To book for someone else click here.
one company partner voucher will cover the cost of one delegate ticket
£575 + VAT
£675 + VAT
£575 + VAT
Businesses’ thirst for B2B insights to extend their customer understanding, build business resilience and support decision making has never been greater.
Join MRS to examine how the business landscape and buyers’ behaviour is evolving, and in turn, how B2B Research is innovating to meet new and escalating insight demands of businesses. Explore the new tools, methodologies and partnership approaches clients are increasingly embracing.
Key contributions from:
Sage * Maersk * Moody’s KYC * IAB UK * Jus Connect * International Chamber of Commerce * Simply Business * Brother International Europe
Book your place to:
MRS B2B Network
The MRS B2B Network is a new MRS special interest group, dedicated to supporting best practice in B2B research and encouraging networking. The group is open to both specialist B2B researchers and non-specialists. In particular, we welcome practitioners who have recently joined the industry, operational personnel and other groups involved in collecting and using B2B research data. The range of support services offered by the network includes a dedicated website/knowledge hub, training and education, awards, meeting others with a common interest and commercial opportunities.Empower
FlexMR
IDR (Insights Driven Research)
Prevision Research
Prevision Research is a boutique provider of CATI and online data collection specialising in a wide range of B2B markets. Since 2009 we have been helping researchers in agencies and client-side organisations to meet even the most exacting of data collection challenges. How do we do this? We simply put ourselves in your shoes and work with you to design and carry out successful research projects and make sure that you and your clients are completely satisfied.Ronin
RONIN excels in acquiring participants for both qualitative and quantitative survey research, including business professionals, healthcare specialists, experts, and numerous hard-to-reach audiences. We utilise online, phone, and digital platforms to ensure your targeted participants are engaged, delivering verified and high-quality data. With approximately 400 multi-market projects annually and over 25 years of experience, RONIN specialises in market research. Introducing RONIN Edge, our innovative platform for engaging senior-level audiences. With offices in the UK, Germany, Hong Kong, and the US, we are eager to discuss your international research needs.Media Partner
Breaking market research news, latest job vacancies, industry reports, in-depth analysis and cutting-edge opinion for customer insight professionals.
Dr Christine Bailey, Senior Director of Marketing, Moody’s KYC
Dr. Christine Bailey is Senior Director, Marketing, for Moody’s compliance and third-party risk management business in Europe and Africa. She was previously CMO of Passfort, a SaaS RegTech provider acquired by Moody’s in Nov 2021. Prior to that she was Managing Director, SMB UK, and CMO at Valitor, a European payment solutions company.
Christine has spent her career in B2B Tech/FinTech marketing roles, leading European marketing functions for Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems as well as for pre-IPO companies.
A respected thought-leader and public speaker with two TEDx Talks, Christine is a published author of “Customer Insight Strategies: How to understand your audience and create remarkable marketing” and contributing author of The PAYTECH book. She has a doctorate (DBA) in customer insight.
Jessica Ashcroft, Brother International Europe
Jessica’s experience in customer data and insight spans 12 years. She has provided customer insight to the on-trade and food retail sectors before becoming the Customer Insight Officer at Brother International Europe, a leading supplier of technology solutions, in 2019. Prior to this role, most of her work encompassed B2C projects but today she works across both B2B and B2C research in tandem. Jessica delivers customer data, insight and representation across a wide variety of projects, striving for the customer to remain at the heart of every decision.
Stephen Bairfelt, Managing Director of Prevision Research and Chair, MRS B2B Network
Stephen is Managing Director of specialist data collection company, Prevision Research and joint Managing Director of research and insight consultancy, Purple Market Research Ltd. He has always had a passion for B2B research and believes strongly that there are certain skills required for this type of research, which set it apart from other types of research. He is also very keen to ensure that these skills are passed down to younger generations and those with less experience in reaching B2B and trade audiences.
