Using awards for benchmarking performance: The case of ZINARA

by Editorial Team
3 minutes read

For many marketing and public relations professionals winning awards means getting rewarded and recognised for one’s efforts in their trade, but for the Zimbabwe National Road Administration (ZINARA) Corporate Communications and Marketing Executive, Tsungie Matiure-Manyeza and her team it means much more. To them winning an award is more than third party endorsement for themselves and the ZINARA brand. It means a new baseline on which to benchmark future performance.

We reproduce below Matiure-Manyeza’s recent LinkedIn post in which explained how she and her team use awards to benchmark their performance against previous achievements and against the performance of other brands in their league.   

Benchmarking – leveraging parallels to improve personal standards!

Last month, my beloved Team Excellence ZINARA had the spectacular honour to take to the podium, not once, not twice but three times, to receive honours in marketing and public relations at the National Exceptional Awards 2024 by the Marketers Association of Zimbabwe (MAZ).

We celebrate this stellar achievement which, for us, sets our new baseline, and we are now working towards even greater.

In my view, awards platforms are benchmarking platforms where greats are not only celebrated, but exceptional standards are illuminated for the purposes of improving overall industry or sector performance.

We submitted a total of seven project profiles for the awards and clinched only three – less than 50 percent? Well, what it has made of us is unquantifiable.   Success is now what you achieve but who you become while working towards the achievement!

As we prepared our submissions we knew we were trying our hand against giants, but this did not hold us back, because we have come to understand that we move up by looking up. We set our standards based not only on our former self, but on the greats in the marketplace. We benchmark!

Over the past year, my team and I have been benchmarking in three ways

Internal benchmarking

We are part of a high performance organisation, from the board to the shop floor – ours is a high performance team. As such, we continually glean on the ways of working of our peers to inspire how we too develop as individuals and as a team. To this end, we were excited to take home the PR Practitioner of the Year award by yours truly.

Competitive benchmarking

We put ourselves side by side with the greats in our sector. We are learning from both the good and not so great to inspire how we can improve. We also initiate peer reviews for our work and we enjoy the collaboration in our sector, and especially in our parent Ministry. We walked away with the Excellence in Public Sector Marketing of the Year gong!

Strategic benchmarking

For me this has always been the game changer throughout my career – benchmarking with other sectors and industries. I have observed that there are some sectors that excel in some areas and by benchmarking against these, we peg our standards higher and improve as we try to match.  We were, therefore, excited to bag the Gold Award for Best Radio Informercial of the year in a category that was dominated by private sector players in retail, banking and insurance sectors among others.

Benchmarking is not a competitive act, but a self-development activity for self-improvement. It is not only about observing and appreciating the higher standards, but acting on them.

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