Andisa Ntsubane is chief marketing officer of Old Mutual, a 176 year old insurer that predates the South African state. He proposed that the company take an active role in vaccination across the markets where it operates. There would be no better marketing, he argued, than investing in saving the lives of its customers. You cannot have humanized growth, he argues, when humans themselves are at risk.
The rest of the interview covers how he won internal alignment for that position, and why he treats strategic partnerships as a requirement rather than an option. It also covers Project 2030, a two phase growth project run out of marketing, and the thesis on artificial intelligence in an African context that he was finishing at the time.
Key findings
- The barrier Ntsubane names was not budget or doubt about marketing but genuinely divided personal views. Some colleagues held strong pro-vaccination positions and others were against vaccination altogether. That is why he insisted the position be led from the executive leadership team rather than announced by his own function. He also paired the go-to-market approach with education, because of the myths and falsehoods around vaccines.
- He built support one executive at a time before the big sessions, tailoring the case to each person’s own accountability. Human capital heard that employees were as central as customers; the chief financial officer heard the commercial argument. Working with the actuarial teams to quantify the benefit turned the CFO into one of the program’s strongest advocates.
- Ntsubane is explicit that none of this was philanthropy. The modeling showed a correlation between vaccinating customers and risk mitigation on the book, for the simple reason that the more people are affected, the more claims the insurer pays.
- The program had launched in four markets when he presented it to the IRG 100 program, and by the end of 2021 it covered six countries. Old Mutual opened vaccination sites in its own buildings, including one of its large Cape Town offices. Two weeks before the interview it added Vacci Taxi, branded vehicles that carry vaccinations out to areas the public cannot reach.
One market where the campaign could not run
Old Mutual built a pan-African campaign to support the vaccination effort and intended to run it across every market. Tanzania was the exception, because the country did not accept that the pandemic existed at all, and Ntsubane says a large campaign there would have killed the business. The company worked behind the scenes instead, alongside a local business community already lobbying government.
The exception is permitted by a rule he states plainly: Old Mutual wins in the markets where it operates, not from head office, so local insight and local input have to shape execution. The other half of the rule is what does not move. Core essence, strategy and positioning stay consistent everywhere; only the execution around them is negotiable.
Setting the mood on purpose
Ntsubane’s first leadership lesson is that a leader has to create the right environment before any meaningful conversation happens. He takes the idea of mood set from the self-mastery writer Tim Wigham, whose children used to peer into a room to check his mood first. Wigham links positive moods to productivity, which is why Ntsubane treats mood as a discipline rather than a temperament.
He argues that this mattered particularly during the pandemic because the corporate language covered what everyone was carrying alone. People at work were watching those they knew and loved be affected. If a company could not be human at that moment, he says, it had really missed the plot.
What the crisis exposed at home
Ntsubane’s own reckoning starts in his household. When schooling moved online his son could simply carry on, while many South African students could not, because there is no wi-fi. He gave far more of his own time to social causes aimed at closing that gap. What he noticed is how much of what he takes for granted every day the majority of people actually struggle with.
What he learns from the students he teaches
Ntsubane speaks at universities about marketing as a profession, recently to a group at the University of Johannesburg. He covers the leadership lessons of the last two years and the importance of a personal brand in building social currency. Asked what he gets back, his first answer is about his own timing: he should have started doing this earlier.
The students taught him two things he had not expected. The gap between the theory they are taught and what happens in practice was wider than he assumed, and the pressures they described were sharper, from managing social media to handling peer pressure. He has a thirteen year old at home and sees the same pressures there.
Where to play, how to win, and what to do when you cannot
Ntsubane sets out growth strategy as three questions. Which customers are you going after, and how big is the opportunity. What must you design and deliver to win those markets, and how do you take it to market. If you cannot win a market you want, he says, there are only two options. Abandon it, or partner with and incubate the people who are already winning there.
That is the rationale for the startup work rather than any general enthusiasm for innovation. Old Mutual has a new function on the leadership team focused on new growth, and is looking at how startups add value to a broader financial services ecosystem. Kenya and East Africa are where he sees the density of it, driven by digital penetration.
Partnerships, including with competitors
Ntsubane’s case for collaboration starts from the size of the problems rather than from a preference for cooperation. Climate change, social justice and gender-based violence are not problems any single company can solve alone. His example from South Africa is competitors working together: the retailers ran co-branded campaigns to drive education and support frontline workers.
