Is ghacem a private company

THE CEMENT NUMBER GAME Introduction For forty years GHACEM (formerly Ghana Cement Works) was the only company in Ghana involved in the production cement for the West African country’s market. But this is no more the case as the company now faces competition from others, some of whom are using the mass media to propagate a well-crafted advertising message with a big idea: numbers! Cements come in grades of 32.5, 42.5 and 52.5 (See Table 1 for the Cement Classification Grades). These numbers depict the ‘standard strength’, which is the minimum strength a concrete-mix prepared using the cement achieves in 28 days. Each grade is further differentiated based on what is technically referred to as ‘early strength’, which is the strength the cement’s concrete mix achieves a period of 2 days or 7 days. These time periods are represented by R (rapid) and N (normal) respectively. And so there are ‘N’ and ‘R’ versions of each grade. For example, for grade 32.5, there exist 32.5N and 32.5R. The ‘R’ and ‘N’ labels can further be differentiated with the following illustration - a 32.5R grade cement achieves an ‘early strength’ of 10MPa in 2 days, while a 32.5N grade cement achieves the same ‘early strength’ in 7 days. Both grades (32.5N and 32.5R) however will end up with the equal standard strength of 32.5. Table 1 captures the various grades of cement and their “early” and “standard” strengths. Obviously, numbers means a lot when it comes to cement. The issue of Numbers is central to the one question that kept bothering Benny Ashun, the Head of Sales and Distribution at GHACEM, all weekend: “what is the best way to respond to competitor’s tactics of portraying value via the number game?” This question has brought Benny to the office at 6:35 am, an hour earlier than usual. Good for him he doesn’t have to drive through heavy traffic to work as many others in the capital do all the time. He lives just five miles away from the office located in the premier and major port enclave of the country. Benny turns the pages of the 149 page report from Origin 8, the company’s marketing communications agency. The agency was contracted two years earlier to collect information from key markets that would provide insight into customer behavior including purchase decisions. Of a particular interest to GHACEM was what the cement class numbers or grades meant to the consumer. Cement class numbers is of interest to GHACEM because of what has become known in the industry as the “number game”. As Benny puts it, “The number game is being sold as a competitive advantage, making people aware of a certain number that is supposed to suggest quality. Yes! So the number game is up and competitors use it to their advantage saying they sell a certain 42 for the same price as 32, so why don’t you buy my 42 instead of buying someone else’s 32”.