Stephen began his research career at Research International, where he initially became involved in B2B research. He then joined Shell UK as Head of Insight, before setting up Purple Market Research with B2B specialist, Trevor Wilkinson. In 2019, he was involved in the purchase of B2B data collection company, Prevision Research and now leads this business.
He is a former Chair of the Independent Consultants Group (ICG) and was an MRS main board member for 7 years. He also spent a number of years as a judge on the MRS awards panel. In 2021 he became a Fellow of the MRS in recognition of his contribution to and involvement in the research industry.
Karin Lombard, Lead - Global Customer and Behavioural Insights Function, Simply Business
Karin is a Strategy, Insight, and Innovation Leader with 24 years’ experience in decoding real human needs and crafting powerful customer, category, and market insights. She thrives on translating these insights into commercial opportunities that drive Brand/Positioning, Growth Acceleration, Product Innovation and Customer Experience strategies and operational plans.
She has a Masters Degree in Politics and Research. With only a few years' experience working agency-side, she has spent most of her career client-side with senior roles across multiple sectors (including Retail, FMCG, Financial Services, Manufacturing and Telecoms) in the UK, US, Europe and Africa, including roles at O2, Pepkor, Disney Channel and Sky. She currently heads up the Global Customer and Behavioural Insights function at Simply Business, a market-leading Digital Insurance Provider that protects the livelihood of more than 1 million small and micro-businesses in the UK and US.
Dan Coombes, Head of Activation, Basis
Dan is Head of Activation at Basis, with responsibility for helping client teams to land and embed strategic insights in a way that successfully drives action. In a decade as a senior leader at Basis he has worked across B2B and B2C for a diverse range of brands: from Sage to BT Group, and Gen Digital to Google.
His prior positions have included roles at C Space and a stint in public sector strategic marketing consultancy at the Central Office of Information.
Hanna Wilcox, VP Customer Insight, Sage
Hanna is the VP Global Customer Experience & Insight at Sage. She has over 25 years experience in insight applied to brand, proposition, advertising and customer experience strategy development.
She discovered her huge passion for understanding humans and their underlying needs and motivations from her early career at Unilever and has subsequently worked at John Lewis and across multiple brands at a CX design start up.
Hanna is now on a mission to close the customer centricity gap in B2B vs B2C, by creating empathy and connection with the humans behind the businesses and driving alignment throughout the stakeholder ecosystem.
Santosh Makhani, Senior Research Director
With over two decades of agency-side experience, Santosh is a seasoned insight professional known for his steely logic, big-picture thinking, and a track record of delivering high-quality, actionable research in both B2B and B2C domains. His expertise has guided organisations within financial services, technology, quasi-governmental bodies, travel, and tourism sectors. Santosh has a particular interest in the financial services sector due to its critical impact on both consumers and businesses.
B2B research holds a special place in Santosh’s heart, forming a substantial part of his early career. He has led accounts for business and corporate financial services clients, leveraging insights from large, complex customer experience tracking projects to drive business growth. He has also delivered strategic ad hoc studies involving diverse audiences, from farming/agriculture businesses to motor trade dealers, small to large business users of asset & invoice financing products, and businesses severely affected by the 2008 financial and 2019 COVID crises.
With his dedication to B2B research, his commitment to excellence, and his experience in harnessing insights to advance client objectives, Santosh is keen to play his part in steering B2B research towards new horizons.
Amy Middleton, Director, Beam Fieldwork
Amy is Company Director of BEAM Fieldwork, a highly celebrated fieldwork agency delivering qualitative and quantitative research project management in the UK and across the globe.
With 25 years’ experience in the market research industry, including her active involvement and prominent roles in the BIG Committee, and the ICG, establishing and growing BEAM Fieldwork over the past 7 years also led Amy to launch research recruitment brand, Give Opinions in 2020.
