Dr. Rotimi Olaniyan

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 five countries and cultures, including the UK. His experience covers integrated marketing communications, brand and strategic marketing management, innovation, sales and customer marketing, as well as data-driven 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 the 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 a past president of the Experiential Marketing Industry trade group in Nigeria.

Rotimi holds a BSc, an MBA, and an MSc in Marketing. He is an alumnus of IESE, Barcelona, as well as the Lagos and London Business Schools. He has a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice and a Professional Certificate in CRM from the IDM UK. In addition to other professional fellowships, he is a senior 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 diagnostic model for better understanding the institutional munificence of entrepreneurship at the community level.

External activity

Rotimi consults actively with practice and knowledge exchange engagements across the UK, Europe, and Africa. He served on short consulting assignments for firms such as the Unlimited Group, which is one of the UK's leading services groups and now part of Accenture Song; MTN, which is Africa’s largest telecom operator; and the UK East Midland Combined County Authority. He currently serves as an advisor on strategy and business transformation to Guinness Nigeria Plc, a publicly quoted company with £200M in annual trading revenues.