Godfrey Parkin is an internationally respected digital strategist and edtech pioneer. He is on the boards of a number of global tech startups, and has advised household-name companies in more than thirty countries on strategy, digital marketing, e-learning, and innovation.
He is the bestselling author of several books, including “Doing Business Digitally,” “Digital Marketing: Strategies for Success,” and “Own the Future: Strategies for Digital Disruption.”
Godfrey brings to his Britefire clients a unique blend of international corporate experience and entrepreneurial vision. His career began in FMCG marketing, market research, and business intelligence. After heading the global business development operations of Nielsen, Godfrey went on to found a series of successful digital companies in Zurich, London, Washington, D.C., and Cape Town. He’s a co-founder and CEO of MindZu, a disruptive edtech company teaching maths and science via mobile phone to high school learners in Africa, India and around the world. MindZu beat more than 3,000 startups from 80 countries to make it to the finals of the Global EdTech Startup Awards in 2020.
Godfrey has a life-long passion for consumer behaviour, and for modelling how networks influence the way people make decisions. Through OD and blended skills development work, he helped major organisations like Credit Suisse transform their operations, grow sales massively and rise to the top of customer reputation leader-boards. He pioneered virtual worlds and 3D avatar technologies in computer gaming and movie CGI, and patented technologies which are still used today. He brought socially-networked productivity to the global Project Management teams of many Fortune 100 corporations and US government agencies, including Cisco Systems, IBM and Ford. He took organisations like Georgia Tech, Kepner-Tregoe, and American Honda into the world of e-learning. He built the largest Project Management e-learning company in the US. And he created North America’s best-selling enterprise-wide digital transformation program, helping to bring organisations like Sasktel and AT&T into the digital era.
The businesses he has founded have all successfully pushed the digital envelope by inventing technologies or processes to make new customer experiences possible, or by applying existing tech in disruptive customer-centric ways.
Today, Godfrey Parkin facilitates board-level strategy development in companies whose markets are increasingly disrupted by technology or other external change. For example, he worked with each of the TFG retail brands to help them define and achieve their strategies for omnichannel success. He is an Associate of the Centre for Innovative Leadership. He is on the faculty of USB-ED, where he runs executive development programs in digital strategy. He runs the Social Media Boot Camp and the Digital Media Master Class for the DMA, and leads Britefire’s Own The Future and Start-up Workshop programs.
Always at the forefront of tech innovation, he has addressed countless international conferences, exhibited at trade shows such as E3, Siggraph, and ASTD ICE. He’s partnered on creative content, strategy and brand development with movie studios, celebrities and aristocracy. He’s appeared on radio and television, and been a popular columnist and blogger. His insight, wealth of real-world stories, and penchant for challenging the status quo make Godfrey Parkin a sought-after conference speaker and workshop facilitator.
He has a degree in Business Science, majoring in Marketing, from the University of Cape Town.
Godfrey Parkin is on Twitter @gparkin where he shares only the best news and views from the digital sector, and he hosts the Growth Hackers TV talk show. He lives in Cape Town, and works worldwide.