As a lifelong lover of shopping, Amy is passionate about consumer research. She leads her team of resourceful and supportive ‘BEAMIES’ to bring together the people, the places, the team, and the tools to deliver trusted and effective projects to brands and agencies around the world.
Jordan Wood, Associate Director, Opinium
Jordan is an Associate Director and Partner at Opinium, an award-winning insight agency with offices across London, New York, Amsterdam and Cape Town. He has been in the industry for 13 years, starting off his career at Dynata and spending the last 10 years at Opinium.
Jordan specialises in research for brand & communications, working in both B2C and B2B to help his clients understand their audiences and make evidence-based decisions. Media and campaign measurement is where his passion lies, most notably developing research methodologies to allow clients to measure the impact of innovations in OOH and influencer marketing.
Outside of work, Jordan is kept busy by his two young daughters and likes to spend some quality time on the golf course, when they allow him to!
Carrie Condino, B2B Research Director, MTM
Carrie is a Research Director within the research and strategy team at MTM, specialising in the tech and media sectors. She combined her love of data with understanding human behaviour and psychology by completing a Master in Market Research & Consumer Behaviour. Carrie now works closely with her clients such as Figma, Google, Pinterest and Bloomberg, leveraging quant and qual methods to empower stakeholder decisions across brand strategy, go-to-market planning, customer experience, and product development. She has a diverse track record with B2B audiences across international markets, from C-Suite executives to SMEs and practitioners such as developers and cybersecurity admins. Her ability to tailor her research approach to meet the specific needs of each audience has made her a valuable asset to clients seeking to make data-driven decisions.
Marcus Brandford, New Product Researcher, Figma
Marcus uses research to inform product and marketing strategies for disruptive technology products. As part of Figma's New Products Research group, he partners with stakeholder teams to identify unmet user needs and opportunities for growth. He began his career on the agency side at Known, where he led research to help companies like Google and Microsoft explore emerging technologies and enter new markets. He stepped away from the field to pursue his MBA from UC Berkeley and uncover opportunities for research to drive greater business impact before joining Figma in 2022.
Mireille Patoine, Strategic Customer Insights Leader, Maersk
Mireille Patoine, Strategic Customer Insights Leader at Maersk, transforms data into gold with her 15+ years of user research, customer insights, and innovation prowess. Driven by a passion for understanding customers, products, and markets, she skillfully combines primary research techniques and customer-centric frameworks like Customer Journeys & Personas to enable colleagues in developing outstanding products, services and experiences. As a leader of customer empathy, Mireille fosters collaboration among cross-functional teams, ensuring that insights turn into exceptional customer-centric business decisions.
09.00 Registration & coffee
09.45 Welcome from the Chair
James Endersby, CEO, Opinium
10.00 Buckle up; the B2B insight revolution is here
Fraudulent responses and subpar research experiences are a significant issue in B2B research. But could AI present a very real solution to this?
In this session, Verve will share its pioneering journey with GenAI simulations and show how combining Gen AI with high-quality customer data brings the opportunity to create ‘Intelligent Personas’ – lifelike audiences that can replicate, with statistical confidence, what real people would say if asked.
Hear how AI and intelligent personas can be used to bring customer segmentations to life, build and interact with industry or topic expert advisors, measure and refine concepts and creatives, uncover hidden narratives in NPS/CX data and democratise insight more broadly.
Rich Preedy, Executive Director, Head of Artificial Intelligence, VERVE
10.30 How Sage launched its first B2B Community – and what they did with it
Online communities are a ubiquitous consumer approach, rarely used in B2B. In this session, Sage and Jigsaw will demonstrate how they can also be effective for business audiences.
Hear how Sage, one of the leading global SaaS accounts companies, set up and used its first B2B community of small business owners to conduct a research programme to feed into the launch of its first sustainability product – Sage Earth.
Examine the research journey, gain top tips for building a B2B community and take a deep dive into the Sage Earth research project.
