Marketing is foundation for industry growth says NIMN President
By Oghale Mafuru
The President of the National Institute of Marketing of Nigeria NIMN, Mr. Idorenyen Enang has charged stakeholders in the Integrated Marketing Communications Industry and members of the academia to return to the fundamentals of knowledge acquisition founded on the basic tenets of marketing.
The NIMN boss gave this charge during the Advertising Industry Colloquium in his keynote address which has the theme: ” Changing Trends in Advertising Education and Practice in the Era of Globalization: The Nigerian Perspective”
Speaking on the need to introduce a competency framework in the marketing and advertising ecosystem, the marketing boss urged stakeholders to change the status quo which focuses on profit making instead of capacity development and knowledge acquisition adding that marketing as the foundation must not be jettisoned in order to develop individuals with the requisite capabilities and skills for effective brand management.
He said: “The era we are today is an era of specialization. Specialization where you have media specialist, creative specialist, experiential *marketing* specialist and all manners of specialists but I make bold to give this analogy; the house is marketing,the *specialties are the rooms* but the foundation remains marketing. *If you kick off your career and you are just a specialist at the expense of marketing fundamentals,* you’re half baked. That is why in this industry, we are having this challenge”.
“Let’s put our focus on the focus, so we don’t have half-baked graduates. Start with the foundation then you can go into any route. Let’s build the curriculum again in such a way that we build solid marketers who will decide where they want to specialize because the trends are telling us now that specialization will not last. Doctors don’t start from being dentists or surgeons” he stressed.
He called for more synergy and integration of professionals and members of the *academia* to ensure that there is a cross pollination of ideas and initiatives geared towards restructuring the curriculum in line with the latest challenges associated with the dearth in marketing knowledge.
“Let us start by coming together to say where are we going? when you build your Advertising curriculum, where do you draw your Advertising *contextual elements* from? What drives your choice of media? It is the positioning of the brand. I am a student of brand management and in the *brand* architecture, the positioning statement drives every other thing. You have advertising, PR …call it what you want but the spoke cannot determine what the hub will do. It is driven by it”.
“The guys we want to build are the focus. We focus on profit as against the people. Let’s change the focus. Let’s look at these students from the lens of posterity, and ask them, what do you want to be? you need to get the foundation. Do we want to build master business leaders or we want to build specialists?Let them decide but let’s give them the foundation and that foundation will only work if we build it from the competency framework. We can have a joint competency framework” he added.
While urging stakeholders to focus on talent development which revolves around standards centred on acquiring critical skills such as customer insight, measurements, digitalization, data interpretation, Mr. Idorenyen Enang called for concerted efforts to mitigate the impact of the rapid technological revolution and disinformation which are major threats to marketing and advertising industry.
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