Happy New Year 
As we look ahead to 2025, we’ve gathered 16 brilliant marketing professionals across different verticals to share their No-BS strategy advice for 2025. This isn’t your usual fluff—these are actionable strategy tips to help marketers stay ahead in the fast-evolving landscape.
Ready? Let’s go.
Critical reflection remains humanity’s most important skill for developing any great initiative, institution, or society. The ability to take abstractions and reflections from lived experiences and convert them into meaningful corrective actions for the future is what true learning is all about and how progress is achieved. It means you must learn to become critical of everything around you, including what you thought you believed. It is not only okay to change your mind based on evidence and reason, but you should seek to do this constantly.
You should wake up every morning and ask yourself, “What reality am I going to change today?” This is how great thinkers, strategists, and groups break free. Innovative future states are created by being distrustful of the past and holding convention to account.
Above all else, understand that the strategist’s most important duty is to fight the tyranny of orthodoxy, and that requires a rebel in all of us, prepared to subvert the usual.
- Stay opinionated, and intentionally increase your level of influence.
- Migrate from that silo approach to strategy- don’t be known as a digital strategist or a traditional advertising strategist or an experiential strategist or any of those so-called specializations but be more of a holistic strategist focusing more on the client’s broader business goals or challenges.
- PLEASE! PLEASE! PLEASE! stop regurgitating templated decks, everyone but you is tired of templated strategy decks. Lean into a better understanding of the consumer. This should be a no-brainer, no?
“Nigerians are resilient” is NOT an insight. It’s an overused generic observation that should lead to an insight. Stop torturing your creatives and clients with it going forward.
- Trend Spotting for Local Impact: Stay ahead by understanding how global trends—like AI, fintech, and sustainability—translate locally. Use tools like social listening, industry reports, and community feedback to uncover untapped opportunities. Think of how Safaricom scaled mobile money by addressing local payment gaps.
- Building Ecosystems, Not Just Products: Shift from selling standalone services to creating ecosystems that solve multiple customer needs. For example, integrate e-commerce, logistics, and payments like Jumia or develop end-to-end agriculture solutions connecting farmers, markets, and financing.
- Customer-Centered Solutions: Focus on what people need. Use surveys, focus groups, and user testing to co-create products. Study everyday pain points, whether urban transport or cross-border payments, and design solutions that feel personal and practical.
- Agility Over Perfection: Markets change fast. Test ideas quickly with pilot programs or minimum viable products (MVPs). Adapt your strategies based on what works, like Paystack which continuously adjusts its product offerings and integrations based on customer feedback, enabling businesses to access seamless digital payment services.
- Purpose-Driven Growth: Align your strategy with the issues that matter to Nigerians, such as economic empowerment, infrastructural challenges, and financing options. Brands like MTN and Flutterwave have thrived by merging profit with purpose.
Put in the work in 2025. It almost always shows when you do. Network and connect with folks within your industry as well. More importantly, as a strategist, speak to consumers more in 2025. The desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.
Want to Win in 2025?
No Hogwash, Just Strategy
If 2024 was tough, 2025 will be tougher. With instant access to alternatives and the internet amplifying their voices, customers will expect more for less. Winning in 2025 will demand a sharper, faster, and more authentic approach. Ensure you cut off the fancy fluff and focus on the things that matter. Here’s how to stay winning:
- Obsess Over Customers: Forget personas; focus on real people. Understand their fears, desires, clicks, likes, behaviours and decisions better than they do. Dive deep into cultural and behavioural insights to fuel powerful and impactful messaging.
- Master the Value Chain: The competitive edge that unlocks growth can be anywhere along the value chain. Use every touchpoint to discover, create and seamlessly tell your brand story.
- Ruthless Execution: In 2025, agility will be everything. Test fast, fail faster, and learn rapidly. Slow businesses will be obsolete before they launch.
- Stand for Something Real: Authenticity matters. Gen Z and Alpha won’t buy into brands faking values. Align with meaningful causes and take real action.
- Think Globally, Act Locally: Act global but cultural relevance sets you apart. Speak to your audience’s emotional and social needs, not just their rational benefits.
Finally, remember: the brand that wins won’t be the biggest or the loudest; it’s the one whose marketing delivers commercial values. Don’t follow the noise, be the signal.
As you step into 2025, let’s clear one of the most persistent misconceptions: a strategy is not a plan. The two are fundamentally different, and mistaking one for the other is the fastest way to derail your efforts.
Strategy is the “why” and the “what”—the overarching direction that defines where you’re going and why it matters. It’s about making deliberate, long-term choices that set you apart. Think of it as your compass. On the other hand, a plan is the “how” and the “when”—the tactical roadmap of steps, resources, and timelines to execute the strategy. It’s your itinerary.
