Down-to-earth Marketing announces ideation training programme
Down-to-earth Marketing, a training firm for marketing professionals, has announced a training programme for experiential marketing practitioners. The innovative ideation programme is designed to provide excellence-templates that are purpose-built for experiential marketers, especially those saddled with the day-to-day task of generating fresh ideas or new ways of executing old ideas.
It is scheduled to hold in Ikeja, Lagos on July 16 with no less than 30 delegates in the methodical approach to innovation.
Speaking on the forthcoming training, Ogechi Ikemefuna, Training Manager at Down-to-earth Marketing, pointed out that while many business leaders were very clear about the role innovation plays in creating and sustaining competitive advantage, they often lacked the means to empower their teams with the methodologies to deliver innovation in the workplace.
“Although there’s a common approach to the development of all innovation, there are sector-specific templates that, once learnt, would equip practitioners to become ideas machines, regardless of the brief at hand, and in record time too. An excellence-template is not a red-tape rule. It is in fact the opposite. It seeks to disrupt bureaucracy and, in its place, install a way of solving problems that’s faster and more cost-effective.
“ If a company, for instance, is busy celebrating 100% sales growth, same company could have been celebrating 400% sales growth, if only they’d allowed their excellence-templates to run full course. It is hoped that come July 16, this most promising sector of marketing would start witnessing an era of customised learning modules for innovative challenges in the experiential marketing world,” she explained.
In the same vein, the CEO of Aster Integrated Marketing, Tolulope Medebem, lauded the learning initiative, saying that there was urgent need for more capacity development programmes in the experiential sector, as opposed to the tendency to recycle great hands over and over.
Boye Adefila, a marketing coach based in Lagos, explained that the issue of innovation was a two-pronged challenge.
“Take experiential marketing for example, a sector yearning to leverage its greatest potentials; innovation is under extreme pressure partly because clients give impossible deadlines to agencies and partly because agency leaders are unaware of the urgent need to teach innovation techniques to their teams.
“It is indeed a fact that marketing agencies sometimes outsource the idea generation element of their experiential/activation briefs to experts, who may or may not meet the impossible deadlines available to the agencies. The result is often a repetition of the last ‘wow’, again and again,” he explained.
Continuing, Mr. Adefila said: “It is okay to outsource, either because one does not have the competencies in-house or one desires to add to the overall basket of excellence. But I am privy to the downright horrible timelines that many activation firms are given by their clients to generate great ideas, source production quotes and produce roll-out plans for pan Nigerian campaigns, sometimes within 24 hrs. And it can be crazy.”
Corroborating the foregoing views, Former Snr. Manager (Consumer Segments) MTN Nigeria and Group Business Director at SPV Nigeria Limited, Saidat Lawan-Mohammed, said: “Only purpose-built training interventions will address purpose-built industry challenges.”
Chief Eshiet Essien, managing director of Brand Believers Limited and African Wild Dogs, said: “New knowledge is critical to competitive edge and so I will be at this training with three of my managers.”
Also Audu Mohammed, a fresh graduate of marketing, said, “I would love to acquire knowledge in special areas of my choice,” noting that the training programmes he had always ran into were largely of generic nature.
All the experts agreed that special training on ideation with excellence-template was the only way for innovation to thrive and thrive constantly to sustain agencies’ competitive advantage?
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