CX & Marketing Conference 2026

Ronald Muringai

By Ronald Muringai: Programme Coordinator at IMM Graduate School

Roland Glass

The modern CMO must lead cross-functional transformation. This topic addresses building agile marketing teams, integrating data scientists and technologists, fostering innovation cultures, and developing future-ready talent strategies that align marketing with enterprise growth.

Mike Saunders

Marketing leaders are under increasing pressure to demonstrate financial impact. This topic unpacks advanced attribution models, performance measurement frameworks, and revenue-aligned KPIs that help CMOs confidently present marketing as a strategic growth driver at board level.

Theo Groenewald

Consumers expect personalised experiences—but demand privacy. This discussion examines how organisations can use first-party data, predictive analytics, and AI responsibly to deliver contextual, meaningful engagement while protecting customer trust and complying with global data regulations.

Vilashni Vandayar

In a world obsessed with short-term metrics, how do leaders protect long-term brand equity? This session explores balancing performance marketing with brand storytelling, emotional connection, and reputation management to sustain long-term market leadership.

Nadeema Tommy

Nivasha Pillay

Rather than focusing solely on acquisition, this topic highlights strategies for improving retention, loyalty, and lifetime value. Marketing leaders will gain insight into loyalty ecosystems, customer journey orchestration, and predictive churn management frameworks.

Rindy Janse Van Rensburg

Disconnected channels damage experience and revenue. This session explores how to integrate digital, mobile, retail, social, and customer service touchpoints into a cohesive ecosystem powered by real-time data and marketing automation platforms.

Melanie Forbes

Many organisations have invested heavily in MarTech but struggle with integration and ROI. This discussion focuses on rationalising technology stacks, improving interoperability, and ensuring technology investments directly support strategic growth objectives.

Celéste Burger

Consumers increasingly trust communities over advertising. This session explores how brands can cultivate communities, leverage influencer ecosystems responsibly, and foster authentic brand advocacy in an era of declining traditional ad effectiveness.

Oscar Stark

Artificial intelligence is no longer experimental. This session explores how marketing leaders can move beyond pilot projects to fully integrated AI ecosystems that enhance customer experience, predictive targeting, automation, and measurable revenue growth while maintaining governance, compliance, and brand integrity.

Opening keynote. Reframed for November: as businesses head into festive-season peak trading and 2027 planning, AI has moved from pilot to production — it now has to survive volume spikes, outages, and real operational pressure the way any other core system does. This session sets the tone: reliability and infrastructure thinking aren't IT's problem anymore, they're a CX leadership problem.

Fireside chat. As AI takes on more customer-facing decisions ahead of the high-stakes festive trading period, this is the session that keeps leaders honest: transparency, fairness, and auditability aren't compliance checkboxes, they're what determines whether customers trust the brand behind the algorithm. Real case studies, real tension, no easy answers — a deliberate change of pace from the keynote.

The infrastructure conversation goes practical: how do you actually unify fragmented customer data before the festive surge hits, without falling foul of privacy regulation or losing customer consent along the way?

With festive-season contact volumes about to spike, this is the most operationally urgent session on the agenda. Workforce strategy, agent-assist tooling, and the metrics that prove AI is helping — not replacing — your people, right when capacity is about to be tested hardest.

Positioned as the "act before Black Friday and December drop-off" session. Real-time signals and alerting let teams catch at-risk customers before the festive noise drowns them out — timed deliberately as the pivot point from operations into commercial strategy.

The economic reality check. With South African consumer spending under continued pressure heading into the most price-sensitive shopping period of the year, this session is squarely about protecting margin without losing loyalty — value framing, frictionless loyalty mechanics, and targeted incentives that hold up under festive discounting pressure.

Closing session, deliberately. As delegates head back to build their 2027 CX budgets, this is the "how do I prove all of this worked" session — modern metrics and experimentation frameworks that tie experience investment directly to revenue and retention. Sends the room out with a business case, not just inspiration.