Richard Ingleton, the global CEO of TNS, the multinational market research firm, has said that Nigeria’s economic growth trajectory will continue beyond expectations if the country continues to drive the investment education and create the right policy framework and infrastructure that allow business to flourish.
Ingleton, who was in Nigeria on a business visit, said that with the observed competitive energy in Nigeria and entrepreneurial spirit, the country needs to unleash the economic potentials through the right infrastructure and policies.
Ingleton, whose company’s job is to help governments and companies understand what people think about their activities and their products, told BusinessDay that Nigerian market has been asset export led growth. “People are interested on how they export products and while that is good as it is bringing money to the economy it not necessarily the best stimulus for local economic growth”.
He said the government should increasingly be thinking about how it creates policies that encourage the local as there are local entrepreneurs that are coming out of Nigeria and Africa as a whole. “I think marketing becomes powerful when it is about taking less of the assets of the country and exporting for money and is more about growing business, commerce and growing capitalism with the country. I think Nigeria’s growth will really come enormously when there is social policy framework that encourages markets to grow an entrepreneurial base that is able to build their business”.
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From market research perspective, Ingleton said Nigeria is increasingly becoming an interesting country and “when you see a country develop and level of professionalism develop, then organisations and government start to think much more methodologically of how they understand what customers and what people feel”.
According to him, as businesses mature they start to think that they need to find out what many people think and therefore market research becomes more important part of national infrastructure and national way of thinking. He said Nigeria has clearly reached that point and “I think there will be an explosion in terms of the way we understand consumer and understand society. For us we see enormous opportunity in Nigeria”.
