Marketing and Communications practitioners in Nigeria have been advised on the need to improve the practice and nurture future generations of practitioners by sharing their experiences and documenting them in forms that will be available to the general public.
Ikem Okuhu, brand analyst and publisher of the marketing news portal, BRANDish, said the trend of treating knowledge like trade secrets by most industry leaders has lingered for so long and has denied the wider marketplace, the wealth of knowledge and history required for enhanced understanding of the immense progress being made daily in the country’s marketing environment.
Okuhu, who, on November 26, 2019, will be presenting to the public, his book titled; PITCH: Debunking Marketing’s Strongest Myths at the Chartered Institute of Bankers auditorium, Victoria Island, Lagos, lamented the situation whereby most of the knowledge acquired by Nigerians are drawn from foreign literature, wondering why the many successful marketing activities are not being properly documented, especially in book forms for the benefit of everyone.
“Researching the Nigerian marketing and marketing communications environment is every researchers’ nightmare. Literature here is very scanty and when you find some, they are largely academic with most important case studies that enhance proximity and understanding missing. In my journey in the industry, I have read a lot of books on brands and marketing and I always found some sort of dissonance in most of the case studies and examples used to drive home points by these authors. These case studies and examples are always about companies and individuals that are not Nigerians. I therefore wondered why we shouldn’t have well-written books that discuss brands and marketing with Nigerian examples and cases?”
Nigerian marketing and communications professionals, Okuhu said, are some of the most brilliant in the world, but regretted the situation where brilliant ideas are archived in PowerPoint slides and left, hidden from those who need to make use of them.
“Nigerian students and scholars of marketing need to read more about Nigerian marketing stories and the journey of Nigerian brands same way we have spent all our years reading about the likes of Apple, HP, General Motors, General Electric, Samsung, Virgin Atlantic, IBM and so many others. While we may have gaps in inventiveness, I think the major difference between Nigerian brands and those in those other countries lie in the stories and literature the practitioners in those countries write about them,” he stated.
He said that although his new book has a global perspective, a lot of effort was made to document and highlight the journey of many indigenous brands and business leaders in such a way as to create historical perspectives about what has been done well as well as the challenges a number of them have faced.
