The Women Shaping Marketing and Supply Chain in South Africa
Marketing and supply chain management can look very different from the outside.
One is associated with brands, customers and campaigns. The other with operations, systems and the movement of goods. But both have something fundamental in common: the decisions people make have direct consequences for the business.
Four leaders, four strategic perspectives
For four women working across these fields, success requires more than knowing the latest platform, process or technology. It requires the judgement to question assumptions, recognise when the numbers do not add up and understand when an issue in one department could affect the entire business.
- Bronwyn Strydom is Marketing Manager at Grow Business Coaching, where her work connects marketing activity with commercial outcomes.
- Kershnee Hermanus is a marketing executive and advisory board member for the CMO Council Africa, working at the intersection of marketing, technology and business strategy.
- Jacqui Deeks is Head of Brand and Marketing at St John’s College, bringing decades of marketing experience to an environment where reputation, relationships and trust matter.
- Marzia Storpioli is a supply chain management specialist and lecturer at the IMM Graduate School, drawing on extensive industry experience in which operational decisions carried significant commercial consequences.
Three are IMM Graduate School alumnae, while Marzia now brings her industry experience into the classroom as a lecturer.
Their careers offer four perspectives on what marketing and supply chain management demand today, and why sound judgement still matters in a business world increasingly shaped by data, technology and automation.
When an empty shelf becomes a business lesson
Marzia Storpioli shares a story that illustrates this better than any job description could.
While working for a chocolate manufacturer, she was involved in the launch of a new product that performed exceptionally well. Three months of forecast sales disappeared in just three weeks.
It looked like a great result. Then someone noticed an empty section in the company’s storage area. The space should have contained drums of cocoa powder, but it was empty. A member of the team asked why. That question led the operational team back to the company’s SAP inventory system, where they discovered a critical data error.
There was no time to wait for the normal supply route. The company ultimately chose to air-freight a replacement shipment of cocoa rather than wait for it to arrive by sea.
The decision came at an additional cost, but it helped keep the production line running and ensured that customer demand could continue to be met. What matters most is that someone recognised that something was wrong and felt confident enough to question it.
Marzia’s team had created a culture where someone on the floor could question what they were seeing and know that their concern would be taken seriously.
For Marzia, that is a fundamental part of effective supply chain management. It is not simply about moving products from one place to another. It is about understanding how people, systems, data and commercial risk connect, and having the judgement to act when something does not add up.
That same principle now informs her work as a supply chain management lecturer at the IMM Graduate School.
Accurate information matters, but its value depends on whether people can interpret it, question it and act on it. That lesson extends well beyond supply chain management.
Marketing has changed. The business question has not.
When marketing moves from tactics to real business value
Bronwyn Strydom sees a similar shift from the marketing side of the business.
Attention still matters. But increasingly, it is not enough for a campaign to be noticed. Businesses want to know what happened next.
Did it generate qualified leads? Did it contribute to revenue? Did it help the business grow?
For Bronwyn, this has changed what it means to be a marketer. Digital channels, performance marketing, CRM systems and analytics can all make the work faster and more measurable but knowing how to use these tools is only part of the job. The bigger question is why the work matters to the business.
Her Bachelor of Philosophy Honours in Marketing Management at the IMM Graduate School reinforced that way of thinking. Rather than treating marketing as a series of tactics, the qualification challenged her to consider the wider picture: the customer, the business objective and the strategy connecting the two. That distinction matters.
Marketing is not simply about producing communication. It is about understanding and influencing demand, and recognising why customers choose one organisation, product or service over another.
For marketers, that means developing capabilities that extend beyond individual channels or campaigns:
- understanding customer behaviour and market dynamics;
- connecting marketing activity to commercial objectives;
- interpreting data and evidence;
- making strategic decisions rather than simply executing tactics; and
- demonstrating how marketing contributes to sustainable business growth.
The platforms will change. The business question remains.
When AI makes thinking matter even more
For Kershnee Hermanus, technology is accelerating the pace of marketing, but it is not reducing the need for sound strategic thinking. Artificial intelligence (AI) can generate content, analyse information and automate increasingly sophisticated tasks in a fraction of the time those activities once required.
That creates opportunity. It also creates a new problem.
If the thinking behind the strategy is weak, technology will not correct it; it may simply help a bad idea travel faster. For Kershnee, that makes strategic clarity increasingly important.
Marketers need to understand the customer, the market and the commercial objective before deciding which tools or channels to use.
Her Bachelor of Business Administration in Marketing Management at the IMM Graduate School gave her a foundation in areas such as:
- segmentation and positioning;
- customer behaviour;
- business and marketing strategy; and
- understanding the relationship between marketing decisions and business outcomes.
These principles remain relevant even as the tools around them change.
