THE JUDGES
INTRODUCING THE JUDGES
We are proud to announce the judges of the 2023 South African Loyalty Awards. The judges bring an incredible depth of experience and expertise in the industry to the table. The judging panel consists of 12 seasoned loyalty and CRM professionals whose experience stems across some of South Africa’s leading brands across different industry sectors.
Amanda Cromhout | Awards Judging Chair
Amanda is the founder & CEO of Truth. Amanda’s extensive experience in the field of loyalty & CRM has put Truth at the forefront of the loyalty industry. She spent 11 years at British Airways, leading sales & marketing teams across UK, Africa, Middle East & Asia.
She has also spearheaded the Customer (CRM) division at Woolworths, South Africa. Amanda is invited to speak, professionally, as a keynote speaker and thought-leader in her field, both in South Africa and internationally.
Amanda is also one of the judges at the U.K. Loyalty Magazine Awards, a prestigious, highly acclaimed event, recognising the best in loyalty, globally.
Nicholas Bednall
Nicholas is an executive in the Fintech and Digital marketing industry, with 25+ years experience. He has been identified as one of the top 25 most influential people in advertising in South Africa (Financial Mail) during his tenure as BBDO Cape Town MD. He has held senior management positions in Marketing at Tech companies in the mobile, loyalty and location software sectors and was a founding Director of South Africa’s most awarded Digital Marketing agency.
He has also served as a judge for the Applied Innovation Institute (Mobile World Congress, Barcelona), the South African Innovation and Technology awards (TT100) and was a board member of the Advertising Communications Association (ACA) in South Africa. Nicholas has a Masters in Digital Marketing from IE Business School, Madrid.
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Ursula Kuni
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Ursula is the Chief Data, Analytics, Digital Officer at Hollard Insurance. Ursula has more than 25 years of business experience both as a Strategy consultant with one of the leading international Strategy Consulting firms and in Corporate leadership positions. Her main focus over the past 20 years has been on building Data, Advanced Analytics and Data Science capabilities for major Corporates. She is a strong analytical and strategic thinker with a great delivery track record and a passion for building and leading strong teams that unlock and realise value opportunities.
Areas of core expertise:
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Strategy, Big Data, Advanced Analytics, Data Science, Digital, Loyalty
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Retail, Banking, Credit Cards, Insurance
Candice Goodman
Candice Goodman was the DMA’s Direct Marketer of the Year 2016 and is currently a Non-Executive Board Member of the Direct Marketing Association, heading up the Assegai Awards working group. Over the last few years, she has been on the Education Committee of the IAB, and head of Education at the Mobile Marketing Association of SA. Previously, she was on the MMA Advisory Board as Chairman and was the first Certified MMA Mobile Marketer in South Africa.
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Candice founded mobile marketing technology enabler, Mobitainment, 17 years ago, and has won multiple awards over the past 16 years. Mobitainment earned the coveted title of “#1 Technology Provider in Africa, #4 in EMEA, and #8 globally” from the MMA Global in 2018.
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Wendy Knowler
Wendy Knowler's journalism career spans more than 30 years. For the past two decades, she has specialised in consumer journalism, both in print and on radio.
Her weekly consumer column, In Your Corner, is published on the TimesLive online news site, as well as in Tiso Blackstar print titles the Weekend Post and Daily Dispatch, and she has weekly consumer segments on 702, Cape Talk and East Coast Radio.
Bronwen Rohland
Head of Retail, CPG, Travel, Transportation and Logistics Consulting, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) South Africa.
She has over 30 years of experience gained in the Retail and CPG Sector covering Business Strategy, Information Technology, Supply Chain, Human Resources, Store Operations, Marketing, Customer Experience, Customer Analytics and Loyalty Programmes.
As a previous CMO of a large FMCG retailer she was responsible for the marketing strategy and plan, which included Corporate Communications, Brand, Product Offers, Loyalty, Customer Insights, Digital and Online Shopping. She also led the team that designed, developed and implemented the very successful Smart Shopper loyalty programme that was launched in 2011.
Nick Chambers
Nick is Managing Director of Mobile Loyalty Technologies Limited. Experienced in providing consulting & technology in all aspects of consumer loyalty, payment & ordering from strategy and planning through technical implementation.
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An expert in digital customer engagement he has over a decade of experience in consumer & enterprise internet technology working closely with leading merchant, service & point-of-sale providers.
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Nick is also the Managing Partner at the Customer Strategy Network (CSN) which brings together the worlds’ leading independent practitioners and strategists in customer advocacy & retention strategy.
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CSN represent a diverse mix of global experts in advisory, academia, architecture, data regulation, and analysis of customer loyalty solutions. Our collective focus is on global enhancement and promotion of best practices in customer loyalty engineering.