He also treats partnership as a growth mechanism rather than only a crisis response. Key partnerships build additional lines of revenue, and he points to telecoms companies where financial services have grown to roughly 30 to 35 percent of revenue. The vaccine example he cites is MTN, the continent’s largest telecoms provider, working with the African Union on distribution.
The lines between industries are blurring, and his evidence is a court case rather than a forecast. A bank in Kenya is in court over its application for a telco license, arguing that telcos are banks. The instruction he draws is about identity over time: understand not only the line of business you are in today but the kind of organization you intend to become.
A leader brand that thinks like a challenger
Asked how a brand with the word old in its name reinvents itself after 176 years, Ntsubane offers a posture rather than a campaign. Old Mutual is a leader brand that thinks like a challenger. That matters because a challenger is not limited in its view of the categories it plays in or the markets it competes in over a five to ten year horizon.
The shift already behind the company is substantial. Fifteen to twenty years ago ninety percent of the business ran through advisors physically visiting customers. The strategy now is what Old Mutual calls channel of choice, offering straight through online purchase alongside the advisor route. The technology investment reaches those advisors and distribution partners too, so they can deliver a better experience themselves.
Project 2030, and skating to where the puck will be
The clearest evidence that the function has changed is Project 2030, a two phase piece of work run out of marketing that began the year before and had completed phase two by the interview. It draws on a data set covering every sub-Saharan city with a population of 50,000 or more, which lets the company see which cities will grow over the next ten years.
The questions it puts to the business are about footprint rather than communications: are we present in those markets, and do we intend to be. Phase two moved from where to how, prioritizing which opportunities to capture pragmatically. What the work bought, more than the answers themselves, was a shift in perception, because marketing was speaking the language of the business.
If the role of marketing is to do marketing, it is in the wrong place
Ntsubane states the change as a conditional: if the role of marketing is to do marketing, then marketing is in the wrong space. What he puts in its place is outward facing and predictive. The function identifies the trends moving in the world outside, from climate change to the evolution of customer needs, and has the foresight to say where opportunity will come from.
Asked whether he fears a chief growth officer being appointed above the function, he separates the title from the substance. If that is the outcome, he says, there is no issue whatsoever. What cannot happen is marketing being seen as the people who do campaigns and communications and organize events, when the function is a strategic growth enabler and a partner to the business.
He is honest about the fact pulling the other way, that CMO tenure keeps getting shorter, which he calls worrisome. The counterweight is scope. Marketers now have to understand technology as well as commerce, alongside employee brand and customer experience, and the role sees a broad spectrum of the entire organization. He calls that a blessing and a curse.
Writing a thesis on artificial intelligence from an African perspective
Asked how he keeps up, Ntsubane points to a thesis he was finishing on how artificial intelligence can be used for good on the African continent. It takes up AI ethics from an African rather than a global standpoint. His starting concern is documented: technology used to discriminate against certain groups. The answer, he argues, is to design for the outcomes you want.
The opportunity he sets against that is framed by the size of the gap rather than the state of the infrastructure. Africa has the greatest opportunity, he argues, precisely because of the challenges it faces, and AI could let it leapfrog in areas such as education. That reaches past access to how teaching is done, improving teachers’ pedagogy and helping learners optimize their learning.
His practical recommendation is a warning against importing a solution designed somewhere else. There is no one size fits all, and the context you are designing within has to shape the technology, because continents differ and so do the issues they prioritize. The second requirement is the ability to scale and adapt while keeping people involved in reducing whatever harm the technology might do.
Why the problems are the opportunity
Ntsubane’s explanation for why he works where he does inverts the usual framing entirely. He loves Africa because it has more problems and more issues than any other continent, and issues create opportunities. Shared value, in his definition, is the creation of business models that accelerate social issues, and the commercial case is general: the most successful companies in the world have solved intense needs.
Divine discontent
Asked for one thing to take away, Ntsubane offers a phrase from an article about why the All Blacks rugby team keep winning over decades: divine discontent. They are never quite satisfied, and even after a win they go back and check where they made mistakes. He applies it in both directions, to self-development personally and to being the catalyst of change inside an organization.
Scope and limitations
This is one executive’s account of his own company’s program, recorded in December 2021. The brand rankings and business effects he cites are his own statements rather than anything independently verified here. Those include Old Mutual’s position as the most valuable insurance brand on the continent and its brand tracker results. The thesis he describes was unfinished at the time. His account of Tanzania touches on a change of national leadership; that political detail is omitted here and only the commercial decision is reported.
Source
This page summarises HGS #38: Andisa Ntsubane (CMO, Old Mutual) about human growth in Africa’s largest insurance company, by Frank van den Driest, 2022-02-14.