AI may change how quickly marketers can produce, analyse and distribute their work. It does not remove the need to understand the customer, define the problem or decide what the business is trying to achieve.
Technology will keep moving. The fundamentals still have to hold.
When experience meets academic rigour
Jacqui Deeks came to postgraduate study from a different point in her career.
She was already an experienced marketing professional when she enrolled for the Postgraduate Diploma in Marketing Management at the IMM Graduate School.
With decades of industry experience behind her, she began the qualification with considerable practical knowledge and expected some of the material to be familiar. That combination of professional experience and academic rigour is particularly valuable for working professionals who want to progress their marketing careers while continuing to apply what they learn in the workplace. Studying while working full time demanded discipline.
More importantly, the academic process required her to interrogate decisions she might previously have made from experience or instinct, and to support strategic thinking with theory and evidence.
That combination matters.
Experience tells you what you have seen before. Academic rigour can make you stop and ask why you believe it will happen again.
For an experienced professional, that is not about replacing practical knowledge with theory. It is about making the two work together.
That combination of professional experience and academic rigour is increasingly relevant for working professionals who want to progress their marketing careers without stepping away from the workplace.
The value is not simply in adding another qualification to a CV. It is in developing a more disciplined way of thinking about the decisions that experience alone can sometimes make feel obvious.
What the job titles do not tell you
Their experiences suggest that success in modern marketing and supply chain roles cannot be reduced to a list of software platforms or technical qualifications. They point to capabilities that become increasingly important as professionals move from executing tasks to influencing business decisions:
- Commercial thinking: Bronwyn’s experience demonstrates the importance of moving between digital channels, analytics and CRM without losing sight of the commercial objective.
- Strategic communication: Kershnee’s perspective highlights the ability to engage stakeholders and explain marketing activity in terms that support business decision-making.
- Listening and relationship-building: Jacqui’s experience in education highlights the importance of understanding families and communities, building relationships and earning trust—outcomes that cannot always be captured through a single campaign metric.
- Problem-solving across functions: Marzia’s experience demonstrates how supply chain professionals can influence business decisions by helping marketing teams reconsider product design to meet launch dates or motivating executive management to address equipment-maintenance risks.
- The common thread is not a particular tool. It is the ability to see beyond the immediate task.
A marketer needs to understand more than marketing. A supply chain professional needs to understand more than supply chain. Both need to understand the business problem they are actually trying to solve.
That is where specialist business disciplines become particularly important. Marketing and supply chain management may operate in different parts of an organisation, but both contribute to solving commercial problems and creating business value.
The value of asking better questions
Women’s Month content can sometimes fall into a predictable pattern: identifying a group of successful women and assigning them a collection of admirable qualities. These four stories suggest something more useful.
Their experiences show that leadership does not take a single form, nor is professional success defined by one prescribed set of characteristics. What these careers do demonstrate is the value of different perspectives and the confidence to question what others may have accepted as normal.
- Jacqui focuses on listening to people and understanding what matters to them.
- Bronwyn looks beyond campaign attention to what that attention produces.
- Kershnee questions whether faster technology is necessarily producing better decisions.
- Marzia’s story begins with perhaps the simplest question of all: “Why is this empty?”
That question helped prevent a production shutdown.
In another context, the right question might reveal that an expensive campaign is generating attention without sufficient business value. It might expose a long-standing assumption about customers or identify an operational risk before it becomes a crisis.The value is not asking questions for the sake of it. It is in having the knowledge, confidence and judgement to do something with the answer.
And that is a capability that applies well beyond marketing or supply chain management.
Where ambition becomes capability
The experiences of these four women also demonstrate why focused, business-relevant education matters at every stage of a professional career.
At the IMM Graduate School, qualifications in marketing and supply chain management are intended to develop more than theoretical knowledge or technical proficiency. They support the development of professionals who can:
They require professionals who can:
- understand customers, markets and commercial objectives;
- interpret information and data;
- challenge assumptions;
- identify and manage operational and commercial risk;
- work effectively across functions;
- communicate with stakeholders; and
- make decisions with real business consequences.
For Jacqui, Bronwyn and Kershnee, studying at the IMM Graduate School helped strengthen the way they evaluate and approach decisions in their careers. As a lecturer, Marzia draws on her industry experience to help students understand the practical judgement required in supply chain environments.
Together, their stories illustrate something important about the future of marketing and supply chain management in South Africa.
Technology will continue to reshape professional practice, data will become increasingly accessible and artificial intelligence will accelerate the pace at which information is produced and decisions are made. But businesses will still need people who can interpret what they are seeing, understand what it means, ask the right questions and decide what to do next.
That is where education becomes more than information. It becomes the ability to recognise a problem, ask a better question and make a better decision.
Where ambition becomes capability.
Explore the IMM Graduate School’s marketing and supply chain management qualifications at www.imm.ac.za.