World marketing forum ends

Daily Graphic, Pg. 33 Wed. Feb. 24/10

Story Rebecca Quaicoe-Duho

This year’s World Marketing Forum 2010 held in Accra, attracted 150 participants from various corporate organisations to share ideas on ways to put the marketing profession on a higher pedestal.
The participants came from the banking industry, commerce, trade, the academia, marketing consultants, among others. Also in attendance was Professor Martin Reynolds, Pro-Vice Chancellor and Dean, Ashcraft International Business School at the Anglia Ruskin University, United Kingdom; Mr Martyn Mensah, Managing Director, Kasapreko Company Ltd, and Professor Svend Hollensen of Global Marketing Network (GMN).
Organised by the GMN in association with StratAfrique, the key speakers at the forum included Professor Roger Palmer, Head of Management School, Henley Business School, and Mr Kofi Amegashie, Executive Chairman, StratAfrique.
Earlier, the British High Commissioner to Ghana, Dr Nicholas Westcott, launched the Global Marketing Network (GMN), Ghana, a professional membership association for marketing and business professionals which will award masters qualification for marketing. The network is affiliated to the Anglia Ruskin University.
The network is a worldwide professional membership association of marketing and business professionals designed to provide marketing and business professionals with the most current knowledge, needed to help them take advantage of new opportunities.
Mr Mensah, who is also the Honorary President of GMN Ghana, said the forum, which brought together professors and academicians, was aimed at supporting young marketing officers to learn at first-hand some of the achievements of successful marketers.
According to him, GMN’s ambition was to put marketers back into the boardrooms where critical decisions were taken.
He said unlike other professions where practitioners could rise to higher levels, marketing officers on the other hand had a ceiling where they could not go beyond.
This, he said, was going change with the launch of GMN Ghana where professional marketers could acquire skills to become top executive in any business set-up.
Mr Kofi Amegashie said marketing as a profession needed to be properly understood, saying that unlike others, it was a profession which could not be easily codified or defined by a set of rules and prescriptions.
According to him, marketing had certain enduring fundamentals and there was a growing and constantly evolving body of knowledge that underpinned everything that a professional marketer did.
He added that marketing, much more than any other area of business, required practitioners to constantly update themselves and to enrich practice by drawing from experiences from all over the world.