Brenda Koornneef is a tiger at the top of the food chain

Brenda Koornneef is one of the most powerful women in South African marketing. And that – if you believe brands are treasured assets which determine business success or failure – makes her very influential indeed.

As the top marketer in the monolithic Tiger Brands consumer goods company, she controls well over 100 top product lines, many of them so interwoven into the fabric of South African life that they are truly worthy of “iconic” status.

Koo, Tastic, Fatti’s & Moni’s, Albany, Jungle, Purity, All Gold… it is a gathering of South African brand royalty, some with a history stretching back decades – and a century in one or two cases.

“They are such unbelievable household names,” Koornneef once told an interviewer. “People remember them from their granny’s old days.

“Our job is really to understand exactly what makes them tick and then build on that.”

Her role at Tiger is to guide the brands at a strategic level, acting as a ‘custodian’ and managing their current and future direction in an increasingly competitive and changing environment for fast-moving consumer goods.

More recently, Koornneef’s responsibility has expanded to head up Tiger’s Home and Personal Care division that deals in home, personal care and baby care. Although small by comparison with the rest of the business, it is important because it reduces Tiger’s reliance on the food sector.

A highly experienced businesswoman with a string of senior executive positions to her credit, she studied for a BCom at university, but aspired to a career in marketing. “I always wanted to be a marketer and I don’t think that ever changed,” Koornneef says.

“If I had to pick a person who has influenced me most, it would be Dimape Serenyane [a founder of Herdbuoys, the country’s first black-owned advertising agency]. He helped me to understand the importance of really getting consumer understanding at a very deep level and how to convert that understanding into strategy.”

The changing consumer

In recent years, Koornneef has needed that depth of understanding in abundance. The recent recession created dramatic changes in consumer behaviour, with premium products based on impulse and indulgence suffering markedly – including some in her own stable.

At the time, the company’s research – done in conjunction with the University of Cape Town – showed fundamental changes taking place in the lives of consumers, particularly middle-income earners. “They are having to buy down or rent down on their houses, sell off their cars and change their children’s school to more affordable institutions,” Koornneef noted at the height of the meltdown.

But people have to eat, and demand for the more basic foodstuffs continued unabated.

Perhaps surprisingly, she says shoppers failed to turn in droves to low-price products. Instead, they frequently preferred higher priced but tried-and-tested brand names.

“They said: ‘If I’m going to spend R4 on a can of beans, I want to make sure I’m buying the right can’,” Koornneef explains.

She bucked the common knee-jerk reaction of cutting marketing spending during tough times. Instead, her strategy was to “invest during a recession”, which paid dividends in the form of increased market share at a time when many were seeing sales dwindle. “In general, we actually gained share. I think it paid off,” she remarks.

But while the difficulties of the recession seem to be behind her, other challenges await.

Consumers are changing in more permanent ways – and with it, the way marketers must go about their business.

“People have become far more discerning and much less willing to accept what you claim,” Koornneef says. “If you say Tastic cooks best – they’re not going to believe it just because the ad says so. I think that consumers today form their own opinions much more strongly.”

The implication of this is that people now want to be ‘engaged’ and not ‘spoken at’. As an example, she cites television advertisements that need to interact with the viewers’ emotions or sense of humour. “You want a person to say to their family member: ‘You must see that ad, it’s so funny’, or so sad, or so great,” says Koornneef.

That continual need for engagement means other new tactics, too. Consumers are harder to reach via a single medium due to media fragmentation caused by the growth of social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, etc), greater availability of online information, and declining viewers and readers for mainstream television and newspapers.

“The influence of traditional media has been reduced. The days when you could flight three TV ads and reach 80% of your target audience are gone,” she observes.

The result, for marketers of fast-moving consumer goods such as Koornneef, is that interacting with your customers – face to face and within the confines of the supermarket – has become a more productive and cost-effective way of doing business. This means, among other things, more in-store promotions and product demonstrations, as well as greater efforts to get shoppers to sample the products

“Point-of-purchase marketing is more important than ever,” she explains. “But I do think people form their brand perceptions and affiliations through all the touchpoints [ways in which the consumer and a brand interact] – whether it’s a pack they see on the shelf, a billboard, an in-store demo, or what their neighbour said about the brand.”

