CIM Future Marketers Conference provides insight for new age marketer

23 October 2015 06:39 am

Student Committee 


Panel discussion in progress 

The new age marketer indeed paved the way to a discussion across the marketing fraternity in Sri Lanka on the changing role of marketing and greater opportunities it brings along. The CIM Future Marketers Conference was held for the fourth consecutive year and it proved to be an immense success with a house full of enthusiastic and energetic future marketers eager to gain insights on how to expand their careers. 
Nearly 300 current and the future marketers, who attended the conference, had the privilege of listening to four highly accomplished speakers, speaking on the most talked about topics of today, while giving insights from their own knowledge and experiences.
MTI Consulting CEO Hilmi Carder delivered the keynote speech on ‘The New Age Marketer’. Carder spoke about the ever-changing role of a marketer and how the marketer should focus on value creation. He also spoke about how the organisations should move out of the traditional functional silo structure to a value creation-based model in order to be relevant to their customers in this new age of marketing.
Viranga Wickramaratne, who is the Head of Modern Trade at Unilever, spoke about ‘Insights’. “In today’s noisy marketing environment, understanding the value of an insight, decides the marketer’s success” he said. Ranjan De Silva, Team Leadership Specialist and CEO Success Coach-Sensei International stated, “A brand is a promise, our people deliver the promise, our people are the brand” in his speech on how a marketer can add value to an organisation. Nushad Perera, Chief of Marketing and Expansion at Celcom Malaysia, delivered the final speech on ‘The 2020 Digital Marketing Mix’. Perera introduced the new ‘Fantastic 4 Cs’ of digital marketing which will surely guide the Sri Lankan marketers in this new chapter on marketing.
Wrapping up the informative and successful event, the panel discussion was held with five eminent professionals and lecturers in marketing, namely G.S Sylvester, Yasas Hewage, Reyaz Jeffrey, Yarthav Mathiaparanam and Deepal Lokugalappaththi. Roshan De Silva, Marketing Director at Fonterra, Sri Lanka, moderated the discussion. The panel discussion provided the attendees the opportunity to learn the transition of the CIM qualification throughout the years and how CIM has managed to keep the qualification up to date and relevant in this new age by continuously increasing the quality and the context of the subjects. The panel discussion was extremely useful for the student members as the lecturers discussed and answered the questions of the audience on practical implementations of the updated qualification.
CIM Sri Lanka Region Student Committee President Musab Nalir commented, “This year’s conference was fastidiously crafted by embedding an array of pressing, contemporary and must know areas by any marketing professional in the modern era. I believe my team had pulled off an event, which has raised the bar within the marketing fraternity. This conference wouldn’t have been possible without their commitment and having the common aim of elevating the Sri Lankan Marketing fraternity to greater heights.”
The committee members who organised this year’s highly successful conference are: 
Musab Nalir (President), Gayantha Niyangoda (Project Chairman),     Malithi Herath (Secretary), Trevin Ratnayeke (Treasurer), Adheesha Dharmakeerthi (Vice President), Hashan Wickramasinghe (Assistant Secretary), Aadil Jabbar (VIP Relationships), Angela Mahendran (Sponsorships), Fazle Mohamed (Communications), Dinethri Kalansooriya (Tickets & Sales), Tarshan Siva (Creative), Samshan Chapoor (Co-ordination).