Oluwatoyin
Akindele

There is a particular kind of pressure that comes from being the person responsible for telling people who a brand is, when the brand itself is still figuring that out.

In 2024, I was part of the team navigating the integration of two of Africa's most recognised insurance brands: Sanlam and Allianz. Overnight, two distinct identities, with their own histories, visual languages, employee cultures, and customer promises, needed to become one. And someone had to write the story.

That someone was, in no small part, me.

The first thing I learned: logos are the easy part

Everyone focuses on the logo. The colour palette. The new name. These are the visible things, so they feel like the real work. They are not. The real work is the invisible architecture beneath them: what does this brand stand for? What promise does it make, and to whom? What does it feel like to be a customer of this brand? What does it feel like to work here?

The visual identity can be designed in weeks. The internal alignment, getting two teams, two sets of values, two different leadership styles to move in the same direction, takes much longer. And until that alignment exists, every piece of communication you put out into the world is built on an unstable foundation.

The second thing: your employees are your first audience

We made a deliberate decision early in the process to treat our internal communications with the same rigour as our external campaign strategy. The people inside the organisation are not just an audience, they are the brand. Every customer interaction they have, every conversation with a partner or agent, reflects the brand promise. If they don't believe it, no marketing budget in the world can make the customer believe it.

The third thing: be honest about what is changing and what is not

One of the biggest mistakes organisations make during transitions is overclaiming continuity to avoid anxiety. "Nothing is really changing", when things are clearly changing. People can feel the gap between what they are told and what they experience. That gap becomes distrust.

We chose transparency. We communicated clearly about what was changing, why it was changing, and what would remain constant. We acknowledged uncertainty where it existed rather than manufacturing false confidence. And counterintuitively, this built more trust, not less.

What I would tell myself at the start

Start with the people, not the assets. Get clear on the human truth of the brand before you touch a single design file. And remember that a brand is not what you say, it is what people feel when they encounter you. Mergers give you a rare chance to redefine that feeling intentionally. Take it seriously.

The work was some of the hardest and most meaningful of my career. I would do it again in a heartbeat.

Every marketer I know has a dedicated process for external campaigns. A brief. A timeline. A creative review. A performance framework. KPIs tracked weekly. Agency calls every Monday morning.

Ask those same marketers about their internal communications strategy and you will often get a pause. A vague reference to the email newsletter. A mention of the all-hands meeting. A shrug.

This is one of the most expensive mistakes in brand management, and almost nobody talks about it.

The 70% moment

During my time at Allianz Nigeria, we overhauled our internal newsletter, not because leadership demanded it, but because I noticed something: readership was low, and the content was built for the organisation, not for the people inside it. It was announcements, not stories. Policies, not people.

We restructured the format around three things: recognition, insight, and belonging. We celebrated people. We shared the thinking behind decisions, not just the decisions themselves. We told internal stories that connected to the brand's external narrative. Readership increased by 70%.

Seventy percent. From a newsletter. Because we treated our employees like an audience worth engaging.

What a great internal communications strategy actually looks like

It starts with listening. Before you can communicate effectively with your internal audience, you need to understand what they actually care about, not what you assume they care about. What are they uncertain about? What do they feel proud of? What makes them stay?

Then it moves to consistency. Internal communications is not an event, it is a rhythm. The brands that do it best build a cadence: regular touchpoints that employees can anticipate and rely on. They don't communicate only in moments of crisis or change. They communicate continuously, so that when hard things do need to be said, there is already a foundation of trust to carry them.

The competitive advantage nobody is talking about

In a market where talent retention is increasingly difficult and employer brand is increasingly scrutinised, internal communications is one of the most powerful tools available, and one of the least invested in. Companies that communicate well internally tend to retain people better, execute change faster, and show up more consistently for their customers.

Write the brief. Hire the strategist. Build the function. Your external brand will thank you for it.

The brief was ambitious. The budget was significant. The campaign was called Save and Win Palli, a savings-led promotion from Union Bank designed to drive deposit growth and brand engagement at scale.

By the time it ended, we had generated over 150 million paid impressions, 2 million video views, and a 29.1% increase in deposits. On paper, it was a success story. In practice, it was an education.

The Nigerian digital consumer is not a monolith

One of the first things I had to unlearn was the idea of "the Nigerian audience." There is no such thing. There are Nigerians in Lagos who respond to English-language, aspirational creative. There are Nigerians in other states for whom a pidgin-inflected message lands with a warmth that no polished ad can replicate. There are young Nigerians on TikTok and older Nigerians on Facebook who do not share a single media habit.

