Sponsored Content: South Africans love an underdog. It’s wonderful to see how one of us — through grit, commitment and passion — rises to do something extraordinary.
When it comes to endorsements, brands tend to focus energies upon either signing entertainment or sports celebrities or finding “everyday” heroes: the businesswoman still finding time to help her kids with their homework after work, the son who achieves professional success and still come home to gives back to his parents. Both these strategies, as messages containing a brand’s ethos and as great storytelling vehicles, may work very well.
Straddles the two
But, when you find a person whose story straddles the two — between celebrity and everyday — it creates a storyline that may feel both more substantial and more hopeful.
Recent examples of such tales that have been translated successfully into pieces of communication include the story of Lawrence Anthony (The Elephant Whisperer) and that of Prof Lerothodi Lapula Leeuw, a boy who grew up in the Kalahari but would eventually become an expert in his chosen field of astrophysics.
Leeuw has studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was a research fellow at the NASA Ames Research Center. He currently serves as a professor at Unisa in astrophysics and interdisciplinary research. His story is told in a an advert for Profmed, a restricted medical aid scheme that is open only to graduate professionals.
“Answer to a greater calling”
The ad shows a boy cycling to school on his bike in the darkness of early morning, amazed at and fascinated by the milky way under which he rides. Those who strive for the stars, the ad tells viewers, seldom touch them, but Leeuw reached for the stars anyway, and succeeded in realising his dream of working at space agency NASA.
Profmed offers healthcare support to “those who answer to a greater calling” — a call to action for graduate professionals who have obtained a minimum four-year degree or its equivalent – to follow Leeuw’s in life and in selecting a healthcare partner.
Even when it seems the odds are stacked against us, Leeuw’s story should inspire fellow South Africans to answer our own calling.
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