Deon grew up in the Eastern Cape where he matriculated at Pearson High School. He obtained the BCom and BCom(Hons) degrees at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, majoring in Business Administration and Industrial Psychology.

During his honours studies he considered the option of an academic career, which led to his first appointment as Junior Lecturer at Vista University in 1985. In 1986 Prof Nel commenced a lectureship in the Department of Business Management at the University of Pretoria, where he registered for an MCom degree. He then obtained a DCom degree under the supervision of Profs Sieg Marx and Leyland Pitt. During this time he was promoted to both Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor. In 1991 he was offered a professorship at the University of Johannesburg.

The next step in his career was to take on the international academic environment. For twenty years, he worked overseas for Aston Business School in the UK and Henley Management College UK, as well as a seven-year stint in Australia at Bond University on the Gold Coast, Deakin University in Melbourne and Flinders University in Adelaide. In between he had some fantastic experiences at the University of Stellenbosch and University of Cape Town Business Schools.

“All of this would not have been possible without the excellent education I received from the University of Pretoria”, said Prof Nel. Prof Marx had a saying which the junior staff members, when complaining about heavy teaching loads, did not like at all: “As jy ’n denker wil word in bemarking en diep spore trap, moet jy die gat wyd grawe”. Those words rang true when Prof Nel started up a new Marketing Department during the past four years at Flinders Business School in Australia. “I had to use many of the tricks learnt during my early career to put the Marketing curriculum together and to develop it into one of the fastest growing programmes at Flinders University with limited teaching resources”, he said.

Looking back on his career, there were many highlights, like working for Henley Management College and delivering high-level executive programmes in many parts of the world. The programme that stood out, was the Asea Brown and Boveri senior executive programme delivered by Henley at the Swiss Academy in Zurich over an 18 month period. It meant flying in and out of Zurich every two weeks, delivering a multi-million sterling project. Another highlight was being part of the meteoric early growth phase of the University of Stellenbosch Business School under the able leadership of Prof Eon Smit. A fine opportunity was the participation in the Harvard Business School Africa Services Marketing Program that was held at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business.

The latest highlight is the current inspired growth taking place at the Department of Marketing Management, currently under the leadership of Prof Yolanda Jordaan. According to Prof Nel, the BCom (Marketing Management) students can expect drive and rapid expansion of research activity, world-class teaching and community engagement going into 2014 and beyond.

Prof Nel’s current research interest is the growth of brand value in BRICS markets. Few developed world consumers would have recognised brand names like Petrobras, Sberbank, Airtel, Tencent or MTN at the new millennium. More recently, several emerging market brands were persistently listed in global brand value rankings. He has submitted a paper with Prof Jordaan on the BrandZTM Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands ranking and if the paper gets accepted in a high impact international journal, it would be another career highlight and then returning home would be a real bonus!