Renowned for building household brands to shaping Africa’s digital marketplace, Jiji Africa’s Head of Marketing and PR, Majolie Obaje, shares insights on innovation, consumer behaviour, leadership, AI, and the future of marketing in this interview with GODWIN AIKIGBE
Can you walk us through your journey into marketing and public relations, and what motivated you to choose this career path?
My entry into marketing and public relations was driven by a deep fascination with human behaviour and storytelling. I have always been intrigued by the “why” behind consumer choices, why people trust certain brands, what triggers loyalty, and how a well-crafted narrative can bridge the gap between a business solution and an everyday human need. I’ll tell you a story. I recall my final interview with Sir Ropo Alabi, Founder and CEO of Linkpoint Resources Int’l Ltd, the very first marketing agency that gave me a chance to explore the industry, and him asking how I would endear a particular beverage brand to the younger generation. I found myself sharing the exact strategy I had thought about for this brand not too long before then. That was a defining moment for me, because I had watched my mum’s loyalty to this particular brand over time and often wondered why my siblings and I never really connected with it. I knew I had to do marketing. It was in my DNA, so I plunged right in.
From the onset, I loved that marketing felt like the perfect marriage of creativity, psychology and business strategy. It allowed me to curate experiences that directly impact bottom-line growth and transform lives. It still does.
Which key moments have been most influential in shaping your career path?
There have been a few, but two stand out vividly. The first was transitioning into the e-commerce and classifieds sector with Jiji Africa. Moving from localised campaign management to steering marketing and PR across multiple African markets (including Nigeria and Kenya) forced me to scale my thinking overnight. It taught me that Africa is not a monolith: what drives a user in Lagos is fundamentally different from what moves another user in Nairobi.
The second major defining moment happened just days ago at MarkHack 5.0, where I was honoured with the ‘CMO Innovation & Future Impact Award’. Standing on that stage was an incredible validation of both personal effort and the collective resilience of our team at Jiji. It reinforced that when you anchor your marketing strategy on solving real and structural economic problems for people, business growth and industry recognition naturally follow.
What habits or guiding principles have played the biggest role in your success?
I’d say intellectual curiosity for sure. The digital ecosystem is fast evolving, and the moment you think you know it all, you become obsolete. Also, having radical empathy as a principle has always helped. I’m able to step into the shoes of the consumer while designing a campaign that solves their problem. Lastly, creativity without data is just an expensive hobby, so I’ve set a culture where every creative concept must answer to a measurable data frame that contributes towards our business goals.
Jiji has become a household name in Nigeria. Which marketing strategies have been most effective in driving that growth?
Our growth at Jiji is anchored on a very specific value proposition: eliminating the middleman and making buying and selling easy. Unlike traditional transactional e-commerce platforms, Jiji operates as a classifieds marketplace where buyers and sellers interact directly. This eliminates artificial mark-ups and gives small businesses full control over their sales pipeline.
Jiji’s trajectory from an ambitious classifieds platform to an absolute household name across Africa is the result of a deliberate and aggressive strategy of market consolidation, programme-driven acquisitions, and vertical specialisation. While many digital platforms attempt to build everything from scratch, our strategy has been to acquire established players, absorb their market share, and seamlessly integrate them into the Jiji ecosystem.
A defining turning point in our growth strategy was our acquisition of OLX assets across five African countries, including Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana. This move instantly consolidated the classifieds market, eliminated our largest direct competitor, and gave us immediate access to millions of active buyers and sellers. From a marketing perspective, our challenge wasn’t just acquiring the technology but managing the migration of user trust. We executed a seamless brand-transition campaign that reassured legacy OLX users of enhanced security and access to a wider network of users. This helped us successfully retain their loyalty.
We also recognised that to dominate the digital economy, we needed to go deep into high-value verticals. This insight drove our acquisition of Cars45, the then market leader in the automotive transaction space. Marrying Jiji’s massive online traffic with Cars45’s physical inspection centres and technical expertise helped us solve the biggest bottleneck in the African used-car market: trust. We backed this up with aggressive category-specific marketing campaigns that positioned Jiji as the safest, most transparent marketplace for high-ticket items like cars and property.
