SLIM delegates shine at Philippines National Marketing Conference

Delegates from the Sri Lanka Institute of Marketing (SLIM) did the country proud by making well acclaimed presentations at the recent National Marketing Conference of the Philippines.

The flagship event of the Philippine Marketing Association, it included prominent and leading speakers from the Asia Pacific region as well as elite marketers from the Philippines.  

Among the participants at the conference were 700 marketers from the Philippines, including some of the leading marketers of the country. It was hailed as one of the most prominent events of the Philippines business calendar. The event was also was simulcast at a second location with a further 300 participants in the south of Philippines and was telecast on national television.

President of SLIM Rohan Somawansa made a presentation on the Certified Professional Marketer (CPM Asia) qualification, as a prequel to the launching of the CPM Philippines. He did Sri Lanka proud by highlighting the fact that the country had the No. 1 rank for the qualification and status in the entire Asian region with the highest number of graduates.

Following Sri Lanka are Singapore, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Philippines, Japan, etc. He also made a number of recommendations to the Philippines marketing fraternity with regard to marketing efforts and trading efforts with other regional countries including Sri Lanka and India by highlighting the emergence of Asia as a future powerhouse from an economic perspective.

Vice President (Education) of SLIM Tilan Wijeyesekera, who was invited to represent Sri Lanka by the PMA and SLIM, made an extremely thought provoking presentation on ‘Transformational Marketing’. He used both conventional, non-conventional examples and case studies to wow the crowd.

He engaged the audience with his practical case studies on Madonna as a transformationist and how the IPL (Indian Premier League) changed the landscape of sports and entertainment and utilised transformationist strategies to re-define the success of cricket to develop a multi-billion dollar brand within three years.

His two other case studies included two Sri Lankan examples. Elephant House and how it started with an 18% market share to become Sri Lanka’s market leader by overcoming the World’s No. 1 brand Coca Cola and strategies employed to create the required transformation.

Next was his example of Vanguard (ETV) which began as a single dimension English niche media station and later transformed itself into a multi-dimensional organisation with tremendous growth in non-core and non-traditional mediums and redefining its boundaries on a continuous basis to have one of the most radical business models in Sri Lanka.

SLIM is one of the most active members of the Asia Marketing Federation. The invitations extended to Somawansa and Wijeyesekera to make presentations at the National Marketing Conference of the Philippines have been seen as an endorsement of the recognition both SLIM and Sri Lankan marketers get from the international body and other regional marketing bodies.