Former Nigeria President, Olusegun Obasanjo (second right), EXMAN’s immediate past president, Kayode Olagesin (extreme right), EXMAN’s newly elected president, Rotimi Olaniyan (second left) and General Secretariat, Kehinde Salami (extreme left) at the 2nd annual general meeting/congress of Experiential Marketers Association of Nigeria in Abeokuta, Ogun State recently

By Henry Ojelu

The newly elected executive council of Experiential Marketers Association of Nigeria (EXMAN), led by the president, Dr Rotimi Olaniyan, has resolved to confront the several challenges facing their operations, which include dwindling revenue, reduced margin, and slow growth amongst others.

Experiential marketing is a form of advertising that focuses on helping consumers experience a brand. While traditional advertising (radio, print, television) verbally and visually communicates the brand and product benefits, experiential marketing tries to immerse the consumers within the product by engaging as many other human senses as possible. In this way, experiential marketing can encompass a variety of other marketing strategies from individual sampling to large-scale guerrilla marketing.

In the end, the goal of experiential marketing is to form a memorable and emotional connection between the consumer and the brand so that it may generate customer loyalty and influence purchase decision.

The new leadership made this known after its 2nd annual general meeting in Abeokuta recently where the Kayode Olagesin’s led exco was replaced by Olaniyan’s.

Others in the new exco are Vice President-Wole Olagundoye, General Secretary- Kehinde Salami, Financial Secretary-Kayode Idowu and Publicity Secretary- Abiodun Oshinibosi.

The newly elected president stressed that the agenda that the new exco would work towards is to grow profitability and market size. He said he believes that a 25 per cent growth rate is realizable given the six critical goal areas set up to drive the process.

An optimistic Olaniyan said this would be achieved in the next one year and to achieve these, he said the body would only worry itself about six critical goal areas. “First is levering the industry and basically protecting the industry from non-professionals, and secondly, is about thought leadership. This is putting in place initiatives that would ensure that we maintain cutting edge as a practice and professional service industry.”

Other areas, Olaniyan believed could spur the intended growth rate include improving the internal training capacity and focus on client engagement.. “We will focus on client engagement as a critical issue. It is time for to set up a proper forum to be able to engage with clients and bring them up to speed with the challenges that we all faced.”

According to him, “Everybody in the experiential marketing industry is complaining, we have reduced margin, we have payment compensation terms that we don’t feel is adequate to cover our operational cost not to talk about the little profit at the end of the day, which we can use to reinvest, so there is a need for us to do some work in that area,” he said

He however promised that in the next 30 days the new exco would be coming out with a working document that would show a clear calendar of activity and clear measurable output that would be used to measure their performance in office.

Assessing his tenure the EXMAN’s immediate past president, Olagesin said his two years as foundational president has been fantastic. According to him “it is never easy to take up the responsibility of leading a new association and starting from scratch. It has been very interesting, challenging as well as enjoyable because laying the foundation and structure that would guide us going forward was never going to be an easy task.”

He highlighted some of the achievements to include breaking the jinx to get started, formation of code of conduct, training programmes and the association relationship with Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria.

“Our relationship with other sectoral bodies and APCON have improved, which was an issue from the initial stage. We had divergence views as in the appropriateness of doing that but there is a consensus position by all members again that is a major achievement for us.”

He said “As I speak we are formalizing our relationship with APCON and with that it also means we have the force of law to back up some of the things we want to do to reinforce our association. So as a foundational president I am quite happy as what we have achieved and the crowning glory is that we had a very successful elections,.”