Earlier in April, we, Bangladesh Brand Forum, have completed our 12-year anniversary. We celebrated, we recalled our achievements and paid gratitude towards our well-wishers. While celebrating, we realized how challenging the past 12 years were for a think-tank organization like us to survive and thrive. We comprehended, what brought us here, will not take us to where we want to go. Hence, in this piece, we are sharing our newly defined ambitions and strategic goals, following a short trip down the memory lane. As a platform for the thought leaders, we have always tried to keep our stakeholders aligned with our vision. This piece, written from the core of our heart, is just another attempt to do that, so they can guide us in the future in all our endeavors.

In 2007, the journey of Bangladesh Brand Forum started with the first-ever BBF Seminar, which was titled as Brand Seminar at that time. It was a time when just a handful of brands were practicing innovation in their way of doing things. So, our idea was to make the brands realize that better branding leads to a better economy. When your brand grows, your business expands consequently creating more employment opportunities. A big brand doesn’t create employment only with its direct operations – it helps the advertising industry grow, it helps the physical-branding material vendors grow, it helps the smallest of the retailers grow. All these collectively help the country’s economy thrive. So, our core idea was to instill branding ethos among the local corporates, hence, our tagline was ‘Inspiring Brands in Bangladesh’.

In the following years, we started exploring new avenues of engagement with our stakeholders – who were mostly business leaders, academicians, creative and corporate professionals. We started publishing this monthly magazine with global branding & marketing insights. We felt that recognition could drive the brands to do better and Best Brand Award Bangladesh was introduced in the year 2008. We realized the dire need of discussions on business leadership and initiated Leadership Summit where global experts came and shared knowledge with our local leaders. In an attempt to inspire the creative minds to thrive, we initiated ‘Commward: Excellence in Creative Communication’ in 2009, the first ever award initiative for the Bangladeshi advertising industry. Our quest to inspire the brands and the marketing community took a step further when we organized the first ever World Marketing Summit in the year 2012. With a mission to promote Bangladesh on the global platform, we put together three expositions on Bangladeshi Art, Culture and Business Innovation in USA, UK, and France.

This was a time when the country was in the first phase of the digital revolution. The whole world was changing fast. In the last five years, we took several new initiatives such as Digital Marketing Summit, Bangladesh YouthFest, Bangladesh Innovation Conclave, NRB Conclave and a few more.

Now, why are all these reminiscences in this BBF 2.0 story? The answer, interestingly, is ‘WHY’. Why did we think of BBF 2.0? No, the name is not changing; however, we have rethought our ambitions.

We have been playing the role of a disseminator of knowledge from the very beginning. And we have been successful in that role. However, the future will be anything but what we can think of. We often read reports by global think-tanks that half of the jobs will be taken over by machines. For an overpopulated country like Bangladesh, the impact of this rapid change will be even more dangerous. Right now, we are in the middle of that digital revolution and by the end of the next decade, we will be completely submerged in it. The big question is, are our youth being groomed enough for that future? Are our professionals working on themselves enough to take the new challenges?

Questions like these drove us to rethink our purpose, prompted us to reshape our model, our role in the country’s development. We do not want to be the disseminator of knowledge only. We want to make a meaningful impact in the lives of the people – the nation. Therefore, our new tagline, Inspiring the Nation.

Now, an ambition this big requires extensive effort, strategic planning and most importantly time. We are seeing it from three broad perspectives. First, the professionals need to be groomed with newer functional skills, more effective leadership prowess, and industry-wide farsightedness. Second, the 8 divisions of the country should evolve as 8 growth hubs, from where region-level innovation will be driven. Third, the youth must be nurtured from the very beginning to face the challenges of the new world. Another perspective, which relates to all the previous three, is empowerment and grooming of women. What we have learned from the past 12 years, will help us in the next phase of our journey and we will do that in the following way.

Solely from Bangladesh Brand Forum, we will drive our new agenda across three sections – Functional Skills Engagement, Sector-specific Initiatives, Communication Media. Functional skills such as communication, sales, marketing, leadership, etc. will enhance the capability of our professionals to take newer challenges. Along with summit and dialogues, we will offer extensive courses through our academies for these skills. Global and local trainers, mentors, academicians will groom this new generation of professionals. To create awareness about the prospects of booming industries, we will have multiple initiatives for Modern Retail, Fintech, Apparel, Family Business, Tourism & Hospitality, and Real-estate & Future City. Industry best practices around the world will be shared with local stakeholders through our platforms. Collaborating with global think-tanks, we will simultaneously bring in knowledge and promote our industries globally. For disseminating the knowledge generated from these initiatives, we will revamp our existing print and digital media and will consult industry stakeholders directly.

Bangladesh Innovation Conclave will facilitate the drive of innovation throughout the country through 8 Innovation Centers in 8 divisions. The innovation centers will act as regional growth hubs. Guided by the central hub from the capital, the core responsibility of these hubs will be to ignite innovation among the young minds in their respective regions.

Youth will be another broad segment of our future endeavors. It is unquestionable that Bangladesh’s demography dividend is one of the most important factors for the country’s growth. We had successfully held two YouthFests throughout the country in 2016 and 2017. Moving forward, we are changing the whole module of Bangladesh YouthFest by making it absolutely digital. Along with the fest, there will be a digital learning platform titled ‘YouthHub’. YouthHub will be a platform for learning, inspiration, and mentorship, available for every youth across the country.

These three broad segments, however, will be interlinked with one another. Although they all have distinct purposes, it’s the people whom they will all cater to. A young student who aspires to thrive will get every learning material from YouthHub, guidance to practice innovation from the Innovation Centers, and advanced skill development training through BBF’s core initiatives when they become professionals. It’s a journey of learning that we want to provide to the future leaders.

We will be a catalyst for women to explore their power into possibilities. Women in Leadership, an established platform for professional women, will collaborate with us in our future endeavors. WIL has been igniting women empowerment through its multiple initiatives since 2014. It brings together female business leaders, corporate professionals, academicians, and creative professionals in order to create a discourse on women-related issues. Being perfectly aligned with our agenda of inspiring the nation, WIL will be an integral part of the next phase of our journey.

Bangladesh is growing at an unprecedented speed. Currently among the top three fastest-growing economies, Bangladesh’s future looks only bright and it will be even brighter by the end of the next decade. From cricket to agriculture, from socio-economical development to manufacturing, Bangladesh will only thrive in every sector. Just google ‘Future of Bangladesh’ and you will see what the world is anticipating about us. We have said it before and will say it again – what we do in the next decade will define the following 100 years for us. The things that we need to fix right now are our mindset to innovate, our inner strength to thrive, our humane connection and our divergent thinking capability. The future will do the rest for us.  

Compiled by Raiyan Rumman