The National President of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, Ghana (CIMG), Dr. Shola Safo-Duodu, has charged marketers to adopt and adjust to modern trends in technology in order to ensure survival of their companies.
Speaking at the 26th CIMG awards themed ‘The Future of Marketing: Evolve or Die’, Dr. Shola cautioned companies to learn from the failure of some top multinational organisations to be innovative in their products, which led to a significant fall of their market share.
“Evidence abounds of how great international companies that refused to see ahead and innovate suffered severely for it. We can remember former household names like Kodak, Xerox, Motorola, IBM and Olivetti. These are names and products that we no longer hear about or see. What went wrong?
“For Kodak and the like, they severely missed out on innovating or evolving with new technologies and refused to build any critical new communication technologies into their organisation. Kodak not only missed the boat on the digital revolution but also never capitalised on the very digital camera technology it helped to create. It also misunderstood the new ways consumers wanted to interact with their photos, the technology involved, and the market forces surrounding them,” she said.
She warned that with the advent of social media, customers now have more access to information about products than any other period in history — and as such, bad reports about a product can quickly spread and collapse a company; hence marketers must be wary about this development and always ensure customers are satisfied.
“Internet users are creating content and sharing with others, allowing for unprecedented transfers of information and knowledge. With the explosion of social media, a blog or video created by a dissatisfied customer can become viral in a matter of hours. A viral video can mount an army of criticism and online hate for a product, and even a company,” she added.
Dr. Shola therefore cautioned marketers to keep pace with the changing trends of technology and develop quality customer relations in order to survive the technological storm that is taking place worldwide.
She further used the opportunity to announce that the CIMG awards scheme has introduced two new awards: the E-Commerce Organisation of the Year and Emerging Digital Media Organisation, in a bid to take care of emerging trends within the industrial environment.
The CIMG introduced the National Marketing Awards in 1989 with a mission to deepen the marketing profession’s interest and that of its members, and to ensure the institute impacts positively in the performance of its legitimate role in society and the economy.
The awards’ objectives are to create awareness for the marketing concept and its importance for the success of businesses, to promote high professional standards, and to encourage excellence among marketing practitioners so as to stimulate healthy competition among organisations; and, above all, to ensure improved quality of products and services being offered by businesses.
Mr. Alhassan Andani, Managing Director, Stanbic Bank, was adjudged Marketing Man of the Year, and Mrs. Lucy Quist, Managing Director, Airtel Ghana, won the Marketing Woman of the Year award.