happen in the Philippines – Choose Bangsamoro as its regional brand. The region’s promotion branding injects the Sarimanok into its regional logo, a legendary bird that become a ubiquitous symbol of Maranao art and is unique to the Bangsamoro. It is depicted as a fowl with colourful wings and feathered tail, holding a fish on its beak or talons with the head profusely decorated with leaf, and spiral motifs as a symbol of good fortune.
The regional brand is further broken down into four sub-brandings considering the many inherent competitive advantages that the region can offer. These are location branding that would highlight the region’s tourism and investment opportunities; product branding that would showcase the region as a global Halal hub; people and culture branding that would put in the spotlight the region and its people’s rich culture including its history, language, food, fashion, and celebrities; and political branding that would showcase the Bangsamoro as a reformed, peace-loving, adhering to moral governance region, and a united region speaking in one voice.
The Make It Happen in the Philippines brand meanwhile is infused into the regional brand through the play of colours and texts. Initially, the following are the working draft logos of the MIH-infused BARMM promotion brand.
Rossini J. Alonto-Sinarimbo, director-general of MTIT, said, “We must communicate to the world the potentials of the Bangsamoro region as an investment destination of choice, especially with the improvements in the region. It’s our chance to put our region forward.”
Meanwhile, Maria Veronica Magsino, executive director of BOI, said that the three-day training was proof of a strong partnership between the national and BARMM governments towards harmonising the campaign brand of the Philippines.
“This endeavour is not new to us, since for the past years, we have been encouraging government agencies and the private sector to use MIH as the country’s new investment promotion campaign brand, in their respective investment promotion activities and information materials,” Magsino said.
The multi-day training and planning workshop covered various topics, namely an overview of the MIH brand campaign; the basics of formulating a marketing and communications plan, and the development of information materials and utilisation of promotional tools such as Canva and Hubspot.