Our growth has been powered by a dual strategy: we use strategic acquisitions to expand our product categories and secure market leadership, while deploying hyper-localised performance marketing to keep user engagement and retention at an all-time high. This combination is why we command the classifieds space across the continent today.
How do you strike a balance between creativity and data-driven decision-making?
I look at data as the skeleton and creativity as the flesh and blood. You cannot have a healthy body without both. Data tells us where the opportunity is, who the consumer is, and what channels they frequent. But data cannot write a script that makes a user smile or take action. That is where creativity comes in.
At Jiji, we utilise continuous A/B testing. We let our creative team run wild with compelling messaging, unique angles and cultural storytelling. But we launch them as controlled experiments. We look closely at key metrics like conversion rates, customer acquisition costs and customer lifetime value in the long term. If the data show that a creative asset is underperforming, we optimise it in real time. If it hits, we scale it.
How do you keep your marketing messages relevant in a fast-changing market?
We remain relevant by staying deeply embedded in the consumer’s macroeconomic reality. For example, the current economic climate, borne of rising inflation costs, tells us that consumers have become more price-sensitive. The spike in the use of the price filter, as we recently reported, meant that we had to pivot our messaging framework. So instead of just talking about variety, we’re leaning heavily into economic empowerment and cost-saving. We launched campaigns showcasing how Jiji allows small businesses to eliminate commissions and store rental costs completely, helping them retain 100% of their profits so they can survive these trying times.
In Kenya, we recently launched the Jiji Academy with a course we’re currently offering for free called ‘Zero to Profit’. This course is aimed at helping young business owners, the underemployed and the unemployed gain the skills required to start or scale their businesses to profitability.
Relevance happens when a brand stops trying to sell a product and starts solving an immediate, everyday frustration for its audience, and that’s exactly what we do at Jiji.
What role do consumer insights play in shaping campaign development?
Consumer insight is the foundation of our entire marketing structure. For example, through deep consumer listening, we recognised a significant gap in digital inclusion for women entrepreneurs. We found that they run over 60 per cent of informal businesses in Nigeria but lack access to digital tools.
This specific insight birthed our ‘Biz Queens Run the World on Jiji’ campaign, launched in partnership with the Association of Small Business Owners of Nigeria. Through this campaign, we empowered over 50 female-led businesses with tools like smartphones, a laptop and free Boost Packages on Jiji. That campaign succeeded because it was born out of a real human insight.
What has been the most important PR lesson you’ve learned over the course of your career?
I’ve learned that perception is reality, but truth is the only sustainable anchor. In PR, you can paint a beautiful picture, but if the actual product experience or company operations do not back up that picture, the public will eventually tear down the facade. To win in PR, what your brand does must match what it says. This is your brand truth.
How do you handle brand reputation in today’s social media era?
The single biggest PR lesson I’ve learned is that corporate gatekeeping is officially dead. The audience now owns the narrative. Early in the history of public relations, organisations could control a narrative through press releases or legal non-disclosure agreements. Many also explored close relationships with traditional media editors. If a crisis arose, you could effectively contain it from the top down. Today, social media has completely dismantled that dynamic, and looking back, I’d say one event that completely changed PR for my generation was the global explosion of the #MeToo movement on Twitter years ago.
That movement was a classic masterclass for communicators everywhere. It proved that a single, decentralised hashtag could bypass billions of dollars in corporate legal protection, completely topple institutional gatekeepers, and force immediate global accountability within a matter of days. It also positioned social media as a leveller where the collective voice of the public can now shift corporate realities overnight.
That incident taught me that you can do all the fine, glossy stuff on billboards, but your brand reputation is the sum total of what people say about you when you’re not in the room. This lesson dictates how we protect the Jiji brand today.
