“SLIM is about creating business leaders”

One of the main objectives of SLIM is to turn marketers into business leaders, by being strategic and maintaining a holistic view of their specific businesses and brands, which will help them gain entry into the boardroom one day, stated SLIM President Upul Adikari in a recent interview. 

“Further, SLIM Brand excellence is a platform which encourages marketers to think like business leaders as their branding efforts need to have brought in ‘the numbers’ in order to win an award at SLIM Brand Excellence,” he added.

It is important that there is a strong link between a brand and its respective companies, he noted, adding that a brand should be in the forefront, driving the objectives of the organisation and the people who stand behind it should drive this synergy.

“SLIM Brand Excellence is a national platform which recognises these efforts by respective brand custodians. This nationally-acclaimed initiative by SLIM Brand excellence has continued to grow in quality and popularity, and today this serves as a representation of the power and influence of the country’s marketing industry.”

As the apex body of marketing and a leading institute of education, its first and foremost priority is to ensure the development of the profession of marketing in Sri Lanka in order to meet the international benchmark. 

Proficiency is a vital quality in a leading marketing professional; therefore SLIM is dedicated towards producing a calibre of business leaders who will not be the conventional marketers, but talented, pioneering and highly sophisticated professionals who will take the lead in forming a better future for the marketing industry of Sri Lanka, he said.

Adikari asserted that today the skills of many marketing professionals are limited to just communication and promotion, while an essential but often neglected component of the business sector is the accumulation of revenue and the drive to build a successful and sustainable business. 

“We at SLIM are well aware of the fact that the Sri Lankan marketing industry is in desperate need of professionals who are proficient and have a wide range of knowledge of local and global marketing trends. Thus we have made it our goal to do all in our power to fill this breach and bridge the gap between Sri Lanka and the global marketing community.”

He stated that as the national body for marketing SLIM has been the driving force behind the inclusion of marketing studies in schools as a means of ensuring that students are familiar with the concepts of marketing upon leaving school and beginning their higher education. 

He revealed that this initiative is gradually leading to the development of a generation of young professionals who are well versed in the practices of marketing, customer service and sales, whilst also imbedding in them an understanding of the importance of self-development and the representation of the values of their organisation through their behaviour. 

All of these efforts by SLIM are for the sole purpose of making a significant contribution towards the economic progress of Sri Lanka, Adikari emphasised.

Speaking about the recently completed SLIM Brand Excellence Awards program, the President of the organisation said: “Brand Excellence began with the objective of recognising the efforts by the brand custodians driving their brands towards excellence. Through Brand Excellence we provide them a platform to gain recognition and rewards for their hard work, by sharing their story with an esteemed panel of judges. In this the custodians are expected to convince the highly qualified judging panel, that their story is better than the other applicants and worthy of an award. The panel will then make its decision. This process ensures that only the best of the best will be chosen.”

He added that the program also provides marketers the opportunity to experience and familiarise themselves with a clear and effective process of brand building, which will ultimately help bring in revenue to their respective companies. “After all revenue is one of the primary reasons of a brand’s existence. Through briefings and workshops we ensured that the participants were able to gain a clear understanding of the process and the evaluation criteria. The excellence of a brand does not depend solely upon communication but also on the entire process of the brand’s journey.”

On the development and role of this year’s theme, ‘Excellence is an Obsession,’ Adikari stated: “As our purpose lies in building business leaders, we were in search of a theme which covers the full spectrum of the birth of a brand, its development and the process by which revenue was achieved. During this process we realised that in order for a brand to achieve the status of excellence the people behind the brand should be obsessed with the achievement of it and thus we selected ‘Excellence is an Obsession’. I believe that the theme of this year’s helped get the attention of a wider audience of brand custodians, which enabled us attract the highest number of entries ever recorded in Brand Excellence history.”