Kaveer Maharaj
Kaveer is a seasoned loyalty and consumer professional, with a demonstrated history of working across major brands in the last 13 years, within media, retail, financial services, telecommunication and F&B industries. He has specialised in loyalty proposition development and implementation using consumer behaviour and incentive principles to design bespoke and innovative programmes.
Kaveer is currently based in Dubai and involved in launching programmes across multiple Middle Eastern markets; however he still keeps an eye on loyalty trends in South Africa, where he spent most of his career. At the core, he believes in driving emotional transactions through shared value behavioural change programmes and looks to change the way we think about the purpose of Loyalty.
Papi Rapolai
Papi Rapolai is founder and Chief Executive Officer at Tembo Investment Group (Pty) Ltd. Papi is a seasoned retail and Fintech specialist with over 20 years of working experience in banking, grocery retail and Fintech.
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Papi started his career in retail banking as a Product Manager in credit, and later savings and investments for the low-income customer segment. He later joined retail, where he was responsible for sales, customer experience and store operations for value-added services including store credit, insurance, loyalty programmes, clubs and 3rd party payments. His achievements include the relaunch of the Edgars & Jet Thank U programmes, re-launch of Pick n Pay Smart Shopper programme and launch of Stikeez Promotions at Pick n Pay.
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Papi holds an MBA from Henley Africa (Reading University, UK), B Admin degree (majoring in Economics) and several international executive courses from United States of America (Smeal Business College, Penn State USA), Toronto, Canada, Henley Africa, Wits Business School amongst others.
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Varsha Ramesar
Varsha Ramesar is the Executive for Data & Analytics for iOCO, responsible for driving data solutions across the Financial, Insurance, Retail, Telco and Manufacturing Industries.
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She has over 20 years of experience gained locally and overseas in finance, insurance and e-commerce within the data domain, where she has fulfilled various roles in creating new data competencies, designing and implementing data warehouses, intelligence solutions, and data governance & strategy programs.
Varsha is also a Practitioner Coach; a passion of hers that was born from bridging the gap between technology, data, and people. Her current focus is supporting organisations to manage large and diverse sets of data effectively and deriving value from this data to create a rewarding and engaging Customer Experience.
Thandi Jamba
Thandi is the Head of the Information Resource Management department at NERSA and has led various business units in ICT, knowledge management, data analysis and market research enabling diverse operational and strategic business initiatives.
She has over 20 years of experience in market research across the retail market, FMCG and the public sector departments among others; customer insights using big data analysis and market research at Woolworths across the food, clothing, digital, homeware, in-store product cataloguing and loyalty programs as well as energy insights across the electricity generation and distribution industry.
She is driven by her passion for transforming data into consumer insights, information and knowledge for business decision-making purposes thus empowering business to meet strategic objectives.
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Andrew Hall
Andrew has had a 23-year career in the marketing and communication industry. He has worked on some of SA's biggest brands and was the MD of Hero Strategic Marketing for 5 years. Andrew recently started his own venture as a specialist consultant and is working with tech start-up's helping them to package and engage with their target markets and achieve ambitious growth targets.
Andrew has led many large-scale projects and campaigns during his career, but one of his proudest was the conceptualisation, build and delivery of a bespoke loyalty campaign for one of SA's biggest financial services companies. It is here that Andrew’s passion for customer engagement and CRM was born and he has continued to be involved in the loyalty space ever since.
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Leanne Papaioannou
With over 23 years in loyalty strategy development, she has extensive experience in this field and is deeply passionate about every aspect of a business that impacts customer loyalty and drives better commercial outcomes for her clients.
Leanne is an internationally renowned customer loyalty professional who has helped countless forward-thinking companies achieve new heights by adopting her customer-centric B2C & B2B loyalty strategies. Her strengths lie in innovative strategic thinking, exceptional leadership skills and an ability to work with company Boards to deliver commercially successful, award-winning loyalty strategies.
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The judging will be processed in 3 stages:
1) Shortlisting process for all entries:
Each entry will be evaluated and the top 10 entries per category will be shortlisted.
2) Remote judging process for shortlisted entries:
All judges are involved in the remote judging process and will judge each shortlisted nominee independently. The individual shortlisted nominees will be measured and judged against the evaluation criteria for each category.
3) Judging panel process:
The judges will gather at a central meeting point, to discuss their shortlist assessment and will share their individual scoring.
PLEASE NOTE: We take confidentiality very seriously. No judge will have access to any information submitted by brands if they have not signed the code of conduct. The judges also need to declare any conflict of interest before reviewing any of the details within the submissions.