We operate with the absolute understanding that transparency, accountability, and alignment between our corporate actions and public statements are key to our crisis management system.
Could you share an example of a crisis communication situation and how your team managed it?
When Jiji initially scaled across Nigeria, our biggest reputational bottleneck was trust and platform security. Because we are an open classifieds marketplace, bad actors tried to exploit the platform to scam unsuspecting buyers. It was a severe crisis that threatened our core brand value.
Instead of shying away or running defensive PR campaigns, we tackled it head-on with structural transparency and heavy technological investment. We publicly acknowledged the challenge and launched a massive, continuous user-education campaign across traditional and digital media. More importantly, we revamped our internal platform security algorithms.
We invested heavily in AI-driven verification systems and automated fraud detection, which have successfully reduced the scam rate on Jiji to less than one percent. That one brand crisis today has become our greatest competitive advantage, backing up our communication with real, tangible technological solutions.
How do you evaluate the success of a PR campaign beyond just media coverage?
Clipping newspaper pages and calculating advertising value equivalency is an outdated metric. We measure PR by its impact on business outcomes and brand health.
We track share of voice against competitors, Net Promoter Scores, and sentiment analysis movement (from negative or neutral to positive). We also monitor direct behavioural actions, for instance, did a specific campaign PR push result in a surge of organic search traffic? That is how you measure PR success.
What key qualities do you prioritise when assembling a marketing and communications team?
I look for three things: the hard and soft skills to deliver on the job, high emotional intelligence, and a bias for execution. Part of having the requisite skills includes being adept in the use of relevant martech and AI tools, or showing the curiosity to learn. High EQ is non-negotiable because marketing is fundamentally about understanding human behaviour and emotions. If you cannot empathise with your teammates, you cannot empathise with your customers. Finally, I value people who own their execution. I would rather manage a wild, creative executioner who makes occasional mistakes than a perfect planner who never ships a campaign.
What leadership insights have you gained from managing teams and projects?
The greatest leadership lesson I’ve learned is that my job isn’t to be the smartest person in the room, but to remove roadblocks for the smartest people in the room. When managing cross-functional teams across multiple markets, micromanagement is a fast track to failure. True leadership means setting a clear strategic vision, aligning on the performance tracking model, and stepping back to empower your team to execute. It also means giving them the visibility and credit when things go right, and taking full responsibility when otherwise.
How do you respond to setbacks or campaigns that fall short of expectations?
In our department, we don’t view setbacks as failures. We consider them data points. If a campaign fails to hit its target KPI, we immediately hold a review during which we dissect the core issues, for instance, what went wrong? Was it a channel mismatch? Was the creative hook weak? Did we misread the consumer context?
We extract the lesson, document it and pivot immediately. In a fast-moving market like Nigeria, you can’t afford to mourn a failed campaign. Your best bet is to adjust the strategy and launch the next iteration as soon as possible.
What marketing trends should businesses be watching in the coming years?
This is an interesting question. Businesses should definitely consider the move from mass personalisation to predictive hyper-localisation. The brands that will continue winning in the marketplace are those already using data to anticipate consumer needs before they consciously express them.
Another trend to watch out for is the rising importance of trust and brand community. Consumers are becoming fatigued and sceptical about corporate advertising. We’re seeing a shift towards trusting peer recommendations and community-based marketing.
Third is the explosion of conversational commerce. In Africa, commerce is deeply relational, so platforms that seamlessly integrate direct chat and negotiation features, like we’ve done on the Jiji interface, will completely outpace rigid, purely transactional systems.
How is AI reshaping the marketing and PR industry?
This ties perfectly into the theme of this year’s MarkHack event: ‘The Culture Algorithm: AI x Human Experience’. AI is transforming our industry by automating hyper-efficient data analysis, predictive consumer profiling, and rapid content scaling. For us at Jiji, AI is a core engine behind our user safety mechanism, fraud mitigation, and ad optimisation.
