Former Managing Director of Guinness Nigeria Plc, Sheni Adetu, has challenged marketing professionals in the country on the need to explore inherent advantages in the present world of digital technology to positively influence the course of their businesses and show leadership in their professional calling.

Adetu, Founder/Group CEO, Algorithm Media Limited also enjoined marketing professionals to re-direct their focus on the things they could change rather than playing the blame game and focusing on things they could not change, stressing that only by so doing could they become true leaders in their chosen carriers.

Appearing as guest speaker recently at the National Institute of Marketing of Nigeria (NIMN) Fellows’ Dinner and Awards Night event held at Radisson Blu Hotels on Isaac John Street, Ikeja, Lagos, the former Guinness boss observed that the current ways of doing things as marketers do not suffice in the new world and, to that extent, today’s marketers needed to imbibe more of the new technology in order to survive.

Speaking on the events theme “The Future of Marketing in a Technology Driven World”, the erudite marketer and management expert observed that two things were going to define the future of marketing anywhere in the world, Nigeria inclusive, which includes technology and leadership.

“Contemporary marketing challenges marketers about the things they need to be aware of in terms of technology and about how technology is shaping the world of marketing and the things they need to imbibe as leaders of marketing in Nigeria.

“What technology will do for us is to take out all the wastages, inefficiencies in the way we operate manually, so we can convert our manual capacity and resources into other things. We need technology to advance things that don’t need men to do,” he said.

He added: “What Nigeria needs to do to grow up to 30 to 40 percent in terms of productivity is to identify the areas where truly, tools of technology such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Visual Reality (VR) can operate in place of humans to drive leadership that would cause the transformation that we need for Nigeria.

“In terms of leadership, one of the things we said they should focus on is what they can change, because a lot of times people tend to play the blame game and focus on things that are outside of their control. And the risk of doing that is that you will leave the things that you can change and shape uncatered for and untouched,” he noted.

He concluded: “So let us focus on things we can change. We are marketers. How do we win the heart and minds of consumers? How do we create consumer connection? How do we use new technology like AI, VR and so on to create connection with the consumer, instead of complaining that oh, the weather is bad?”

The agency boss who took critical assessment of unfolding trends in the field of marketing, took the huge audience at the event through the several stages of evolution of the marketing profession in Nigeria, cutting across the stages of production through to sales concept era when marketers had to push aggressively hard to sell, followed by the era of real marketing exemplified by the branding around the 1950s, and down to the social era stages when companies began to invest in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).

He noted that since the CSR era the world had since gone ahead to witness an era of customer relations and now at the centre of digitalisation.

“Less is small; doing fewer things will give you more impact. Lots of time we tend to overlook too many things. Measure yourself against the best. There is no growth without ambition. Intuition is something as good as your insight. You need to trust your instinct,” he emphasised.