The campaigns that performed best were the ones we localised, not just linguistically, but emotionally. We wrote for specific people, not for a demographic segment.

Data without context is just numbers

We had impressive impression numbers. But the metric that mattered most to the business was deposit growth, and getting from impressions to deposits required understanding the full journey: the search behaviour after seeing an ad, the branch visit, the call to customer service, the friend's recommendation that finally tipped the decision.

I learned to build campaigns backwards from the business outcome, not forwards from the media plan. What does a converted customer look like? What does their journey feel like? What does she need to hear, and when, and from whom?

The 35% budget lesson

In 2022, I managed to save 35% of the digital marketing budget while still hitting every KPI we had set. This was not magic, it was the result of ruthless prioritisation, aggressive negotiation with media partners, and a willingness to cut spend on channels that were generating impressions but not outcomes.

The hardest thing about marketing accountability is that it requires you to say out loud when something is not working, even when you were the one who proposed it. That intellectual honesty is what separates good marketers from great ones.

I spent years marketing insurance. Before that, banking. Products that people need but rarely want, categories where the battle is won through trust, reassurance, and clarity. Where the consumer's primary emotion is often anxiety, and the brand's job is to resolve it.

Then I joined Polo Limited, and the entire grammar of brand marketing changed for me.

The first lesson: scarcity is a feature

In mass marketing, reach is everything. The more people you can tell your story to, the better. Luxury inverts this logic almost entirely. Exclusivity is not a constraint, it is part of the value proposition. The Montblanc pen means something partly because not everyone has one. The desirability is inseparable from the scarcity.

This changes how you think about media, about influencer selection, about event strategy, about every touchpoint in the customer journey. You are not trying to be everywhere. You are trying to be exactly in the right place, for exactly the right person, at exactly the right moment.

The second lesson: storytelling is the product

A Swarovski crystal can be objectively beautiful. But what makes a customer choose it over another piece of jewellery at a similar price point is not the crystal. It is the story she tells herself when she wears it, and the story she imagines others will tell about her when they see it.

Luxury marketing is, at its core, narrative marketing. You are building a world. You are populating that world with characters, values, aesthetics, and emotions that the right customer wants to inhabit. Every campaign, every event, every piece of content is an invitation into that world.

What financial services marketing gave me

I came into luxury with something valuable: a discipline around outcomes. In banking and insurance, every campaign has a measurable business objective. Luxury can sometimes drift into beautiful-but-not-accountable territory. My background keeps me anchored: the creative must be extraordinary, and it must drive commercial results. Both. Always.

That tension, between art and accountability, is, I think, where the best marketing lives.

Nobody hands you a playbook for managing a team through a rebrand, a merger, and a complete shift in company identity, all at once. You figure it out in real time, making decisions with incomplete information, trying to hold your team steady while the ground shifts beneath everyone's feet.

This is what leading the marketing and communications team through the Sanlam-Allianz transition actually looked like.

The thing they don't teach you about leading through change

The theory of change management is clean. The real version is not. In the real version, your team members are anxious about their jobs. They have heard things in the corridor that contradict what they have been told officially. They are being asked to champion a brand they are still processing emotionally. And they are looking to you, their manager, to make sense of it all.

What I learned is that your job in those moments is not to perform confidence. It is to model composure. There is a difference. Performed confidence is brittle, people can see through it, and when reality contradicts it, trust collapses. Composure is honest: it acknowledges difficulty while maintaining direction. It says "this is hard, and we are going to get through it, and here is how."

The communication decisions that mattered most

I held weekly check-ins with the team, not to update them on process milestones, but to create space for the questions they were actually carrying. What happens to our campaigns mid-transition? How do we talk to customers about the rebrand? What if someone asks us something we do not have the answer to?

We built a shared document, our "transition communication bible", that gave the team a single source of truth for what to say, what not to say, and who to escalate to when they were uncertain. It sounds simple. It was transformative. Uncertainty became manageable because it was contained.

What I would tell a first-time manager going through organisational change

Protect your team's access to you. In periods of change, managers often become busier, more meetings, more senior stakeholders, more decisions. But your team needs more of you in these periods, not less. Schedule the time. Show up for it.

And take care of yourself. You cannot pour from an empty cup, and leading through change is one of the most emotionally demanding things a manager does. Your wellbeing is not a luxury. It is a leadership requirement.