NIMN Celebrate Heroes

By Eunice Nze-Peters

As a marketing tool, printed calendars can often get overlooked in today’s sea of technology, especially smartphones and other devices that are able to track important work meetings, appointments, birthdays, travelling and wedding anniversaries with ease. These days, gadget users know what day it is and what’s happening by simply taking the phone out of one’s pocket and checking out things.

Typical, most print calendars are made of twelve pages that are uniquely and creatively designed to grab the attention of viewers. People are more willing to place items on their desks or walls if they beautify their surroundings. Ensuring that the calendars are well designed and as beautiful as possible to make clients want to have a copy without the maker insisting to give it to people.

Since calendars are supposed to last at least a year, the sponsor must ensure that high quality material is used. It is important that the quality be as durable and vibrant as possible. Low quality calendars are easily discarded since no one wants to be associated with inferior products. The print production quality must be a fit for the sponsoring brand.

Well produced calendar usually hangs at positions that easily catches eye contacts constantly and continuously for 365 days.

Desk calendars come in handy especially when you want customers to remember your brand name, contacts, and location. They assist your audience to keep track of important dates, events, appointments and meetings. A good calendar should always have your company logo visible, usually at the top, to ensure customers are able to identify with you. Depending on your printing agency, desktop calendars can be imprinted in multiple colors. They can also be engraved with gold-imprint and shaped to meet specifications.

Calendars are also effective in encouraging referrals as customers can easily direct other clients to business. Information will always be with them and they can easily answer questions regarding products without hesitation.

Calendar also helps to show both your customers and employees how much you value them. They emphasize that their loyalty to your company is what makes your business flourish. Sharing this handy marketing tool keeps your company name and product on their mind all year round.

The National Institute of Marketing of Nigeria (NIMN) 2015 calendar speaks volumes in that it is the body for professionals, practitioners, academia and students of marketing. Members are engaged in everyday marketing and related fields as the body clearly understands the role a calendar plays in keeping the brand identity and history of the brand with its wide and varied audience to retain top-of-the-mind awareness.

NIMN did a good job in the choice of theme, which presents a very interesting aspect of its history and it also a good job of its logo and colour and other compulsory inclusions. The array of Nigerian marketing pioneers and divers background is a compendium on just twelve pages but the narratives in full letters will be enough on “The history and people that planted and watered Nigeria marketing”, indeed they are the heroes of Nigeria marketing.

Any day this calendar is a collectors’ item: From the late Chief Joseph Adeoye and Late Mike Agbakoba who are distinguished ‘Unilever school of marketing’, titanic icons and indeed proud Nigerian exports to Asia at different times before their translation to greater glory.

Sylvester Moemeke, a living legend, that covers the agency side of brand marketing and communication, being the first chairman and managing director of Lintas in Nigeria, and also in general manager in Ghana. Moemeke was also the first chairman of advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria, APCON and founding member of News Agency of Nigeria, NAN.

From the client side of marketing, corporate management and governance is the doyen of marketer from both divide is the quintessential, quiet, urbane and highly cultured Felix Ohiwerei, who combined the three, erstwhile different offices of Chairman, managing director and chief executive of Nigerian Breweries Plc.

Others include Micheal Okereke of UACN; Professor Julius Onah, the first Nigeria professor of marketing and first vice chancellor of Enugu State University; Dr. Udo Udoaka, the director general of the Centre for Management Development; Olaniyi Yussuf, Dr. Gabriel Soyoye of GlaxoSmithKline; Babatunde Stephen, the pioneer president of Advertiser’s Association of Nigeria, ADVAN; Sedun Abimbola, the first ever secretary of NIMN and marketing director of UnileverNigeria and finally, the only woman in this edition, Mrs. Oreagba Tamurat Olabisi who was the marketing director of Tate&Lyle, the sugar company.

What a sweet memory, history, rich legacy and inheritance, hidden before now but made open by the current administration of NIMN.

Although, the glossy paper used for the production of this calender is not crisp, it is considerably acceptable for a small, growing institute that is just getting a proper foothold.

Despite this wonderful concept, the institute has not achieved much of this aim due to the fact that the production was marred by some production ‘devils’.

In terms of illustration, the calendar has no appeal to the sense of vision. This, to a large extent weakened the overall aesthetics of the calendar. For example, the photographs were blurred; some were overblown while several others are very old monochrome pictures.

There were also some printing inconsistencies at the back of the calendar which comes in the form of spill over. These reduced the overall beauty of this historical masterpiece. The printer of this calendar is probably aware of the faults hence the production company are not proud to display their name as the printer of this marketing tool.

In all, it is a good historical material but definitely not a marketing tool.

Even though technology is drastically changing the way we use printed calendars, the beauty of having an ‘old-school’ calendar that you can hold is that it can be personalised in a way that makes it an effective marketing tool.