John Ajayi is Publisher/Chief Executive, MARKETING EDGE, a magazine with a bias for integrated marketing communication and other allied sectors. In this interview with Okwy Iroegbu-Chikezie he speaks on the prospects and opportunities on offer for businesses in the nation’s marketing ecosystem and beyond. Excerpts:
Ideology behind the marketing summit and awards
Right from when we started the MARKETING EDGE magazine initiative, we said to ourselves why are we going into the publication of this special publication? Why are we involved in this thankless job of brand journalism? But we realised that marketing and advertising reportage in Nigeria had been at a very low and infant stage in Nigerian journalism.
When we pioneered this new initiative in brand journalism, we told ourselves what we want to do is to promote the brand idea. The MARKETING EDGE initiative has always been to promote the brand idea. So, in 10 years, we promoted the brand idea through regular publication of MARKETING EDGE as a leading national marketing magazine in Nigeria.
We are forever paranoid, guiding and jealously guarding our market leadership. And to set us apart from the pack of competitors; we created a very robust CSR initiative in the form of MARKETING EDGE National Marketing Summit and Brand & Advertising Awards of Excellence.
The National Marketing Summit, like I said, is aimed at bringing together all players in the Integrated Marketing Communications for contemporary conversation at regular intervals on contemporary challenges that they may be facing in whatever form. As for the Brand & Advertising Awards of Excellence, we initiated this as an extension, a brand extension of the publication initiative. It is like a brand extension in celebrating the brands, identifying the players, who are the brains behind the brands, which brands are market makers, and of course, we said that it is not enough to just write stories about brands, let us appreciate the brands that are performing, let us also appreciate and celebrate the brains. It is an entire gamut because we are looking at the totality; the entirety of those and what is involved in the business of brand management and the management of brand business.
We set up this award initiative to reward, to celebrate, to appreciate excellence in the management of brand business and the business of brand management; that is very fundamental.
Expectations for 2018 edition of the National Marketing Summit and Awards
As we make preparations for the 6th edition of the National Marketing Stakeholders Summit and Brand & Advertising Awards of Excellence, stakeholders in the integrated marketing communications in Nigeria should expect a superlative, eventful and far enriching marketing activities like never before. We intend to organise a very robust marketing summit that will ignite fresh conversation on contemporary marketing issues that have become very latent in terms of marketing management and the management of marketing business.
The theme for this year’s summit, ‘Marketing Paradigms in the Age of Digitalisation’ is a theme that is so dear to our hearts; it is a theme that is so fundamentally germane to current market challenges and all the tasks that presently confront marketing executives and CEOs.
Challenges besetting manufacturers and brand owners
This forum is going to provide the platform for the rubbing of minds; it is going to provide a platform for possible solutions that can enable the brand owners to have a meeting point with the consumers so that business can be more mutually rewarding both to the brand owners and to the consumers and, at the end of the day, it becomes a win-win game.
Choice of theme
Before I go to that, let me further say that as an addition to the award initiative and the marketing summit, MARKETING EDGE will soon debut on TV. We are going to have a weekly half hour programme on Television Continental (TVC) any moment from now as part of our efforts to continue to initiate, innovate, invent, re-invent for people and players involved in integrated marketing services. The half hour programme on TV is going to be very loaded. It is going to be a potpourri of what you see in the hard copy edition of MARKETING EDGE. It promises to be very unique, it promises to be very outstanding, it promises to be very astonishing in terms of content quality and production.
Now, on the topic, ‘Marketing Paradigm in the Age of Digitalisation’ is a highly innovative topic that deserves a special attention and focus. It is timely and contemporarily debatable and highly conversational.
In those days, we used to have a sellers’ market; a sellers’ market used to be where the product owner comes to the market with any kind of goods whether good or bad; good quality or low quality, and they offered them to the consumers who, of course, had very few choices. The choices available to consumers in the age of sellers’ market were few and far between; but as we progress, the market, as you know, is now very dynamic.
As society evolves, we have graduated to the buyers’ market. In the age of the buyers’ market, there are a plethora of products, brands that are there calling for consumers’ attention and patronage.
Name any market segment; be it toothpaste, seasoning, beer, is it lager, or stout, the consumers have choices; they have a thousand and one choices. So, the owners of the brands cannot just come and thrust on the consumer anyhow or any me-too product.
There is now a challenge for brand owners to get the right consumer attention to their brands.
It has become the age of competition, the age of real business, the age of real marketing and to actually achieve results, having exercised, having practicalised, having managed and experimented with different marketing approaches, marketing strategies, deploying the different elements in the mix, competition continues to grow in a very geometric way in the marketplace.
As competition grows, there comes with it a lot of dynamics; it is these dynamics that is impacting and affecting the achievement of marketing objectives of most marketing and corporate communications.
The need has actually arisen for the marketing companies, client companies to up their games in different endeavors and, of course, these changes are happening simultaneously about the time that getting the consumer out there is becoming more and more difficult.
You need to know where to track them to; you need to know their lifestyles, you need to know what determines their choices, what is their taste, then what music do they like to listen to, what language do you think they like to speak, what is the best language you can use to communicate with them, what medium, what channel, what time, etc.
Today, if you look at Nigeria, the country is a high tele-density population; even though we may not have achieved 100 percent tele-density, you will agree with me that more Nigerians are with mobile handsets and these gadgets, the way they are produced, they provide serious engagements for the average phone user; and again, there are a lot of communication messages that you can achieve with less amount of money through the deployment of the social media and especially through the phones.
So, brand owners are beginning to look at different opportunities, different avenues, and different platforms to get consumer engagement. It is engagement, this time around; it is no longer a tyrannical monologue market situation. Brands are beginning to engage in constant dialogue, constant engagement, and constant involvement with the consumers.
