The New Brand Manager’s 90-Day Plan for Taking Over a Brand in Nigeria

A new brand manager 90 day plan in Nigeria comes down to one sequence: thirty days to listen, thirty to diagnose, thirty to move. I run client service at Aikido Agency, which means I sit across the table from brand managers in their first month on the job — and I can usually tell by week two who will still own the brand in two years. This is the plan I wish more of them arrived with: what to check before you change anything, how to find what actually drives the number, and how to close the quarter with a win your MD can see.

The pressure runs the other way. You inherit a brand with a history you did not write, a P&L someone else shaped, an agency you did not choose and a CEO who wants movement by Friday. The temptation is to arrive with answers — a relaunch, a new look, a big campaign. Resist it. The first ninety days are not for big moves. They are for earning the right to make them.

Month one has one job: build a truthful picture of the brand before anyone forces you to defend an opinion. That picture lives in five places, and none of them is a strategy deck.

• The P&L, line by line — volume, value, margin and trend, by SKU and by region, going back at least two years. Know which two or three lines actually carry the brand. When the MD asks what you think, ‘the 50cl pack in the South-East is carrying us and its margin is thinning’ beats any opinion about advertising.
• The distributor truth — sit with your three biggest distributors and ask what sells without being pushed, what comes back, and how your credit terms compare with your competitor’s. A distributor will tell you in twenty minutes what a research debrief takes three months to say politely.
• Trade visits, in Lagos and beyond — walk Balogun or Trade Fair, then take at least one trip outside Lagos: Onitsha, Ibadan, Kano, wherever your volume lives. Check the price on the table against your price list, count your facings against the competitor’s, and ask the woman behind the stall what she recommends when a customer is undecided.
• The agency you inherited — book the first meeting in week two or three, and go in to listen, not to grade. The next section covers exactly what to ask.
• Past campaign reports, read critically — line up what each campaign promised against what it delivered. Be suspicious of any report that celebrates impressions and engagement but never shows a sales line; we unpacked that trap in our essay on clicks versus growth.

Your first agency meeting is a diagnosis, not a performance review. You are not yet deciding whether to keep them — you are finding out how they think, and whether anyone has held them to a commercial standard. Five questions do most of the work.

Listen as hard for what is missing as for what is said. If nobody mentions your commercial numbers unprompted, that tells you how the relationship has been run — and it may say as much about your predecessor’s briefs as about the agency. If you later decide the roster needs to change, do it deliberately; our guide to choosing a marketing agency in Nigeria sets out that process step by step.

By month two you can separate the symptom the company talks about from the problem underneath it. ‘Sales are down’ is a symptom. In the Nigerian market the cause is usually one of four things, and each has a different fix — and a different owner.

1. Availability — the product is not where the buyer is. Check numeric and weighted distribution, out-of-stocks and distributor coverage before you blame the advertising.
2. Price — the shelf price has drifted past the buyer’s threshold, or your pack sizes no longer match what her pocket allows this month. Judge this at the point of purchase, not from the price list.
3. Salience — the brand has gone quiet, or is being outshouted where it matters. Compare your share of voice with your share of market, and look at who owns the channels your buyer actually sees.
4. Product and pack — quality drift, an ageing pack, a competitor with a better answer. The trade told you this in month one, if you asked.

Then make the one decision month two exists for: pick a single commercial priority and put it in writing — one sentence that finance and sales would both sign. This is the first of our five principles at Aikido — Seijun, precision: no creative work begins until one commercial objective is agreed in writing. The same discipline serves a brand manager. One priority. On paper. Agreed.

Month two is also when you stop the zombie projects — the sponsorship nobody can explain, the app nobody downloads, the quarterly activation that survives because killing it feels rude. Put one question to every project on the inherited plan: which number does this move, and who checks? Give each owner a dignified exit, redirect the budget, and say why. Much of a new brand manager’s first-year budget is found this way, not requested.

With the diagnosis done, month three is for movement — but movement of a particular kind. Three deliverables, in order.

1. One visible win — small, measurable, finished inside weeks. Fix out-of-stocks in one region with the sales team. Re-cut the trade offer on your fastest SKU. Sharpen one high-traffic touchpoint. The point is not scale; it is proof that when you move, a number moves.
2. A reset agency brief — take your written priority to the agency and rebuild the engagement around it: one objective, KPIs in writing, and a weekly or fortnightly reporting rhythm that tracks the commercial number rather than the activity. If the agency pushes back on being measured, you have learned something valuable.
3. A clean report to the MD — one page. What you found, what you will do, how it will be measured, what you need. Include the bad news; an MD who hears the problem from you will trust the plan from you. Our guide to measuring marketing ROI in Nigeria shows how to set the measurement up so this report almost writes itself.

From the agency side of the table, the failures repeat. Four traps account for most of them.

• Changing the logo first — a redesign feels like decisive action, which is exactly why it is dangerous. Identity work has its place in a proper brand strategy, but it comes after diagnosis, not instead of it. No distributor has ever increased an order because the wordmark got cleaner.
• Promising the CEO too much — in week one, a bold number feels like the way to look serious. By month six it is the stick you are measured with. Anchor every promise to the diagnosis: commit hard to the one priority, and stay conservative everywhere else.
• Mistaking activity for progress — a full campaign calendar, a busy social feed and a thick stack of agency reports can coexist with a flat sales line for a long time. If the number is not moving, the plan is not working, however busy everyone looks.
• Treating sales as a rival — marketing plans in Nigeria live or die in the trade. Bring the sales director into the diagnosis in month one and your month-three plan arrives with an ally, not an audience.

A word on how we handle this, because a fair share of the people who call us are in exactly this seat — new on a brand, ninety-day clock running, holding an inherited plan they do not fully trust.

• A point of view in 48 hours — tell us the business challenge, the target and the timeline, and we come back within 48 hours with a point of view and next steps, not a credentials deck. In your first month, speed to a straight answer matters more than a parade of case studies.
• Diagnosis before creative — our Katana System establishes market truth, human truth and cultural truth before anything is designed, and no creative work begins until one commercial objective is agreed in writing. Our process hands you the diagnosis your ninety-day plan needs anyway.
• Senior people in the room — the founders sit on every brief and we deliberately keep the number of engagements small. The people who meet you are the people who work on your business; a new brand manager has no time to manage a hand-off to a junior team.
• Weekly commercial reporting — KPIs reviewed weekly, with the authority to kill what is not working. Your clean report to the MD is only as good as the reporting underneath it.

We are not the right fit for everyone. If what you want is an agency that keeps the calendar full and the reports colourful, we will frustrate you. If you want a partner who helps you find the number and move it, that is the entire design of the firm.

We work with brand and marketing leaders across FMCG, telecoms, financial services, food and beverage, fintech, beauty, health, fashion and technology. New brand managers usually arrive with one of three sentences: ‘I have inherited a brand that is losing share and I do not yet know why.’ ‘My agency sends beautiful reports and my sales line has not moved.’ ‘I have ninety days to show something and I do not want to waste them.’

Any of those is enough to start. Tell us the business challenge, the target and the timeline, and within 48 hours you will have a point of view and proposed next steps. Write to hello@aikido.ng, call +234 810 960 5970, visit us at 3b Felicia Koleosho Street, Opebi, Lagos — or start the conversation here.

— Adefunke Adedayo, General Manager, Client Service, Aikido Agency.