At par with the rest of the world the marketing profession in Kenya has reached a defining moment and the profession needs to up its game to keep pace with the mindboggling changes that are the result of a technological boom affecting all areas of business .
The role of the marketer has become complex in that he requires additional core skills to be able to deliver as the principle business engineer in charge of business development and growth . The training and induction of a marketer into the profession will have to change .
This will be achieved by interplay of the marketing profession , the academia and professional associations . Working in tandem the named institutions will have to prepare the marketer needed to play a pivotal role in business and the country .
The marketing fraternity in Kenya had a strong and focused association in the eighties and nineties . This unfortunately disintegrated mainly due to fragmentation of the association caused by a leadership vacuum that allowed the capture of the association by non-marketers .
It is a well-known dictum that any organization rises or falls due to leadership and the error committed then was that the association was unable to attract the right caliber of leadership because the organization had progressively become political . Success always attracts political opportunists .
Since the running of the association was and still is on a voluntary basis , the able professionals with the requisite qualifications and experience were disillusioned by the untidy politics and were unwilling to offer their talent , services and time .
What we deem as the most important task that the profession needs to do is to attract back a team of dedicated leaders with a vision to steer the profession back on track . The leader ’ s first responsibility is to define reality and the reality is that the marketing profession in Kenya is stagnant and rudderless .
The mettle of the leader is defined by tough times and the road ahead is both exciting and tough because it will be a journey to reclaim the marketing profession and place it at par with other professional associations that have a national voice and presence .
The next decade is going to be a very exciting one for marketers as they learn and invent new ways to connect with the customer and to navigate the technological advancement which is moving at warp speed and before one can properly master a new tech skill it is obsolete .
The team needs to be brutally honest in asking the hard question of what is not working and why it is not working . They will need a leader ’ s vision for the profession as it has suffered greatly for lack of one . Here we are not referring to the theoretical vision as stipulated in the vision / mission statement .
The vision we are referring to is a personal one crafted by the leader and shared with his team . It will draw the roadmap back to respectability and proscribe the milestones that will indicate that the project is on course and determine the resources required to achieve success .
The next hard question is whether the structures in place are serving the association . There is always a tendency of people attempting to manage by not rocking the boat but if the boat is already sinking it would be prudent and correct to just sink the boat and build a new one . The decline of the association from it ’ s hey days is a sum total of decisions made and not made and are a reflection of a non-focused leadership . There is always trepidation in changing status quo but Marketing is about change and should lead by example .
The next hard question will be what value is the association delivering to its members , why should one even consider being a member ? The answer to this question is of utmost importance to the profession as the strength of the association is reflected in the membership .
The engine of the association is the secretariat and as they say this is where the rubber meets the road . Marketing needs a robust secretariat manned by professional administrators whose job is to turn vision into action . Fortunately as employees of the association , their deliverables are measurable .
As Peter Drucker so succinctly put it , what is measured gets managed . A weak secretariat and fuzzy job descriptions are a sure recipe for failure as the volunteer board does not have the time for a hands-on approach to the association , the secretariat is the contractor , it must deliver .
To be fair the secretariat can only be as effective as the leadership . To bring the profession up to speed the synergy between the board ’ s direction setting and the secretariat ’ s execution has to be flawless to achieve the desired results .
It is important that the leadership and the secretariat are strong because they need to be to take on the biggest challenge that the profession needs to tackle in order to establish itself a bona-fide profession in line with other professions in Kenya .
The marketing association was set up as a self-regulating body with a view to uphold standards and ethical behavior . This model works pretty effectively as long as all members abide by the laid down by-laws and professional complaints are handled by voluntary arbitration .
The problem with this model is that not all marketers will be members and those that wish to escape accountability will purpose to avoid membership . It also becomes impossible to root out bogus marketers who borrow respectability from the profession to con unsuspecting customers .
A more serious problem is on how to regulate the unethical behavior of both the unscrupulous marketers especially those that make outlandish claims on products and services and the fake marketers out to con the unsuspecting public .
The only viable solution to bring order and accountability in the marketing profession in Kenya is to give it legal teeth by having the profession operate as a legal entity . We feel that this is a move that is long overdue and should have happened
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