Tech expert and marketer, Lade Falobi, has said marketing should focus on solving real problems rather than trying to project grand philosophies or save the world. She explained that in business to business technology, especially software services, the goal is to make life easier for users through clarity and usefulness, not perfection or abstract ideals.
Falobi, whose background spans journalism, photography and marketing, said her journey has been shaped by a deep culture of reading and inquiry. Growing up in a family of journalists, she developed an early habit of questioning how ideas are formed and communicated. This curiosity later evolved into a method she now applies in marketing, reverse engineering successful campaigns to understand the thinking behind them rather than simply copying results.
Her career took a defining turn after she moved from traditional advertising to growth marketing for tech startups. According to her, the shift forced her to unlearn the belief that creativity alone drives success. She noted that in the tech space, trust and clarity matter more than clever messaging, as users want to clearly understand what a product does before they buy into it.
Falobi’s move into in house roles at technology companies further reshaped her understanding of marketing. With direct access to data and customer behaviour tools, she became responsible for systems that directly influenced product growth and user experience. She described this phase as the point where marketing stopped being advisory and became deeply connected to product performance.
In 2022, Falobi launched Marketing for Geeks, a newsletter that later grew into a community of marketers across Africa. What began as a personal effort to document why certain ads worked evolved into a platform for sharing insights grounded in marketing first principles. The community now includes hundreds of marketers and places emphasis on thoughtful analysis over popularity or social status.
She said the community was also created to challenge the Lagos centric nature of the tech ecosystem by building spaces for marketers outside major hubs. While the group has since expanded beyond its original base, Falobi noted that its core values remain rooted in curiosity, learning and practical thinking.
Falobi has also raised concerns about the growing reliance on artificial intelligence in marketing, particularly among beginners. She warned that without a solid understanding of user psychology and persuasion frameworks, entry level marketers risk outsourcing their thinking to AI tools, leading to weaker outcomes and shallow work.
Looking ahead, Falobi is stepping into entrepreneurship with the launch of JumpWag, a new startup focused on helping content creators grow on TikTok. The tool, built with an all female founding team, uses artificial intelligence to help users engage trends in a meaningful way. She said the goal is not just to market better, but to build tools that improve how marketing itself is done.