O'Donnell believes that marketers should be leading business today: "Today everything we do is marketing, yet nothing we do is marketing.
"It's all about strategy, input and driving the organization, with marketing now a lot deeper than in the past where we focused on outputs in the form of ads or promotions."
To properly lead a business, O'Donnell says marketers should have a good understanding of the business and all of its machinations.
"The market has undergone a fundamental change and consumers are still trying to adjust. We have to look around us to determine how our markets will be affected."
O'Donnell suggests moving ad agencies out of the northern suburbs: "We need agencies in Polokwane and Bloemfontein where they can reflect communities and communicate the right messages."
O'Donnell advocates marketers as business leaders who should be moving away from communicating to persuading and from reacting to change to creating change: "Marketing leaders are the architects of integration, not engineers or accountants."
