By Dr Hanningtone Gaya, CEO – The Knowledge Warehouse Kenya
Writing for this coveted list, Caroline Mutoko, the Queen of the Airwaves in this part of the region, has this to say: Marketing isn’t simply an important part of business success – it is the business. Everything else in the business depends upon marketing. Caroline quotes Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and several media and entertainment companies, who puts it as succinctly as possible: “No sales. No company.”
In her thesis, Yvonne Tharao sees marketing as a revenue model: ‘I believe in new marketing, a marketing that is aligned to a company’s bottom line as a revenue generating model, not the old marketing that is always considered as a cost item’.
On the premise set by these two great marketers, Business Monthly EA magazine is glad and excited to introduce the inaugural Top 25 Most Influential Women in Marketing Impacting Business 2022 by Growing Brands, with the first lists and rankings extracted through peer nominations. The list consists of women practitioners both in the mainstream marketing realm and its evolving subsectors, corporate communications and advertising.
We invited ten top women in media, marketing and corporate communicators to nominate their colleagues that are perceived to be doing great work in their spaces. The 157 shortlisted women were then requested to submit a 750-word article on their professional journey, including any SDGs or ESGs initiated or are part of, to form a basis for final shortlisting and ranking. A few did not submit and others submitted out of time.
Based on the available write-ups and a few interviews, the list of the 25 finalists was draw. A ranking through a qualitative key informants’ perception survey was conducted by mobile phone interviews. The Top 25 are those regarded highly by their peers as those who have and continue to achieve brand success for the goods or services under their charge, by providing the overall strategic directions, innovations, creatives, designs and final executions of the campaigns.
Due to the high level of interest, Business Monthly EA will run this recognition annually and develop the series as one of the premier awards for marketers and communicators in their industry calendar. Business Monthly EA magazine looks forward to involving the MSK, PRSK and the local chapter of the CIM in the future. The main objective is to celebrate women whose work often go unnoticed and often regarded as a cost, not a driver of revenue generation that decides the bottom line.
These 25 women are creating effective and focussed product campaigns, restructuring the architecture of the marketing process and lead the teams from the front while participating in industry, sectoral or community leadership roles, through elaborate planning and execution of varying SDGs, ESGs, Diversity and Inclusion agendas, ending in making real differences in society and contributing to both the top and bottom lines in business.
The 25 women awardees have been selected from an initial nomination list of 157 equally worthy candidates. If you feel you are deserving to be on this inaugural list, take heart. You are likely to be on the list next year.
