Dr Sonja Fourie focuses on building customer relationships with a specialization in loyalty programs and segmental propositions in the retail consumer sector. She has a 14-year foundation in Information Technology, 17 years’ experience in strategic business development (financial products, co-brands and loyalty) and a passion for innovation, teamwork and enabling sustainable systemic change. Her career has been marked by delivering interventions at scale redefining and disrupting markets while creating sustainable competitive advantage for shareholders for a number of blue chip companies.
Always pursuing deeper levels of knowledge and understanding, she completed her PhD at the Gordon Institute for Business Science (GIBS) with her research topic focused on loyalty programme effectiveness . Her passion for advanced analytics and causal analytical research has led to her inclusion in various international conferences, such as Big Data 2013 (Europe Customer Festival) participating in panels with industry experts and commentators such as Harper Reed (Barack Obama’s Election Campaign Manager driven through social media and influencers) and Barclays directors, the International Marketing Science 2017 conference in Los Angeles (Academic causal research and direct business marketing effects), Emerging Markets Conference (International conference on academic research in Marketing in Africa with international business relevance) at Wits Business School and the Loyalty conference in Barcelona (2018) where she delivered a presentations on the causal modelling developed for driving customer relationship quality within financial services.