Also shaping the way in which Koornneef and those like her do business, are the twin trends of health and convenience. Both have been factors for the past six to eight years, but continue to grow in importance in South Africa.

“Convenience is overriding; people are looking for greater convenience in everything,” she says. “I think it’s one of the reasons the bread market is growing – customers are looking for easy carbohydrate solutions.

“They also want convenience in the preparation of food, so as a business we have had to look at how we can make products easier and less time consuming to prepare.

“The greater awareness of health is also a key factor for us. We have, in almost every product category, launched new innovations to cater specifically for this. Even in our basic food categories, we’ve re-formulated the product to make it healthier,” adds Koornneef.

In South Africa – with our multitude of languages, cultures and varied demographics – do marketing campaigns need to be moulded for each group, or does one size fit all? Perhaps surprisingly, she says it is the latter.

“My view is that the basic consumer insight is true for everybody, no matter what culture or living standard group you come from. The only thing that might change is the actual execution of that campaign,” she says.

Early years

After graduating, Koornneef cut her teeth at another brand giant (and Tiger competitor), Unilever. The home of such stalwart brands as Sunlight, Omo, Lux and Lipton, it has bred many top South African executives in the marketing field. She spent 15 years there, both locally and abroad, and eventually rose to become marketing director for the detergent brands.

Koornneef then felt it was time for a change, joining the SABC as general manager of then TV2 and working for several years on commercialising the channel.

After leaving the broadcaster, she became managing director of Games Africa and Moribu Limited, which was responsible for the lottery games Ithuba, Viva and Zama-Zama.

But the siren call of the marketing world was strong, and Koornneef joined Tiger in 2001 as category director for the Main Meal category.

Although she spent time away from the consumer goods business, there is clearly a passion for the brand environment. She talks enthusiastically about being privileged to be the custodian of product ranges that “actually belong to the consumers of this country… and live in the people’s minds and hearts”.

Her favourite brand in the company portfolio, though, is Tastic Rice.

“In most of the world, rice is just seen as a commodity. But we have, over the years, built it into a really premium brand with lots of innovations and range extensions. It’s a wonderful success story,” says Koornneef.

Launched in 1958 at a time when most rice was scooped from a barrel into the customer’s packet by the local grocer, Tastic now contributes around R1 billion annually to company turnover.

“I love the brand. It’s an example of how one can, purely through marketing, build the kind of brand equity that commands nearly a 50% premium to any competitor,” she adds enthusiastically.

Tiger has built some of its own brands from the ground up, but reached its prominent position mainly through acquisitions. Koornneef says that a key strength of the company has been the ability to buy and build up brands that are the right fit and have synergies with the existing
product portfolio.

“The majority of our leading brands we’ve actually acquired. But, in almost all cases, we have been able to build further market share. So we really are good at building brands, I think.”

This translates into a hard-charging corporate culture with an emphasis on performance delivery and improving results year on year.

“So if we have, say, 78% market share for a particular product, that’s great, but what are we going to do next year? That’s the driving culture,” she adds.

Does it make for a tough workplace? Koornneef says it is hugely stimulating, although she concedes that if you do not thrive on pressure then it is probably not the place to be.

The dark art

While many high-profile businesses have embraced marketing as critical to their success (think Coca-Cola, Nike and Virgin), in the hallowed halls of the corporate boardroom, marketing is still frequently viewed with suspicion; an unfathomable and hard-to-quantify dark art, rather than a science.

Koornneef’s standpoint is that it is a bit of both. “I have this view that you have good marketers and you have great marketers. You can make good ones through training, experience and commitment. But a great marketer – it’s an instinct. So you can never turn people into great marketers.”

Within her organisation, where marketing is regarded as a key function, day-to-day brand-building activities are governed by a system of templates and blueprints called, quaintly, “Magic Manuals”.

“So the process right throughout the business, across all our multiple brands, is exactly the same,” explains Koornneef. “The infrastructure underpinning the marketing activities is all very sound.”

But what no manual can teach is the ability to get inside the mind of customers and truly understand their needs – and how to transform that into a viable product. Indeed, when she one day leaves or retires from Tiger Brands, she hopes her legacy will be the importance of probing and understanding the minds of South Africans.

“I tell my staff: if there’s one thing you’ll remember I tried to teach you – it is consumer insight,” says Koornneef. ▲

Mike Simpson