President of the National Institute of Marketing of Nigeria (NIMN), Dr. Idorenyen Enang, has said professional marketers are ready, willing and able to partner with government at all levels to drive growth by designing and properly communicating programmes and reforms in the polity.
Speaking in Abuja at its yearly conference with the theme, ‘The Role of Marketing and Ethics in Nation Building’, he urged policymakers to employ professional marketers, who are strategic brand communicators and specialists, as spokespersons.
He said: “As marketers, we hope this will be a great opportunity for us to let the world know that we can do it. A time will come when the president and governors will not be using journalists as spokespersons but as professional brand communicators and specialists.
“We must realise that people are brands and need people that would not just sell the country and the brand alone but fully understand the ethics of it. We need professionals to sit down and craft a strategy to be able to work in the entire system and then implement it using the vehicle of the media to drive it.”
Enang said the conference, which was a gathering of professionals, provided thought leadership on how the nation can be built using marketing and ethics as essential catalysts.
Speaking, the Director-General of the Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria (APCON), Dr. Olalekan Fadolapo, said there was a need for strategies to strengthen the country’s marketing economy.
According to him, an enforceable standard of practice needs to be established to provide acceptable industry-wide rules 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 the marketing ecosystem is a potential catastrophe for the other.
Delivering a paper on ‘The Roles of Marketing Communication and Ethics In Nation Building,’ former APCON chairman and group chief executive officer, Prima Garnet Africa, Lolu Akinwunmi, said that by focusing on sectors such as agriculture, manufacturing, solid minerals, services and investing in infrastructure, education and technology, Nigeria can unlock its economic potential, create employment opportunities and improve the standard of living for its citizens.
