NIMN inducts new Fellows, tasks members on tech optimization
By Felicia Nwosu
The National Institute of Marketing of Nigeria (NIMN) has held its 2022 annual marketing conference. The event also witnessed the induction of new members as Fellows to boost the institute’s professional cadre. The new inductees include Angela Makinwa, Steve Babaeko, Benita Adelore, and Seleem Adegunwa amongst others.
Adoption of technology into key areas of practice by members formed the fulcrum of this year’s conference which featured the theme: “Driving Business Sustainability in the Age of Data and Tech”.
The epochal event brought together the who’s who in Nigeria’s Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) ecosystem and featured a hybrid of astute professionals as speakers and panelists.
Kolawole Oyeyemi, Chief Executive Officer of Axiom Intel Limited and the keynote speaker, who dwelled extensively on the sub-theme: “Disruptive Marketing”, noted that many industries have been technologically disrupted, thereby rendering the old ways of doing things redundant and cumbersome.
Mr. Oyeyemi said sustainability in a VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity) world needs new ideas especially in a world where data is humongous and technology is aggressively disruptive. He, therefore, challenged marketers to embrace contemporary business with fresh technological concepts for continuous improvement in order not to be swept away by disruption. He cited an example from Australian economist Joseph Sean-Peter way back in 1949.
“Mainstream economic thinking that those displaced by technological advancement will have newer opportunities in the new jobs that would be created by the obstructive technology has, unfortunately, not often been the case. Many jobs and many industries have been made extinct by technology and, with their extinction, many once upon a time successful companies and valuable talents are gone.
“There is no better time in history than now, with the explosion in data and very aggressively disruptive technology, to discuss the issue of business sustainability. Not from the green plant perspective, which is what many people want to hear, but from what I will call business fundamentals when it comes to business performance and sustainability,” he said.
The marketing guru also cited data revealing the future growth status of the global technological advancement journey, which stated that in 2012, the whole world will change in ten years more than it has changed in a hundred years previous.
“According to the World Economic Forum, the amount of data in the world was estimated to be 44 zettabytes, at the dawn of the year 2020. A zettabyte for those of us who don’t know is 1,000 bytes to the 7th power. This means one zettabyte has twenty-one zeros behind it. This number came from a summation of the data generated by social media sites, financial institutions, medical facilities, shopping platforms and other several online activities.
“At the beginning of 2020, according to the World Economic Forum, the number of bytes in the digital universe was 40 times bigger or worse than the number of stars in the observable universe. By 2025, the amount of data that will be generated each day will get up to 463 exabyte globally. An exabyte is 1000 bytes to the 6th power,” the data revealed.
The conference also featured sessions with the themes: “Future of Marketing in a Tech-Driven World” and “Disruptive Marketing” where panelists shared their thoughts on how their brands have been able to disrupt through technology and data, especially during the heat of the pandemic.
Some of the discussants noted that disruption can be both incremental and fundamental depending on the mode of response to the product landscape, while stressing the need to refocus for survival in the face of data with technological thinking. This, they suggested, is by approaching growth through a continuous improvement in operation with the application of technology, data intelligence aimed at achieving a deliberate excellent customer service. The marketing experts urged brands to disrupt the passion point of consumers to help set their brands apart.
The conference came to a climax with the induction of new members as Fellows into the prestigious marketing circle.
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