FirstRand Namibia Head of Communications Kirsty Watermeyer has won two honours at the African Marketing Brilliance Awards, including the CMO Award for Strategic Impact and Influence.
Watermeyer also received the Best Internal Campaign award, recognising her work in internal communications and strategic engagement at FirstRand Namibia.
Commenting on the recognition, Watermeyer said effective communication and strategy require more than simply presenting people with information, arguing that narrative and emotion play an important role in influencing how people respond and act.
She drew on Aristotle’s distinction between history, which records what happened, and poetry, which speaks to broader human experience, saying the concept remains relevant to modern strategic communication.
“We spend a great deal of time on the rational architecture of strategy. It’s important, but strategy only becomes real when people move,” Watermeyer said.
“And people rarely move just because they’ve been given more information. They move because something connected with a deeper part of them.”
Watermeyer said her thinking on strategic influence was also shaped by an article on disinformation, which argued that if disinformation were simply a problem of incorrect information, providing better information would be enough to counter it.
Instead, she said, its effectiveness often comes from the use of narrative and emotion, highlighting the importance of understanding how communication influences behaviour.
She said receiving the CMO Award for Strategic Impact and Influence was particularly significant because of the role strategic communication plays in translating organisational objectives into action.
“This is also why, when the evening culminated in the CMO Award for Strategic Impact and Influence, hearing my name called felt particularly meaningful,” Watermeyer said.
The two awards recognise Watermeyer’s work in internal communication as well as her broader strategic influence and impact.
