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Background

Onyinye Ikenna-Emeka is a business Leader with over 25 years’ experience in the telecommunications, logistics and education sectors. She is currently the Chief Marketing officer with MTN Nigeria Communications Plc, a leading telecommunications company in Africa. Prior to this role, she has served as the very first Chief Broadband Officer of the organization and also led the sales and marketing efforts for MTN in the Business segment.

Over the course of her career, Onyinye has held various senior leadership positions within and outside the organization and has also been involved in the development and management of profitable business models for high-end B2B, Broadband and digital market segments. She has established a reputation for developing and driving winning commercial and business strategies especially in the areas of Business planning and operations, market development and expansion as well as talent capacity development. She is known for overseeing winning go-to-market models and has also helped nurture new business lines into mature revenue-generating engines.

Onyinye is currently a doctoral researcher with the ÃÀ¼§¸ó School of management and holds an MBA in general management from the University of Manchester, with a bachelor’s degree in Geology from the University of Calabar, Cross river state in Nigeria. A fellow of the National Institute of Marketing of Nigeria as well as the institute of sales and marketing of Nigeria, she gained executive education in Leadership, Commercial Strategies and technology innovation with Harvard Business School, Said Business School, Oxford University, Stanford Business School, Columbia Business School and the Lagos Business School.

Onyinye is a valued international speaker on Women in leadership, Technology and Commercial models. Passionate about developing talents, Onyinye is also a guest faculty at the Tekedia Institute, A John Maxwell certified Speaker and Coach, a thought leader with the Forbes Business Development Council and a member of the Governing council for the Grange School in Lagos, Nigeria.

She was named as and one of the 31 female Change makers taking initiative by the Rising Women Africa/NBC magazine in 2021 and the Telecoms woman of the year at the AfriTECH awards 2022 for her contributions to driving broadband growth in Nigeria.

Onyinye creates a balance by reading, podcasting, travelling and fashion designing in her spare time.

Research opportunities

The lack of trust in small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) has increased the need to build authenticity in SME brands. In today’s ever evolving world of business, power lies in the hands of the consumer. SMEs whilst constrained with the challenges of newness and smallness have had to deal with competing against large organizations who have more established business operations. Consumers lack trust for the untested and unknown SMEs who have limited capability to showcase their businesses as transparent and credible presenting a challenge for SMEs who are seek survival.

The brand has been identified as one of a firm’s intangible resources important in delivering superior competitive advantage (Hamdoun et al., 2019; Osakwe et al., 2020, M’zungu et al., 2019) and impacting a company’s survival (Porcu et al.,2020; Alwi et al., 2022). Previous research shows that SMEs that invest in the brand will generate higher brand performance than non- brand oriented SMEs (Baumgarth et al., 2013; Wong & Merrilees, 2008). Therefore, to achieve consumer trust, it is argued that firms must learn to understand and excel at rendering authenticity (Gilmore and Pine 2007; Nunes et al 2021).

Brand authenticity has been identified as a key determinant in consumer- brand relationships (Oh et al, 2019; Campagna et al, 2021), as consumers today continue the search for brands that are consistent and trustworthy (Campagna et al 2021). Brand authenticity is a concept in branding that is relevant for building trust (Portal et al, 2019) especially in times of uncertainty(Eggers et a .,2013).It would aid in overcoming the lack of transparency and credibility that hinders consumer trust (Campagna et al 2021). This is the core of my research.

Current activities

Currently carrying outQualitative Field work and data analysis