In 2025, Prof. Adèle Potgieter did something no one from Nelson Mandela University’s George Campus had done before: she outperformed every colleague on the university’s larger Gqeberha campus to win the Nelson Mandela University’s Vice Chancellor Best Integrated Researcher award, as well as the VC’s engagement award— a first for George Campus, and a first for the Department of Marketing Management. “My academic career has been like a fairytale to me,” she said at the time. It still reads that way – except this fairy tale began not in a lecture hall but on a trading floor.
A Foundation in Finance
Prof. Potgieter’s professional life began in South Africa’s financial services industry after she completed her studies in Investment Management. She worked in treasury and capital markets, including a stint at the Development Bank of South Africa, gaining hard-earned experience in investments, financial planning, and governance. It was a world of high stakes and high responsibility, one that demanded careful judgement and left no room for sloppу accountability – lessons that, decades later, would resurface in an unexpected place.
The corporate world gave her real expertise, but it also taught her that success can take many forms. She has described those years as “a fantastic, yet plastic life a phrase that captures both her gratitude for the experience and her sense that something more was still ahead.
A Journey in a Different Direction
A Journey in a Different Direction A major turning point led Prof. Potgieter and her family to relocate to George. Leaving an established finance career behind was not an easy decision but it opened the door to a profession she had never planned for. That door was a part -time lecturing position in marketing at Nelson Mandela University.
That was 20 years ago. What began as a temporary role became a career she genuinely loves one built on learning, discussion, and helping others realise their potential rather than balancing a ledger. “Every class, every conversation with students, and every new subject challenged her to grow, as she puts it teaching, she found, gave her something the corporate world never had the chance to influence lives through knowledge rather than financial outcomes.
The First of Her Kind
Starting over in a new profession took patience most people don’t have the stomach for. Prof. Potgieter supervised postgraduate students, helped shape curriculum, and built a research profile from scratch across several areas of marketing and business – progress that came, in her words, through “consistent learning, collaboration, and a willingness to embrace opportunities. It led, eventually, to her appointment as Associate Professor.
Then came the award that made history for her campus and her department in the same afternoon. It was proof that a career built on a leap of faith could out compete careers built the conventional way and it marked the start of a decade in which Prof. Potgieter has rarely been out of the awards conversation since.
Research Driven by Real Challenges
Ask Prof. Potgieter what she studies and the list sounds broad branding, corporate reputation, consumer behaviour, employer branding, digital transformation. Ask her why, and the answer narrows fast she wants to know how organisations earn trust, and how research can help them do it better. “Universities and industry benefit when they work together,” she says. “Research becomes more valuable when it addresses practical challenges, and businesses benefit when they have access to reliable knowledge.”
That conviction has taken her research into unexpected places. In Ghana, she partnered with the Oniversity of Media. Arts and Communication to study how Adinkra symbols traditional West African visual motifs – could be used to build a stronger, more culturally resonant footwear brand identity, and how gender shapes consumers’ responses to it. In Greece, she worked with academics at the College of Degree to compare graduate employability across two very different economies, publishing findings that South African and Greek graduates are shaped by strikingly different motivational drivers work that has directly influenced how she now designs her own students’ workplace-readiness training. And in 2017, the same year as her first at George Campus, she brought home a Best Paper Award from an international conference in Singapore.
The Trust Question
Ask Prof. Potgieter what draws her back to the same research question, and it isn’t a branding technique – it’s trust. “My research has always been driven by one central question: why do people trust certain organisations, brands, and leaders while disengaging from others?” she says. Branding, in her view, extends far beyond logos or advertising: it reflects organisational culture, leadership, reputation, employee behaviour, and stakeholder relationships. The line of thinking traces back to a question she kept returning to earlier in her career – do people buy from an individual or from an organisation? Does the individual become the organisation’s brand, or does the organisation’s brand become a combination of the individual brands within it? That question now runs through her work on corporate branding, employer branding, personal branding and higher education branding – all of it aimed at helping organisations build relationships with stakeholders that are authentic and resilient in a fast-changing, highly connected world.
It is also the question behind what she hopes to leave. Ask Prof. Potgieter about legacy, and her answer has nothing to do with outputs. “I hope to leave a legacy of developing people rather than simply producing outputs,” she says. “If former students become ethical leaders, if organisations become stronger because of research-informed decisions, if entrepreneurs build sustainable businesses, and if colleagues continue mentoring future generations, then I will consider my work worthwhile.” Ultimately, she says, she hopes to be remembered as someone who combined academic excellence with genuine care for people – someone who consistently sought to create a positive and lasting impact.
“Postgraduate supervision remains one of her favourite parts of the work. Watching a student develop into an independent researcher, she says, is one of the most rewarding things academia has given her – rewarding enough that she has continued formally investing in her own development as a supervisor, completing three separate postgraduate supervision development programmes since 2017 to make sure that mentorship stays as deliberate as everything else she does.”
Coming Full Circle
Here is where Prof. Potgieter’s story does something most academic profiles can’t: it loops back on itself. The young investment professional who once worked treasury and capital markets at the Development Bank of South Africa is now, two decades on, Chairperson of the Investment Committee and a Trustee on the Board of the Nelson Mandela University Pension Fund — entrusted with exactly the kind of financial governance she cut her teeth on at the start of her career, only now on behalf of the institution that gave her a second one.
“Aspire to Inspire before you expire.”
It doesn’t stop there. She sits as a Senator on the NMU Senate, represents George Campus on the Faculty of Business and Economic Sciences’ Transformation and Engagement Committee, and serves on the Marketing Department’s Advisory Board. Beyond the university, she is Board member of the George Business Chamber, championing SME and entrepreneurial development across the region, and a certified Senior Coach with COMENSA, South Africa’s professional body for coaches and mentors – a credential that underwrites the executive coaching and business consulting work she does alongside teaching and research, helping business leaders and entrepreneurs navigate high-stakes decisions with the same steady judgementshe once brought tocapital markets.
A Double Honour, and a Community Rooted in Purpose
In 2025, Prof. Potgieter did the unusual thing of winning not one Vice-Chancellor’s Excellence Award, but two in the same year: Integrative Researcher of the Year, and the Engagement Excellence Award. The first recognised research that “integrates marketing, management and behavioural science to find practical solutions for emerging market challenges.” The second recognised something closer to home marketing initiatives “deeply rooted in the Garden Route community,” including women’s business empowerment projects, student industry collaborations, and local innovation networks that connect the university’s expertise directly to the people around it.
Together, the two awards say something the rest of her career already suggests: for Prof. Potgieter, rigorous research and grounded community impact have never been separate goals. They are the same goal, pursued from two directions at once.
An Enduring Legacy of Excellence
Prof. Potgieter has never limited herself to one room. In the same week she might be lecturing undergraduates on brand strategy, chairing a pension fund investment committee meeting, coaching a business leader through a difficult decision, and mentoring a doctoral candidate through their first academic paper. It’s an unusual combination – and precisely the combination that lets her understand a challenge from every angle it can be seen: the graduate about to enter the workforce, the executive leading the organisation that hires them, and the entrepreneur trying to build something of her own in between.
Twenty years after she first walked into a George Campus lecture hall on what was meant to be a temporary detour from finance, Prof. Adèle Potgieter is still living by the words she has chosen as her own: Aspire to Inspire before you expire. On this evidence, she has spent two decades doing exactly that – and shows no sign of being finished.