However, the real magic happens where humans adopt AI as a collaborative tool or partner. AI can give you the algorithm, but right now it can’t handle, with your own human intuition and lived experiences, the need to understand cultural nuances, the humour, subtle economic anxieties, and triumphs of the real-life African consumer. As one of the speakers at the event rightly said, AI shouldn’t replace your brain, else you risk suffering from brain rot. Humans are designed as thinking and creative beings. The quality of your prompt is directly proportional to the quality of result AI is likely to deliver. I always recommend using AI for the heavy lifting, like data analysis, while it frees up space for you to focus on strategy mapping and relatable emotional storytelling.
What opportunities does the digital economy present for African brands?
The opportunities are enormous, and that’s because Africa has the youngest, most digital-native population globally, coupled with a booming smartphone penetration rate, roughly 65 per cent as of early 2026, according to GSMA Intelligence.
African brands have a unique opportunity to entirely leapfrog legacy infrastructure. We’re already leaders in mobile money and fintech integration. Right now, the digital economy is opening up cross-border trade opportunities within the continent under frameworks like AfCFTA. This means that African brands that can build trust, leverage localised tech solutions, and directly empower small businesses are most likely to scale globally.
What advice would you offer to young people looking to pursue a career in marketing and PR?
Strive to be a well-rounded and grounded marketer. Focus on learning the ropes and give in to mentorship. Master the fundamentals of digital data now, because the future of marketing belongs to those who can look at a spreadsheet and extract a beautiful, human story from it. Become a member of relevant institutions like the National Institute of Marketing of Nigeria, where you’ll be exposed to relevant training, certifications and mentorship.
More importantly, learn to build authentic networks. Be part of the ecosystem, attend industry platforms, speak to people, and show up with a mindset of value creation.
Which skills will be most critical for future marketing leaders?
Data fluency has to be at the top for me. Future marketing leaders must master the ability to translate complex analytics into immediate business strategy. Developing commercial acumen and agile stakeholder management would follow next. The future of marketing leadership is commercial leadership that delivers business growth systematically.
In today’s landscape, which carries more influence: traditional media or digital media?
No, we’re not doing this battle (laughs). There’s no battle of superiority between the two. What actually works is the strategic convergence of both. Digital media is undoubtedly the engine of immediate scale, precise targeting, real-time engagement and measurable ROI. It is where our primary audience interacts daily.
Traditional media, on the other hand, such as premium print features here in The PUNCH or strategic radio or out-of-home campaigns, still holds immense power in building institutional credibility, mass-market trust and top-of-mind recall for brands and businesses. The most powerful marketing strategies utilise digital media to drive conversions and agility, while leveraging traditional media to build institutional authority and trust.
What is a common misconception people have about PR?
The biggest misconception is that PR is merely ‘damage control’ or ‘firefighting’. In reality, PR is a proactive, long-term business strategy. It is about intentionally building a fortress of goodwill and reputation over time, so that when a crisis inevitably hits, your brand has the trust to survive it.
What lies ahead for you, and for the marketing industry in Africa?
For marketing in Africa, the next level will be the massive adoption of localised MarTech. We’ll be seeing tech solutions built by Africans, driving deeply localised consumer experiences.
For me personally and my work at Jiji Africa, the focus remains on driving aggressive cross-continental expansion and deeper value creation for our network of over 250,000 SMEs. Having won the Innovation & Future Impact Award, my goal is to leverage this momentum to forge deeper, high-level strategic partnerships across industries. We’ll be open to collaborations with other conglomerates and key media stakeholders where our interests align, to further strengthen Jiji’s category dominance beyond Africa.
If you had one message to share with marketers, communicators, and business leaders today, what would it be?
My message is simple: never lose sight of the human behind the data point. In our collective rush to adopt sophisticated AI tools and complex algorithms, it’s easy to treat consumers like mere metrics on a dashboard. The problem is, metrics don’t build sustainable brands. You have to build trust, and the most successful businesses of the future will be those that use technology to eliminate operational friction, while staying tuned to the heartbeat, culture and lived realities of the everyday consumer.
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