Engaging with Bertina Engelbrecht, CEO of the Clicks Group, is exhausting. In the best possible way. She’s a self-confessed ‘talker’ but unlike with most self-confessed talkers, where only 10% of what they say is interesting and relevant and insightful, with Bertina Engelbrecht, it’s 100%, hence my exhaustion.
As the first female leader of a major South African retailer, she’s been profiled, lauded and awarded multiple times, so to shake things up a little (as is her style), we’ll present our favourite learnings about her below as if she were a Clicks product.
So, if Bertina Engelbrecht were a product in Clicks….
She’d be very much a product for women, but definitely not exclusively.
One of Bertina’s big areas of focus is balancing being a strong female leader with leading ‘everyone’. On the one hand, she’s very conscious of being a powerful female role model.
“I would never have done an interview like this before but one of the things is about leaning in now… you can’t be in this role and not be willing to make use of a more public platform, because that platform gives you a voice, and it says to other women ‘it is possible for us to get there’.”
On the other hand, she’s passionate about fairness and equity and creating opportunities for everyone – across gender, race, etc. – to flourish.
“The best always rises and the workforce should always be reflective thereof [regardless of race, gender, etc.].”
“The one thing I always look out for is where there is specific inequity or injustice.”
In the early days of her 17-year stint with Clicks, Bertina was responsible for remuneration policies. She noticed that the list of long-term incentive candidates was not representative, something she attributes to what the organisation used to be like. She advocated the advancement of diversity and inclusion, including women and people of colour. She recalls when a young senior manager explained to Bertina that she didn’t want to receive recognition just because she was a woman, or a woman of colour. Bertina pointed out to her, “You’re asking the wrong question… you know you are a standout performer over many years; your question should be ‘why am I only getting this now?’”
Her price tag would be the same for both male and female shoppers.
Gender bias in remuneration remains a big issue across the world, but not at Clicks.
Experts have calculated that it will take more than 100 years to eradicate gender bias in pay; Clicks did it in eight. Bertina attributes this to prioritising it, being open about it. The pay gap between male and female employees doing the same job at Clicks used to be between 10% and 13.5%. This has now been completely eradicated through better analysis and reporting, and the centralisation of certain increase decisions (especially related to promotions).
If she was a food product, there would definitely be a ‘secret sauce’: a passion for people.
When she was appointed to the CEO role, the Chairman highlighted two reasons why she was the right candidate: Firstly, her clarity in terms of the strategic focus areas of the business and secondly, that the business post-COVID needed an empathetic leader.
“You can be a decent human being and really focus on work and still get to the top … you don’t have to do it through maneuverings and political agendas and all those sorts of things.”
She is even often referred to as ‘Big Mama’ within the organisation, mothers being both strict and loving. As well as fair.
She’d be a product attuned to the needs of her shoppers.
“Retail is dynamic – you’re impacted by the economy, by the weather patterns, by sporting events… people behave differently… even politics can influence people’s confidence and how they behave.”
“We’ve done work around products that are responsibly sourced and sustainable, or products that have Halaal formulations, products that have got vegan formulation. That is responding to the fact that the consumer – in terms of the choices they are making – is changing their preferences, and you have to adapt early enough to that.”
She’d be a product available both online and in store.
Bertina sees hybrid shopping as the future, with South African shoppers increasingly expecting to switch seamlessly between in-store (and in-mall) experiences and online product discovery and shopping. Even recognising the challenges to e-commerce growth locally (the vastness of the country, the cost of data, hijacking of delivery vehicles), she expects online sales to make up between 10% and 15% of Clicks’ revenue in the not-too-distant future, and she’s putting resources behind preparing for this.
She’d be a tech-friendly product.
Clicks is harnessing the power of artificial intelligence and bots to automate previously laborious tasks that would take teams of people weeks to complete. An example was a bot designed to clean the data generated by vaccinating millions of South Africans and reconciling the cost of the purchase of the vaccines (to be paid by Clicks to government) against what government owed Clicks for administering the vaccines. The bot could do the job in a fraction of the time, so the pharmacy assistants allocated to the task were reallocated to providing value-adding services such as assisting shoppers in-store and advancing patient care.
“If you can deploy the bot for routine administrative tasks, then the people can do more ‘people’ tasks. We put the twenty assistants in our stores to provide service. Also, there were some tasks that only people could evaluate what they saw the way a bot couldn’t.”
“I think we will adapt and we will adopt [more tech] when we are feeling more comfortable, but that’s an inevitability; the question is how do we maintain this whole thing that we still need people to be productive, and motivated… what will be the nature of work going forward and how can that be value-adding to humans?”
She’d be a proudly South African product.
As much as she recognises that 2024 could be a turbulent year, mostly because of the national elections expected to be held in the second half of the year, Bertina is positive about the future of South Africa. She is encouraged by the appointment of a port authority for Durban, a growing realisation in government that they can’t do it themselves (and delegating to experts) and getting directors of failed SOEs declared delinquent so they can’t serve on other boards and cause damage elsewhere.
She’d be an earth-friendly product.
Bertina notes with satisfaction the investments being made by corporates in renewables and estimates that these may even have buffered load shedding by up to two levels. Clicks is one of these corporates – they’re currently trialling electric vehicles for wholesale pharmacy delivery. She acknowledges that the benefits are not only for the planet – cost savings free up money for Clicks to invest elsewhere.
She’d be a product that was part of a value-adding CSI initiative.
“I’m so proud to work for this company because [it] understands the interrelationship between people and planet and profit in a way that aligns so personally with my own values, and I think with the values of the people who work for this organisation.”
Clicks is currently piloting a project with Wits University – “Students on the Go” – aimed at fighting period poverty and assisting female students who can’t afford sanitary products. Clicks engages with the students to identify their preferred Clicks store and sanitary product of choice and then loads this product onto the students’ Clicks ClubCards. The student can then go to the store and ‘pay’ for the product by swiping their ClubCard. These are mainly National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) students, and government departments are apparently keen to expand the programme to leverage the power of the data and trackability provided by the ClubCard programme. And Clicks gets the future benefit when these students make up South Africa’s middle class and already have a ClubCard in their wallets.
“If you only pursue profit, I don’t think that you’ve got a long-term business”.
She’d be a product and brand keen to collaborate with other brands to the benefit of shoppers and society.
Bertina believes FMCG retail needs a more mature approach to category management and corporate social investment overall. Rather than retailers like Clicks looking at it within the walls of its business and manufacturers looking at it within their product ranges, all stakeholders should be looking at it in a way that is agnostic of the organisations themselves.
“We all want a stable country, functioning justice and correctional services and police, we want an education system that delivers the human resources that we’ll all be employing for the future and we’re looking for better quality – frankly speaking – coming out of the education system. So, within category management, if we approach it differently, we can all do better. I think we can achieve much better results in our corporate social investment programmes if we didn’t run them as company-specific programmes.”
For more insights into Clicks, see Trade Intelligence's Clicks trade profiles here.
About Trade Intelligence
Trade Intelligence (Ti) is a leading source of consumer goods retail research, insights and capability-building solutions that enable effective and profitable trading relationships and inform future-fit strategies.
Our expertise covers the FMCG environment, the major retail and wholesale players as well as emerging retail and shopper trends.