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Bashco Trading Company
year or two, we have taken a very aggres-
sive move in the Montego Bay market;
we put a brand new store on Barnett St.
and recently renovated and upgraded
our Church St. location. In Mandeville, we
have done major renovations and we have
opened up a second floor in the Man-
deville store.Within the last six months,
we have upgraded our downtown store,
called Bashco WOW– it’s a kind of com-
missary/deli, and we’re offering pizza and
sandwiches and salads. So, it caters to the
working environment in downtown Kings-
ton and that has been doing extremely
well. In the last two years, across seven of
our stores, we have added grocery items,
so we are becoming like a one-stop-shop
in a lot of our locations.”
Omar Azan, Bashco’s Marketing and Pub-
lic Relations Manager, stresses that listen-
ing to the public is a key part of its mar-
keting strategy. “We host these customer
appreciation and customer interaction
events,” he says. “We’re listening: ‘What are
you looking for? What do you want?’
We do that across all of our locations during
the course of the year.”
Bashco also maintains a very pervasive
media presence –on TV, radio, and the inter-
net. “We have a very, very strong television
presence, where we have a thirty-minute in-
fomercial – the first one of its kind in Jamai-
ca - where we mix interesting content with
entertainment, bringing light to the new
products and services available, and some of
the new changes and developments at the
store level,” says Omar.
“In addition, we have a very strong audio
presence on the most popular radio station
in Jamaica,” he continues. “In Jamaica, radio
advertising is still very strong, because we
have an active music scene. So, our radio ad-
vertising has a lot of musical influence. The
dance hall genre is very popular and Bashco
has aligned itself with that culture point, so
most of our radio and television advertising
appeals to that market because it also turns
out to be our target niche, as well. Addition-
ally, we do a lot of social media marketing;
our social media presence is very active and