My reflections on marketing education in Ghana
Several weeks ago, I wrote an article in the Daily Graphic on Putting Marketing Back on the CEO’s agenda where I sought among other things to emphasise that marketing should ideally be the darling of company senior executives due to the essential role it played in a firm profitability.
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I will continue my crusade to make marketing a true value driver of value in African businesses this week at the Alisa Hotel where I will have the privilege of sharing at a Think Forum my experiences with the marketing discipline in Ghana over the last 20 years in a career that has spanned my work with consulting firms like Lexcroft, Yankah & Associates, PsyconHR; PWC, Lawfields Consulting and a host of others.
I will also discuss my exciting adventures in advertising with what at the time was the “iconic” Origin8 and my work on brands like Steers, Microsoft, Spacefon (now MTN), Canon, APC, Daewoo to name a few. I will also be discussing my work as a marketing academic teaching at the undergraduate, masters and PhD levels and conducting research in areas such as advertising, corporate social responsibility, e-commerce, branding, political marketing; to name a few.
I will share some 20 lessons from my Marketing Journey in areas such as marketing communications, financial services marketing, not-for-profit marketing, customer service and service design, to name a few.
As a precursor to my talk on Friday, June 26, 2015, at the Alisa Hotel, I write today to share some thoughts on marketing education in Ghana today. Marketing today is taught and studied today through undergraduate masters and doctoral University programmes.
Marketing is also taught via Chartered qualification routes like the Chartered Institute of Marketing qualification or the Institute of Marketing Management qualification from South Africa. The Chartered Institute of Marketing Ghana is still struggling to get Parliament to pass a bill that will give life to the start of local marketing qualification examinations like we have for the Institute of Chartered Accountants Ghana. Marketing Education in Ghana could be characterised as having ugly, bad and good sides.
I will focus on the ugly, the bad; and close my arguments with the good sides focusing particularly on a recently introduced sandwich Masters in Marketing Strategy currently being run at the University of Ghana Business School.
The ugly side of marketing education in Ghana has to do with the quality of instruction in some of the aforementioned marketing training programmes on both the university/professional marketing routes. Some of the lecturers who teach on these marketing programmes do not only have minimal or inappropriate marketing qualifications (for the level they are teaching at), but also have little to no marketing practice experience as well. From a simple garbage in garbage out perspective therefore it is not difficult to see how many of the marketing graduates being churned out from several tertiary institutions in Ghana still require extensive retraining in order to properly fit into marketing and communication roles in several private, public and not-for-profit institutions in Ghana.
The bad side of marketing
The bad side of marketing education in Ghana is closely related to the ugly side. The ugly side has to do with the curriculum that is being used to turn out our marketing graduates in Ghana as well as the corresponding testing modes.
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I was shocked a few months ago to discover in a level 400 (final year) International Marketing exam paper for a tertiary institution in Ghana that none of the six questions that had been set had nothing to do with any mainstream concepts and theories in International Marketing.
The questions looked more like questions that had been set for an international political economy class and I shuddered to think what those students had been taught in that international marketing class.
Another bane of marketing education in Ghana is that case-based teaching is the exception and not the norm and several students are still being taught in the “chew pour pass forget” mode. In the chew pour pass mode, students’ ability to develop key marketing analytical and decision-making skills become limited at best!
What is good about marketing in Ghana is that some tertiary institutions are beginning to respond in nuanced ways to some emerging industry needs for different approaches to marketing training. A case in point is the new MA Marketing Strategy 1-year Sandwich Masters Programme at the University of class which started a fortnight ago with a class of 35 with notable participation from employees of Nexan Cable Metal, Aviance, Engen, MTN, Vodafone, Tigo, Starr FM, ECG, to name a few.
The celebrated musician, Okyeame Kwame, was also in the foundation class which boasted in the first semester exciting courses like Relationship Marketing, Marketing Research, Strategic Marketing, Sports Marketing, Financial Services Marketing, Human Resources Management and Entrepreneurial Strategy development.
This course was developed to train in a much nuanced manner middle to senior level executives and entrepreneurs who desired to make marketing and service excellence key value drivers in their respective organisations.
Marketing education in Ghana can have a brighter future with more qualified and experienced faculty and resources found to fund a comprehensive baseline study of marketing skill gaps and shortages to best inform marketing curriculum development and delivery of same in Ghana.
The writer is a scholar in the Department of Marketing and Customer Management at the University of Ghana Business School and writes for the Centre for Sustainability and Enterprise Development (CSED) at the same School. CSED is a training, research and advocacy centre specialising in marketing; communications, sustainability and social responsibility.
Robert holds doctorate degrees in Marketing and International Business Economics and can be reached at csed@ug.edu.gh