By Chinelo Obogo
The immediate past President of the National Institute of Marketing of Nigeria (NIMN), Idy Enang, has attributed the collapse of many businesses to a lack of understanding of basic marketing.
Speaking to journalists in Lagos, Enang, a business coach and a former top executive of Samsung and L’Oreal Group, said that for a business to be sustainable, marketing must be at its center. He also said that while large corporations integrate Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) systems into their operations, many small and medium enterprises (SMEs) neglect them.
“Marketing drives business. Marketing is business, and business is marketing. If you want a sustainable enterprise, marketing is the soul of it. It should ensure people grasp the connection between their offerings and market needs.
“ESG is the current idea, concept for sustainability and leveraging it and speaking about it, letting companies, organisations know that today’s consumers, today’s business requires you to be sensitive to the environment, understanding that you don’t just do what you want to do and how you want to do it but you must also understand the endemic consequences. SMEs today care less. Big organisations understand this and they are working on that footprint. If you are not careful, people would not live that dream and you wouldn’t have businesses in the years to come.”
Enang said that many SMEs are “accidental” and are founded without a clear strategy and also fail to integrate marketing in their operations.
“When you ask an SME why they’re in business or what problem they aim to solve, many can’t answer. These are fundamental marketing questions. Also there is the lack of understanding of basic marketing. Why are you in business? What do you want to sell, what is the opportunity? What is the value at stake? These are necessary questions you must answer but without these, once you get into the poor, you would sink. Businesses are sinking today. It is not the tax reform that is going to help them. Everybody thinks it is the tax reform. What will help them is knowledge,” he stated.
Enang stated that every industry is confronted with its own challenge and advised that to avoid sinking, SMEs must seek knowledge an innovation. “What is going to build a sustainable pathway for businesses is knowledge. So if you want to get into a space, you need to have acquired something that allows you in there to be able to do it. As you move you begin to learn. It is a ripple effect and it begins to open up,” he advised.
He then cautioned those practising as marketers without the requisite certification, saying the law will soon catch up on them. “There are many people out there that are brand managers, marketing managers, marketing directors. It is a matter that you want to ask yourself, we pursued this in a way through advocacy, we would pursue it through some other means but there will come a time when the rule of law will truly take precedence in our life,” he said
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