Aishat Yetunde Anaekwe stands as a globally influential strategic brand leader and institutional architect, dedicated to redefining how trust, growth, and cultural relevance are established across Africa's most dynamic sectors. With over 14 years of experience spanning global Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) and pan-African financial services, she empowers brands to transcend mere product offerings, instead moving people, shifting narratives, and shaping economies. In her transformative role at Coronation, a pioneering financial services group encompassing investment management, insurance, banking, and digital platforms, she spearheads brand and communication efforts. Her core mission involves strategically unifying a fragmented, multi-entity structure into a powerful institutional brand rooted in clarity, credibility, and ambition, thereby underpinning the group’s long-term objective to reimagine how Africa creates, protects, and passes on prosperity across generations.

Before venturing into the financial sector, Anaekwe held senior leadership positions at prominent companies like Heineken, Johnson & Johnson, and PZ Cussons. In these roles, she managed multi-million-dollar brand portfolios, initiated successful market entry strategies, and executed bold, insight-led campaigns throughout West and Central Africa. Her unique hybrid expertise, which seamlessly fuses commercial depth with profound cultural fluency, has established her as a highly sought-after voice in brand architecture, consumer behavior, and emerging-market strategy.

A pivotal moment in Anaekwe's career was leading the repositioning of Premier Cool, a heritage Nigerian brand that had lost its market edge. Faced with declining relevance and a cluttered category, she championed a radical shift, re-anchoring the brand around confidence and modern masculinity. This involved a strategic partnership with Manchester City FC, chosen not just for its glamour but for its global presence and disciplined brand DNA, which mirrored the ambition of their target audience. This collaboration, along with a reframed narrative, resulted in a 22% growth in brand penetration and made Premier Cool one of the most talked-about brands in its category. This experience solidified her belief that brands connected to culture and clarity can move beyond awareness to affinity, shaping her leadership philosophy of building memories and ensuring commercial thinking is always intertwined with brand strategy.

Her transition from a 12-year career in FMCG to financial services was driven by a desire to build institutions that move nations, rather than just markets. Holding a Master’s in Finance, this was a strategic return with sharper tools. FMCG taught her to earn trust at scale, translate insight into influence, and shape behavior. However, she sought to address larger questions about building long-term credibility and trusted African institutions, leading her from brand love to brand belief, and from campaigns to capital systems. At Coronation, she is now focused on building confidence in Africa’s capacity for prosperity, a narrative she aims to champion for both the brand and the continent.

Anaekwe defines cultural institutions as brands that transcend their category, shaping how people think, feel, and belong. Examples like Apple’s design philosophy, MTN’s symbol of possibility, and Life Beer’s embodiment of homecoming rituals illustrate her point. She emphasizes that in Africa, where symbolism and storytelling are powerful currencies, brands must carry meaning beyond the market. She advocates for creating unique African narratives instead of consuming global ones, embedding brands in memory, identity, and aspiration to build legacy and power.

The primary challenge for African brand credibility, she notes, is perception, where African brands are often seen as local by default. She asserts that credibility is built, not granted, by doubling down on clarity, consistency, and conviction, similar to how global brands establish themselves. Investment in brand infrastructure—creative capital, narrative design, and deep local insight—is crucial. Storytelling must be treated with the same rigor as balance sheets, as brand equity is increasingly economic equity. She stresses the importance of originality, culture, and authenticity, urging African brands to showcase excellence repeatedly rather than mimicking external templates.

Campaigns like “Turu Ugo Lota” exemplify the power of resonance through respect and deep cultural understanding. This campaign succeeded because it was a genuine homecoming call, tapping into the pride and emotional language of a region often unrepresented in national campaigns. Resonance, she explains, requires going beyond translation to insight, understanding cultural codes, music, rituals, tempo, and tension. Excellent execution—right casting, media mix, and mood—is equally vital, as craft builds trust. Such bold moves, leaning into identity and heritage, may be challenging internally but ultimately move hearts, representing the highest form of brand work.