Here’s the trap: many confuse a detailed plan for a brilliant strategy. Loading your slides with Gantt charts, KPIs, and timelines doesn’t make you a strategist; it makes you an executor. A true strategist starts with clarity on the goal and prioritizes critical decisions that shape the playing field.
Why does this matter? Because the competitive edge in 2025 belongs to those who understand the difference. A well-defined strategy allows you to pivot when the unexpected happens, while plans often crumble under pressure. By mastering this distinction, you’ll avoid the noise, focus on impact, and rise above those stuck in execution mode.
You are a strategist- think like one!
Keep it simple! Strategy isn’t about proving how smart you are or showing how much research you’ve done. It’s about eliminating the noise so the truth may speak.
Don’t do it for who is watching; do it for your past, present, and future self.
NO DATA IS A FALLACY – GET CREATIVE!
As strategists and planners in Nigeria and Africa, one of the most infamous lines you will hear within our discipline is, “There is no data.”
I am not naive enough to think that there is an abundance of data in Nigeria. The research value chain—from data collection to storage and access—is a different matter to be addressed another day.
Nevertheless, we are surrounded by data, and if nobody is handing it out to you, get creative and figure out unconventional ways of gathering data for your work, depending on the task at hand. Get creative with the methodology, the sources, the collation, and the insight distillation. Get creative with partnerships.
We are surrounded by data; get creative with it.
As a strategist, your first skill is selling—not just products, but ideas. Your initial “consumer” isn’t always the target audience in your deck; it’s your stakeholders. They are the first people you need to convince to buy into your vision before it ever reaches the end audience.
To do this, you must deeply understand your stakeholders—their priorities, concerns, and goals—before every presentation. Tailor your pitch to address their needs and make a strong case for why your strategy works. Even the best insights and ideas will fail if you can’t sell them effectively. Without buy-in, great ideas remain just that—ideas.
When you speak to your creative teams and clients, speak everyday grammar. You have nothing to prove to anyone.
Data-driven is good, but emotion-driven wins hearts.
Don’t get so caught up in analytics that you forget humans make decisions with their hearts first. Your best campaigns will be the ones that make people feel something deeply.
Clients don’t just want creativity- they want solutions!
It’s not about the prettiest ad or the trendiest campaign; it’s about solving the audience and client’s problem in a way that makes sense for their business goals. Creativity is powerful when it is purposeful.
THE ENEMY CALLED “DECK”
The output of strategists in agencies is becoming more confined to the “deck”.
The “deck” is now seen as the ultimate outcome from strategy. This is also why many strategists get carried away with the allure of frameworks, models, tools, etc The pursuit of these shiny toys is all in the service of making a better “deck” instead of making better “strat”.
With the advent and mass adoption of Gen AI across agency business, reinforcing the bias for computational creativity, rather than imaginative creativity, this enemy called “deck” will become emboldened and reinforced as a standard.
However, the relevance of strategy is so much more. Rather than being seen/utilized as deck-makers, strategists should serve as brand guardians, agency shepherds, culture disruptors and business innovators.
So my charge to you in 2025 is:
“Broaden the horizon of your strategy beyond the “deck”. Take your strategy into the streets, boardrooms, random conversations, depth of culture and twisted intricacies of contexts. Make it an anthem. Make it a song. Make it a rap. Drop it like it’s hot or serve it like it’s cold.
Frame and reframe it. Distill and Crush it into the smallest particles of incontestable truth. Push the boundaries of thinking with your head, loosely hanging in the cloud of imagination and your feet firmly rooted in reality. By all means, fight the enemy called “deck.”
A few years ago, tech was the future. Currently, it is the present. Smart people and businesses will embrace it through meaningful innovation and collaboration—especially in marketing. Mergers are typically better than acquisitions.
EMBRACE THE BEGINNER’S MINDSET
The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.” – Albert Einstein
You should learn the basics of strategy regardless of your professional level.
To achieve this successfully, you must understand the fundamentals of marketing, advertising, and strategy. A solid grasp of these basics will propel you further in life. They provide a strong foundation that many professionals often lack.
Additionally, avoid just accumulating knowledge without putting it into practice. The more you utilize your knowledge, the more you master it, allowing you to adapt your perspective to various situations.
In every scenario, always remember that you are never too advanced to learn something new. The more adaptable you are at starting over, the further you will progress in life. To learn the Basics of Strategy, register your interest in the Strategy Bootcamp for Beginners and receive a 5% early bird discount for individuals and 10% for organizations registering more than three attendees.
As 2025 unfolds, the best strategies will be those rooted in clarity, creativity, and adaptability. By taking this No-BS Strategy Advice for 2025 to heart, you’ll be better equipped to navigate challenges, inspire your team, and deliver real value. Remember, strategy isn’t about perfection—it’s about progress. So step up, stay curious, and make this year your most impactful yet.
New to strategy? You should read this to kickstart your No-BS strategy journey.
