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.