Martinette Kruger

Since enrolling for her Tourism honours degree in 2007, Martinette has shown a love and passion for research, especially in the field of market segmentation and events. She has continued this passion throughout her academic career and obtained her master’s degree and PhD in respectively 2009 and 2010, where she critically evaluated market segmentation at arts festivals in South Africa. During her academic career at the North West University, she been nominated for and won numerous awards including: Second best student in Faculty of Arts (2004), Best Student in Faculty of Arts (2005), Best Student over three years in Tourism Management (2006), Best Ecotourism Student (2006), Best Third year Tourism Student (2006), Best Tourism Honours Student (2007) and Best Honours Student in School of Business Management (2007). With a final percentage of 82%, her master’s dissertation won the ABSA Bronze Medal for the Best Master’s Degree in the Human and Social Sciences Faculty at the North-West University in 2010. She was awarded the Best Junior Researcher at the North-West University award for three consecutive years (2012, 2013 and 2014).

Since her appointment at the North West University in 2009, she has proven herself to be a capable researcher and have dedicated research to various tourism sectors to identify, attract and retain the most viable target market(s) through various methods of segmentation. She has published numerous articles in national and international peer-reviewed journals and have presented her research findings at various national and international conferences on the topic. These research outputs best express her chosen field of research which she has applied to different sectors of the tourism industry, including arts festivals, music events, religious events, sport events and nature-based products such as national parks where she primarily focus on the optimum approaches to profile visitors through various segmentation methods and variables. In many instances, these publications can be seen as benchmark studies since the problems under investigation and methods used applied for the first time. In 2012, she successfully applied for Thuthuka research funding from the National Research Foundation (NRF) to expand her current research regarding segmentation of sport consumers (both participants and spectators) at ultra-endurance sport events in South Africa.

She has initiated various long-term research projects at selected art festivals, sport events, music events and hotels in South Africa. At these research projects, she also manage the collation of the data and have written more than 100 technical reports based on the findings. She has furthermore presented these findings and shared her expertise with many of the projects’ annual sponsorship conferences. Apart from her published research outputs, she acts as subject editor and reviewer for numerous national and international tourism journals.

She is furthermore an advent studyleader and promoter to post-graduate Tourism students and invests her time to mentor young researchers. For the past six years, she has initiated a project where post-graduate tourism students can present their work and get feedback from fellow academics at international or national conferences.

Martinette is currently recognised as an established young researcher according to the South African National Research Foundation rating system and in 2013, she obtained a Y1 research rating. She was promoted to Full Professor in 2015 and works as a full-time researcher at the Tourism Research Entity, TREES (Tourism Research in Economic Environs and Society) at the North-West University in Potchefstroom.