Andrea Rademeyer

CEO & Founder

Andrea Rademeyer is the CEO and founder of the Ask Afrika Group, and has developed the South African company into a highly successful enterprise that is on par locally with the top global market research companies.

Andrea is colourful, passionate, and brimming with life and enthusiasm. As the eternal optimist, she sees every obstacle as a challenge. Her ability to motivate and inspire her staff is unsurpassed. She is both supportive and encouraging, allowing her team to flourish.

Andrea started the company as a one-woman show in 1995. She was motivated by the desire to prove it possible to be simultaneously successful and ethical. To Andrea, business plays a pivotal role in a changing society and she wants the change to be more uplifting than it has been on the whole over the past century. It took dedication, passion, love for her clients, and a capacity to laugh, to build the company to what it is today – a research and marketing organisation that operates in sub-Saharan Africa for both local and global companies.

She wrote her master’s thesis on the role of research in modern business, and has been expanding and applying her knowledge base, keeping on the cutting edge of global market research trends by attending global business schools and the most important international conferences in Europe.

Andrea established a number of benchmarks including the Ask Afrika Orange Index®, which measures service excellence, and the Ask Afrika Trust BarometerTM, in which company directors vote for the most reputable companies, and CEOs vote for their peers ranking the most trusted CEOs in various business fields.

She was the African chair for WIN/Gallup International (the World Independent Network for Market Research), and was the South African representative at ESOMAR (the world association of opinion and marketing research professionals). She is registered with the South African Marketing Research Association (SAMRA) and, as a research psychologist, with the Health Professions Council of South Africa. She successfully completed the YPO-WPO Presidents’ Program at Harvard Business School, Boston, United States (2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018).

Andrea is interested in life in general and appreciates the finer things. She has a huge knowledge base, not only about business and market research, but also about art, culture and more. She is a master conversationalist, respected for her integrity, and loved for her eccentricity. She’s loads of fun and up for the ride, having taken the front-seat on the roller-coaster of life.

Sarina de Beer

Director: Client Experience

Sarina de Beer has two master’s degrees in Psychology and Research Psychology. She started her career as a lecturer at the University of Pretoria, where a driving ambition was born to become a respected researcher.

This drive flourished at Ask Afrika where she managed to create a synergy between business consulting and research. Sarina has successfully blurred the lines between research and the consultation of business-driven clients to ensure that they derive commercial value from research. And – as businesses face much larger, more complex challenges, impacting their ability to drive excellence – Sarina is focused on helping to enable business to become and remain relevant. Her focus is on better navigating client pain points, understanding how this affects them and directing her clients with understanding and context.

Her business exposure lies across a range of industries and she has a passion for identifying social trends that impact brand expectations in the financial-services sector and the media industry.

Together with her team, Sarina is focused on understanding the “why” around research strategy, instead of the “what” by taking a futuristic outlook when it comes to research strategy. Businesses are facing dynamic challenges in achieving excellence and, therefore, Sarina believes it is critical to help them remain relevant in an increasingly complex market, through guiding them with real understanding and context. This approach has ensured the differentiation of Ask Afrika by delivering research projects that enable decision-making.

She is highly committed to the return on investment of human capital, and this is evident by the trust that the employees place in her. Her leisure time is spent with her family, reading and going to the theatre.

Mashudu Ndopu

Director: Sales & Marketing

Mashudu Ndopu is currently the sales and marketing director at Ask Afrika – a position she recently assumed, following a long and successful career in the food and consumables retail sector.

Having worked on a number of large brands – with a strong focus on new business development, driving solid sales channel and strategy and intrinsic customer-service integration – Mashudu comes with a wealth of expertise that complements the Ask Afrika business and client base.

Mashudu is a highly driven businesswoman, having taken on a number of key roles and responsibilities throughout her career. She is passionate about client service and management, as well as gaining a deeper understanding of what drives brands in a certain direction, how sales and marketing strategies fit in, and on defining strategies that make sense for the growth and development of brands and their respective products.

As a woman in business, Mashudu has taken a sound role in mentoring and upskilling people that she works with – driving them to reach their full potential by capitalising on their individual knowledge, skills, values and attitudes.

In her role at Ask Afrika, Mashudu is committed to driving sound marketing and sales strategies for the business – underpinned by sound client relations, skills development and a values-based approach to taking the brand to the next level.

As an expert in food technology, Mashudu has what it takes to find the right mix – building Ask Afrika alongside partners and experts that gel well together!

Christine Kruger

Director: Operations & Finance

As the head of operations and finance at Ask Afrika, a position she assumed in January 2018, Christine Kruger boasts more than 19 years of extensive experience in financial management, analysis and reporting, risk management, performance management, finance back-office outsourcing and grants management. Not only has she worked within the private and public sectors but she has also worked across a wide range of industries including construction, FMCG and automotive – to name a few.

A passionate individual, driven to help businesses succeed and reach their true potential, Christine has a keen “eye” for Africa, where she has actively worked in Africa for a number of years and intrinsically understands what it takes to really tap into this market. Further to this, she has also worked with large multinationals both locally and abroad, giving her the know-how and business savvy to really connect with clients, from CEO level right down to blue collar employees – regardless of location.

Christine has also worked in the humanitarian sector for many years, having directed and managed an HIV care and treatment programme. Therefore, she is cognisant of the importance of social consciousness and of understanding communities in this context, deriving effective insights and putting processes in place for effective results – a critical element to the Ask Afrika brand.

With both a CA(SA) and MBA (Cum Laude) under her belt, she is a highly intelligent business women and partner. However, standing out from the traditional CA mould, Christine is a great communicator with strong people skills and considers herself a problem solver, decision maker and bottom-line guru - not to mention a woman with a knack for entrepreneurship!