Abiodun Ogunlabi

Abiodun Ogunlabi graduated from the University of Lagos in 1995 with BSc. honours in Industrial Chemistry. In 2003/2004 after several years of hands-on management experience, he acquired a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) degree from the prestigious Lagos Business School.

In the past 10 years, Abiodun has worked as a Marketer/Business developer across the key regions of West Africa. He has been involved with products and service launches, developing and maintaining brands' image and formulating marketing and communication plans to maintain and increase existing/new businesses. To date, he has 7 years working experience in telecoms and 3years experience in the FMCG industry. His experience spanned strategy, marketing & services, finance, operations and technology.

Abiodun joined MTN Nigeria in 2001 as an Assistant Marketing Manager responsible for building strong market equity for the MTN brands through advertising and product launches. In this role he successfully managed a campaign that saw MTN Boostercard growing to account for up to 35% of overall MTNN revenue. He also led the team that developed several TV commercials such as “The Billboard man”, “Father & Daughter” ad etc. These commercials received accolades from consumers and the press and contributed to MTN’s superior preference over competition between 2002 and 2003 (56% MTN vs. 44% Econet – now Zain).

In 2003, he was a leading member of the team tasked with developing a comprehensive consumer and corporate segmentation profile for the Nigerian telecoms market. At the conclusion of the exercise, he was given the responsibility of managing the Consumer segment from the Marketing perspective. His key deliverables were to grow subscriber numbers, APRU and retention within the segment. He used a combination of creative advertising and new product introduction to maintain MTN’s lead in this segment. Some of the product he worked to introduce during this time included MTN Daily, weekly and super-Boostercard. He also led the development of the MTN Sights & Sounds initiative.

In 2004, he was made the manager responsible for minimizing churn in the newly created High Value segment. In this role, he successfully developed a reward program based on customer spend and duration on the network. The objective of the reward program was grow consumer preference for MTN thereby increasing their lifetime value on the MTN network.

In December 2007, he was seconded to the MobileMoney project as the Program manager responsible for introducing the product in Nigeria. His responsibilities spanned marketing, pricing, channel establishment & distribution roll-out, bank partnering, IS/IT, network, customer care, and organization set-up, process design for customer operations, accounting & finance, and logistics & warehousing. To date, he has succeeded in developing a working MobileMoney solution that is currently in test and is awaiting regulatory approval for go commercial.

Before joining MTN, Abiodun worked for 3 years at Procter & Gamble as an assistant brand manager. One of his first assignments was the introduction of Ariel detergent into the West African market; Nigeria in 1998 and Ghana in 1999. The high point of this assignment was the 2m household sampling program that he managed which resulted in Ariel garnering 10% market share within the 1st 6months of launch in a mature and highly saturated market. In the year 2000, he successfully re-launched the dying Vicks Lemon plus in Nigeria resulting in 120% volume growth and 80% profit growth by the end of the financial year. He also led the launch of Vicks Lemon Plus in Ghana during the later part of 2000. In early 2001, he led the product development of Vicks Blue, a brand extension to Vicks Lemon Plus. He oversaw the introduction of Vicks Blue in Nigeria in late 2001 and shortly after he joined the newly constituted marketing team at MTN Nigeria