Role
Dr Rotimi Olaniyan is a practice-oriented scholar and currently serves as the lead for the Full-Time MBA course, working with the MBA Portfolio leader, to ensure success across design, recruitment, delivery, and student experience across all Full-Time MBA cohorts. He also leads the Strategic Global Marketing module on the MSc Marketing, as well as the Marketing and Customer Thinking Module on the MSc Innovation and Entrepreneurship courses respectively.
His other teaching responsibilities cover all levels including executive education on modules such as Marketing for the Boardroom on the MSc Marketing course as well as level 6 CIM professionally accredited undergraduate modules in Future Marketing and Digital Customer Experience which have won the CIM’s prestigious Commendation awards.
He currently supervises Doctoral students, and has research interests in entrepreneurship and innovation, particularly around technology service platforms and ecosystems, as well as international business and marketing strategy, with a unique focus on the emerging market context.
Career overview
Rotimi has had a broad-spectrum marketing industry career spanning 30 years in several strategic marketing roles with experiences across a few countries and cultures including the UK. His experience covers Integrated Marketing Communications, Brand and Strategic Marketing Management, Innovation, Sales and Trade Marketing, as well as Data Driven Marketing, CRM, and Consumer Insight while working for multinationals like Cadbury and Colgate Palmolive.
He has operated as a business founder and served as Managing Director and agency head for a series of marketing consultancies. He has also served as a Country Manager within Omnicom’s TBWA/TEQUILA international advertising agency network. He has partnered at C-suite level across several marketing campaigns to help build some of the world’s most important global consumer brands. Rotimi has sat on start-up boards including one of Africa's fast scaling mobile money payment technology start-ups and served as an advisor to several new venture and market entry teams within MENA.
He is a former Vice President of Nigeria's Chartered Marketing Institute as well as Past President of the Experiential Marketing Industry trade group in Nigeria.
Rotimi holds a BSc, an MBA, and an MSc in Marketing. He has a Post Graduate Certificate in Academic Practice and a Professional Certificate in CRM from the IDM UK. In addition to other professional fellowships, he is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and an NBS Alumni Fellow where he gained his Doctorate in Business in 2015 with his thesis, which developed a model for better understanding the environmental munificence of entrepreneurship at the community level.
Research areas
Dr Olaniyan’s research interests are in entrepreneurship and innovation, particularly around technology service platforms and ecosystems, as well as international business and marketing strategy, with a unique focus on the emerging market context.
He is also interested in practiced-based project opportunities such as KTPs, and consultancy with action research potential.
External activity
- Rotimi has a range of industry and trade practice engagements and fellowships across the UK and Africa including a stint with Unlimited, which is one of the UK’s leading marketing services groups.
- He is a visiting lecturer in marketing communications to the School of Media and Communications at Pan Atlantic University Lagos Nigeria.
- He is a reviewer for the international journal of Small Business and Entrepreneurship and the International Journal of Management Education
- He currently sits as a non-exec on the board of B-Global a Nottingham city council-backed pioneering black-led business network set up to help widen business participation by supporting start-ups and helping to scale businesses within the BAME community in the East Midlands and beyond.
Publications
Press expertise
Emerging Markets, Strategic Global Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation