EAT, SLEEP, BREATHE BRAND: IIE VEGA INDUSTRY LEADER SHARES HER INSIGHTS

If you are considering studying towards a brand management-related qualification in the future, this article on bizcommunity.com is essential reading.

by Shan Radcliffe

Eat, sleep, breathe, brand

Enslin wears many hats in her work as head of Postgraduate Studies and Research at The IIE’s Vega School, while also managing Strategy and New Business Development at the institute.

With her PhD in Marketing Management from the University of Pretoria, Enslin’s interest and experience in brand building includes the design and implementation of brand identity systems, brand alignment and contact strategies. She lectures widely in Africa and abroad and conducts corporate training, consulting and coaching, is a course supervisor and trainer for the Master of Arts and the Doctorate in Brand Leadership at Vega, a Research Associate at the University of Stellenbosch Business School and Teaching Fellow at the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business.

Enslin: Virtually all our academic staff are industry practitioners too. We combine this powerful resource with academic and research rigour to develop and evolve future-directed curricula for all our programmes. The key factor is to plan and anticipate for industry needs a decade in advance – and then manage the long time frames for development and subsequent government review and approval processes. The IIE Vega programme development team employs industry networks and are active researchers, deeply invested in their different fields of study. I have attempted in my own industry projects and research to contribute a holistic and systemic orientation to strategy training at Vega.

Enslin: To recognise and respect the strategic and creative value of delaying hasty judgment in order to arrive at deeper human insights – this requires maturing your ability to flow between states of inside-out (the organisation’s perspective and goals) and outside-in (real-world conditions) sensemaking. We want our students to become mindful of building meaningful brand ecosystems that engage complex stakeholder networks.