Parties need marketing experts to sanitise political space - CIMG

Dr Daniel Kasser Tee, the National President of the Chartered Institute of Marketing Ghana (CIMG) has called on political parties to seek the services of marketing experts to sanitise the space of insults.

He said political parties in the country should swiftly abandon the present situation where non-marketing experts, mainly Lawyers and other people who speak fine English, are engaged to handle their marketing and communications.

Dr Tee said this at the 30th CIMG President’s Ball at the weekend on the theme: “30 years of Celebrating Marketing Excellence: Challenges for the Next Decade”.

He said: “Political parties need marketing experts, not loud-mouth communicators and fine English speakers. The CIMG is full of professionally qualified Marketers and Marketing Practitioners who can help these parties.”

He said the way and manner in which political parties conduct their business in Ghana leaves much to be desired, adding that the environment remained unnecessarily jaundiced, charged and polarised.

Dr Tee urged political parties to exercise restraints in their communications, messages and all pronouncements especially as the country enters an election year and that they must consider embracing political marketing to help promote their cause.

He said “Marketing Professionals do not and will not use insults and foul language in promoting your parties, as corporate entities, and your political ideologies and presidential candidates as the main products on offer.

Touching on the theme, Dr Tee said the challenges for marketing organisation in the next ten years and beyond include the need to effectively grasp the digital transformation that is sweeping across the globe and use it to improve marketing performance.

He said there was the need for marketing professionals to know that customers were today better informed and empowered than it was, adding that, there was the need to tailor marketing content to customers, relying on customisation and personalisation.

He urged marketers to understand and employ artificial intelligence to further promote their work and that there was the need to employ the use of data as the bases for discharging marketing programmes, to ensure cost-effectiveness in the era of squeezing marketing budgets.

Dr Tee said the CIMG would in the coming years conduct annual studies to measure the service quality levels in regulated industries such as banking and insurance among others and publish the results using the already known, tried and tested models for measuring service quality to gauge the performance of individual companies along the five dimensions of tangibility, responsiveness, reliability, empathy and assurance.

Mr Alhassan Andani, the Managing Director of Stanbic Bank in a remark said to be ready for the challenges of the next decade, there was the need to look back at the few decades to position for the best, noting that the CIMG had for the past 30 years, changed the face of marketing in the country.

He said due to the entrenched standards of professionalism and excellence, it is only the awardees of CIMG Awards who had stood the test of time as the country had gone through its own economic turmoil.

Mr Andani said a lot has changed and that the change would be exponential in the coming decades, hence the need for professional marketers need to be prepared to embrace and apply the principles of marketing in the changing trends in the profession.

As part of the occasion, new members were inducted to the CIMG with different status and the conferment of CIMG Patron Status on Professor Stephen Adei, the Board Chairman of the Ghana Revenue Authority.

A CIMG Fellow Status was conferred on Mr Kojo Mattah, the Managing Director of ARB APEX Bank and the immediate Past President of the CIMG; Dr Andrews Akolaa of the University of Professional Studies; and Nana Kusi Appiah of the Radford University College.