From Uche Usim, Abuja
President, National Institute of Marketing of Nigeria (NIMN), Dr Idorenyen Enang has advised that Nigerian presidents and governors should employ professional marketers who are strategic brand communicators and specialists as spokespersons.
He gave the advice in Abuja on Thursday at the 2023 NIMN annual conference themed: “The Role of Marketing and Ethics in Nation Building”.
He said: “People are brands and you need people who would not just sell the country or sell the brand but understand the ethos of it. The time is now to bring in more thinking and more veracity to what we’re doing and push it out using the vehicle of the media. You need professionals to craft out a strategy to be able to work in the entire system and implement it. It’s a total picture.
He added that professional marketers were ready, willing and able to partner with the government at all levels to drive growth by designing and properly communicating programmes and reforms in the polity.
“We’re starting a series on NTA, NIMN half-hour for the first 13 weeks and we’re targeting SMEs. They drive the GDP. Our own SMEs may not be near there but we have it. We want to as marketers help provide some insight in governance and thinking”, he said.
Also speaking, the Director General Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria, ARCON, Dr Lekan Fadolapo, said that to strengthen the Nigeria’s marketing economy, an enforceable standard of practice needs be established to provide acceptable industry-wide rule of engagement which will cut across the interests of several sectors in the industry, especially where it is understood that a flop in one sector of marketing ecosystem is a potential catastrophe for the other.
“Our people cannot continue to relegate our value in pursuit of pecuniary gains in a careless and self-deprecating manner. “Unethical marketing practices cannot be permitted to influence or determine the direction of professional objectives. If the marketing industry fails to understand and abide by expected rules, it will allow the dynamics of disreputable objectives to determine her professional values.