Professor Sandra Vandermerwe is an Extraordinary Professor at GIBS, South Africa. She works with boards and senior managers globally on disruptive customer centric growth in a digital world, to uncover unseen currents likely to affect their business and then transform their organizations by defining and dominating new strategic arenas.
Her expertise centres on market making-how corporations and start-ups can create and scale new markets. Her experience spans over four decades across the industrial and service spectrum, inspiring and guiding top management to transform minds and models using state-of-the-art thinking, practice and technology.
She is known as a thought leader trailblazer and is a key note speaker. As an academic, consultant, and board member Sandra has redefined customer centricity and laid the foundation for many of the modern business models and language. For examples she invented “Servitization of Business”, “Market Spaces” and the “Customer Activity Cycle” methodology, which formed the basis of customer experience management.
Sandra has taught all over the world. She had a chair at Imperial College Business School at the University of London from 1996 to 2006. For a decade prior she was Professor of Marketing and International Services at IMD, Switzerland. During the 70s and 80s she was Professor of Marketing at the Graduate School of Business, University of the Witwatersrand, a Senior Lecturer at the Graduate, School of Business, University of Stellenbosch.
She holds a BA in Sociology from the University of Cape Town, an MBA from the Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town and a Doctorate in Business Administration from the Graduate School of Business, University of Stellenbosch.
Throughout her long and successful career, she has taken a keen interest in women and business, mentoring and monitorßing the progress and success of women both as business owners and as executives.
Sandra has published papers and books widely and her work has been translated into Japanese, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Czech, Danish and Russian.
She is the recipient of 16 awards for her cases. Two were cited as among top overall 40 all-time bestsellers in the last 40 years by the European Case Clearing House. In 2022 she was named author of one of the top 20 articles cited in European Management Journal in 40 years, since its inception. In 2022 she was made one of the 50 bestselling case authors by the Case Center UK, a first for Africa. In 2023 one of her cases was named one of the top 50 best-selling cases over the 50 year period, 1973-2023.
Sandra is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce UK and is listed in the ‘Who’s Who’ and ‘International Who’s Who of Intellectuals.