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Character is built in the difficult seasonsAt her core Tanya Van Tonder is a builder. Campaigns are launched, presentations delivered, brands positioned, but what she is most proud of is what sits underneath all of it: the teams she has shaped and the operating models she has built that allow creativity and commercial thinking to work together.  Tanya Van Tonder, Group head of marketing, Provantage. She has been part of the Provantage story twice; once building the mother brand from the ground up and again now, aligning fourteen specialist business units behind a common commercial strategy. Her role, as she frames it, is not to market the business but to help shape the business that the market experiences. Between her two chapters at Provantage, she ran her own consumer and health research business, working with global organisations on large consumer panels. It was exactly the preparation she needed for a media landscape now shaped by data, measurement and audience insight. She has spent much of her career saying yes before she felt ready, and she would have done it sooner if she had trusted herself earlier. Confidence, she has learned, follows action. Her mother taught her resilience before she had a word for it; that integrity is not something you switch on at work, but something you live every day; and that character is built in the difficult seasons, not the easy ones. It is a lesson Van Tonder has carried into every room she has walked into since, ready or not.
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