Award-winning author, business influencer and entrepreneur Lebo Lion is imparting her knowledge to people who have an interest in acquiring knowledge about the field of marketing.
Lion reveals that a lack of marketing expertise is a major factor in the failure of many businesses in South Africa.
The entrepreneur, who is regarded as the voice of marketing and has over 12 years of experience in the field, is ready to host the first marketing tour, “Everything is Marketing”, in Sandton on March 16.
The goal of the masterclass tour, she says is to empower professionals, students, artists and entrepreneurs by providing them with the necessary resources to succeed.
She describes the upcoming event as a learning festival in which they will deliver innovative and effective strategies and tools to assist business owners and professionals in building careers and businesses they enjoy.
Lion underlines the importance of marketing for success in today’s world.
She says that, growing up, she enjoyed customer and product-related activities and that having an entrepreneurial family influenced her career path significantly.
She explains what sparked her interest in hosting a masterclass tour: “We have a huge entrepreneurship challenge in South Africa. A lot of businesses fail because they lack marketing knowledge and tools within their businesses.
“Even professionally, a lot of professionals are not maximising their income potential because they don’t have the adequate tools to build successful personal brands that allow them to leverage corporate opportunities. South Africans need marketing.”
She claims that curiosity is a prerequisite for success in marketing because people in the field are naturally curious and driven to learn how to preserve, enhance, and improve the world in which they live.
“As a marketer, you have to be a risk-taker. Genius is something that you become through play, not through thinking. Marketers who change the game have a level of appetite for risk. Lastly, a marker has to be entrepreneurial. You need to see things before other people do and have the delusional drive to make them a reality,” she says.
Being a true jack of all trades, Lion claims that she uses systems and teams to balance her workload because she thinks that no man is an island.
“You cannot fully extract the true capacity of your personal brand if you don’t have a team that runs the businesses that you build; you won’t be able to audit growth.”
She also expresses her aspirations to establish a technology and marketing academy that will provide African Americans with the resources they require to achieve.
The Star
anita.nkonki@inl.co.za