Measuring cultural relevance, for Anaekwe, is a measurable form of brand equity assessed through three lenses: reaction, retention, and ripple effect. Reaction involves real-time emotional connection, pride, and recognition. Retention refers to the brand’s staying power, where messages are echoed in conversations, music, or slang. Ripple effect signifies influence, where competitors copy codes or communities organically adopt the brand. Given Africa’s diversity, she stresses listening widely, observing deeply, and staying close to the cultural pulse, as relevance ultimately hinges on recognition, repetition, and reverence.

Consumer behavior in Africa, she argues, is not merely data but identity, reflecting how people navigate layered realities, hustling and dreaming. Segmentation must go beyond age or income to decode ambition, rituals, trust dynamics, and cultural codes. Her experiences, from marketing beer by understanding football and nightlife culture at Heineken, to promoting skin health amidst taboos at Johnson & Johnson, or observing how legacy goals and informal systems shape financial behavior at Coronation, have shown her that powerful brands co-create with behavior, building meaning with empathy and precision. In emerging markets, behavior is the blueprint, and leadership requires following culture as much as data.

Anaekwe addresses the challenges women face in branding, highlighting that the market is not neutral. Women navigate systems not designed for them, often magnified by cultural expectations, access gaps, and pressure to overperform. As a mother building a career in male-dominated spaces, she emphasizes the importance of boundaries alongside ambition. Through her initiative, “Brand Like a Woman,” she observes women battling bias, expected to lead with empathy yet judged for ambition. She believes the real challenge is not capability but permission, advocating for women to be trusted, funded, and heard, creating spaces where they can brand from a place of power, where storytelling becomes strategy, and visibility becomes value, ultimately shifting culture and benefiting the world.

Mentorship, for Anaekwe, is a crucial infrastructure in Africa, bridging talent with visibility and potential with power. She advocates for intentional, strategic mentorship rooted in accountability, fostering co-creation across generations where experience meets fresh perspective. For future African brand leaders, mentorship normalizes ambition, demystifies leadership, and accelerates readiness, making the future of branding on the continent inevitable by equipping the next generation who are already building.

Her advice to aspiring brand professionals includes an obsession with craft, customer, and cultural context, emphasizing curiosity as an edge. She encourages taking risks early, pivoting roles, and embracing new industries, as growth occurs outside comfort zones. Treating one’s network as capital, delivering excellence, and daring to stand out are also crucial. Lastly, she advises protecting one’s voice, asserting that leadership is about clarity, conviction, and consistency, and that one’s voice is power that should never be shrunk to fit small rooms.

The future of branding in Africa, according to Anaekwe, will be defined by ownership: ownership of narrative, platforms, and value. Moving from consumption to creation, and from imitation to innovation, the next decade belongs to brands that are unapologetically local yet globally relevant. This future will feature brands built on cultural intelligence, storytelling rooted in identity, and business models reflecting how Africans truly live, earn, and aspire. Her role is to help build brands that not only sell but initiate shifts—making financial services more human at Coronation and amplifying women’s leadership through Brand Like a Woman. She envisions an ecosystem where African ideas lead, setting the pace rather than merely catching up.

In financial services branding, Anaekwe is driving a critical shift from complexity to clarity, and from transactional to transformational. In a sector where language often excludes and trust is hard-won, branding must build belief by simplifying communication, elevating presence, and designing culturally and emotionally resonant experiences. The brand must serve as a compass, guiding people to build, protect, and pass on wealth with dignity and confidence, reshaping how the continent understands money and possibility. Balancing authenticity and commercial goals is not a trade-off but a multiplier, as cultural fluency in Africa is a path to scale and resonance. She emphasizes that culture must be core, not mere decor, citing successful collaborations like the Nigerian Football Federation partnership, which earned FIFA recognition by tapping into national pride and collective identity, demonstrating that commercial ambition and cultural truth power each other.

Strategic brand and sports collaborations, she believes, offer cultural relevance, emotional reach, and mass visibility. Her work with Manchester City FC, UEFA Champions League, Formula 1, Euro 2020, James Bond premieres, and the Nigerian Football Federation illustrates how aligning with global fanbases and shared values can connect with diverse audiences. These partnerships provide African brands a shortcut to global conversation and cultural capital, but only when there is natural alignment and authenticity, making the brand feel bigger, braver, and more human in moments of joy and passion.

Emerging African branding trends include a shift from storytelling to