Creating added value

NO HOLDS BARRED
Ike Señeres

My guest anchor at the Bears and Bulls Show, Mr. Jose “Tito” Osias has recently launched the Balik Probinsiya Monthly (BPM). Tito was formerly President of Bliss Marketing Corporation (Blissmark), a subsidiary of the Human Settlements Development Corporation where I was formerly an Assistant Vice President and Group Product Manager. Perhaps for him, BPM is just a continuation of our old mission to support the creation and sustainability of livelihood at the community level.

A visionary in his own right, Tito spearheaded the creation and the implementation of the Blissmart concept, a chain of convenience stores located inside the Bliss housing sites, long before the 7-11 Stores came to our shores. As envisioned by him, Blissmart was the front end of a complete marketing system that would have supported the marketing of products coming from the livelihood projects of the housing sites.

I loved my job at Blissmark, having been the leader of a group of Product Managers recruited mostly from San Miguel Corporation, with the mission of developing and marketing products from community based livelihood projects. Much as I loved the job, Tito saw the wisdom of lending my services to support yet another mission, to provide livelihood training to these same community projects. This was the mission of the University of Life. Thus, I became a Fellow of UL.

As far as I know now, there are no government agencies that are carrying on the former missions of Blissmark and UL. I recall that Blissmark was created because the government at that time saw the need for a marketing agency that would support the “housing with livelihood” strategy. It was easy enough to start livelihood projects that were initiated to enable the beneficiaries of the housing projects to pay their mortgages, but the hard part was to market the products that would have sustained the projects.

Looking back in retrospect, what we had was actually a three-in-one strategy, to train first, then stimulate production, and then to finally support the first two components with marketing. Of course, there was financing assistance in between, but even now, that is the easy part.

Moving on to the present times, the “housing with livelihood” strategy is nowhere to be seen, and so is the three-in-one strategy of “training plus manufacturing plus marketing”. The government now has housing programs that have no livelihood components in tandem. The government now also has livelihood programs here and there, but there are no marketing programs that could be seen in tandem.

The challenge then and the challenge now are just the same. The challenge is to create and sustain livelihood at the community level, so that the people in these communities could have the means of income to support their needs. In doing so, the economies of these localities would also grow, ultimately contributing the overall growth of the national economy. This is now the advocacy of Balik Probinsiya, to make the national economy grow, by starting at your own hometown, or your own locality.

Still moving on to the present times, we now have the advantage of using computers as new productivity tools to support the business of creating new value added at the community level. There are actually two aspects of this new advantage. I refer to the use of personal computers for simple office applications, and the use of industrial computers for factory grade automated processing and manufacturing purposes.

In my previous columns, I wrote about soliciting old Pentium class computers and reformatting these with new Linux operating systems. The plan is good, to computerize the operations of the local barangay units. But what is even better I think is to include the computerization of cooperatives within these barangay units, to support both their office and factory needs. In this connection, I am happy to report that we have already established contact with the local Linux users groups who will help us with this project.

I will soon be producing a new “Early Morning Show” (EMS) for the Global News Network, in addition to my “Bears and Bulls Show” (BBS). EMS will be a newsmagazine just like every other morning show, but it will have the unique difference of also reporting the good news coming from the local community level, the good news of new products coming out.

Watch my TV show “Bears & Bulls”, a daily coverage of the Philippine Stock Exchange. 9:00 am to 1:00 pm in Global News Network. Email iseneres@yahoo.com or text +639293605140 for local cable listings.