Godfrey Parkin is a digital strategist, marketer, edtech pioneer and author. He is on the boards of a number of global tech startups, and has advised companies in more than thirty countries on strategy, digital marketing, sales development, e-learning, and innovation.
He is the bestselling author of several books, including “Customer First: Persuasive Selling Skills,” “Web Savvy,” “Doing Business Digitally,” “Digital Marketing: Strategies for Success,” and “Own the Future: Strategies for Digital Disruption.”
Godfrey brings to his clients a unique blend of international corporate experience and entrepreneurial vision, enriched by his insight into the changing dynamics of consumer behaviour. His career began in FMCG marketing 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 via mobile phone to high school learners, using the immersive interaction of gameplay and virtual worlds. 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 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.
For more than 10 years Godfrey was the official e-learning guru of the American Society for Training and Development (now ATD), and was both a judge for the Brandon Hall International Learning Excellence Awards and a founding member of the Learning Circuits blog team. His “Parkin Space” column in the UK e-learning journal Training Zone was always among the most widely read content in the publication.
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 Social Media Boot Camps and leads Britefire’s Own The Future and Start-up Workshop programs. He also provides virtual training via a number of MOOCs.
Always at the forefront of tech innovation, he has addressed countless international conferences and exhibited at expos such as E3, Siggraph, and ASTD ICE. He’s collaborated on creative content, strategy and brand development with movie studios and titled aristocracy. He’s appeared on radio, television and podcasts, 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 and he hosts the Growth Hackers TV talk show. He lives in Cape Town, and works worldwide.