Alex Johnston, Commercial Director, STRAT7 Jigsaw
Alex McDougall, Customer Insight Manager, Sage
11.00 Morning refreshments
11.30 Navigating new waters: embedding insights on evolving buyer journeys across Maersk
Maersk is the second biggest shipping company in the world and has been on a transformational journey of digitalisation and modernisation as it transitions from predominantly ocean shipping to connecting its customers' global supply chains. Maersk has new services to sell, new buyers to engage with and new experiences to design, all within the context of a rapidly evolving workplace and marketplace. In such a dynamic environment, how do you get constantly evolving buying knowledge into the hands of 3000+ sales colleagues, designers, marketers, CX pros and product owners?
This is the journey of how the Maersk insight team launched a massive multi-modal research project with hundreds of logistics professionals to create a shared framework. Hear how it brought insights into the hands of colleagues across the business and is being used for numerous initiatives: driving new product development, digital experiences, improvements in CX and much more.
Mireille Patoine, Strategic Customer Insights Leader, Maersk
12.00 Improving global business cultural fluency
Tough economic challenges and increased globality is bringing exciting changes to how we view B2B relationships. This recent study, a joint effort between the International Chamber of Commerce, Jus Connect, and McCann Truth Central, shows how emotions and cultural differences play a big role in business deals across the world.
The research looked into how businesses connect on an emotional level and how culture affects the way they start new deals, develop ongoing partnerships and how they manage friction and disputes when things go wrong. It found four broad types of business cultures each with its own way of handling business and solving problems - and how these vary around the world.
Hear key outcomes from the research and gain insights into how to improve business cultural fluency.
Gideon Wilkins, Executive VP of Commercial Intelligence, McCann Truth Central
Asli Yilmaz, Managing Counsel at ICC Arbitration
Senior representative, Jus Connect
12.30 Lunch
13.30 Moody’s global thought leadership: adoption of AI within risk and compliance
This case study will explore Context+ and Moody's B2B research into the adoption of AI within the risk and compliance sector, laying the foundations for Moody’s to build thought leadership in the field. The project aimed to understand the benefits, challenges, and concerns associated with AI across financial services, corporations, and governments.
Join the project team to examine the key challenges the team overcame to deliver this, three phase, global research programme and find out how the insight was brought to life for internal stakeholders and external audiences.
Paul Nola, Partner, We Live Context
Dr Christine Bailey, Senior Director of Marketing, Moody’s KYC
14.00 Helping UK SMEs unlock the value of digital advertising
Digital advertising and SMEs have a symbiotic relationship. However, recent economic uncertainty has squeezed SMEs, meaning that every marketing pound must deliver.
In this session you will hear how IAB UK worked to tangibly help small business owners understand how to use digital advertising effectively so that they could get the most out of their investment. Hear the headlines from the research and explore how research findings informed the creation of a free-to-use, interactive tool to help SMEs better understand and use digital advertising.
Nick Seeley, Strategy Director, MTM
Gareth Lyon, IAB UK
14.30 Winning a more prominent seat for customer insight at the executive table
In January 2024, the Sage executive board met to agree on a new five-year strategy to supercharge growth of this £12bn business. Hanna and Dan will share how they successfully embedded a compelling new customer narrative at the highest levels of the organisation to ensure the strategy was rooted in deep customer understanding; and how, in doing so, they won Customer Insight a more prominent seat at the executive table.
Dan Coombes, Head of Activation, Basis
Hanna Wilcox, VP Customer Insight, Sage
15.00 Afternoon refreshments
15.30 The big B2B debate: B2B research is no different to conducting B2C research
Both B2B and B2C research share the fundamental goal of understanding customer needs, preferences, and behaviours to drive business success. To what extent should researchers approach them in the same way or adapt them to suit the unique characteristics of each market segment? Join two teams as they debate the similarities and differences between conducting B2B and B2C research.
Chaired by: Stephen Bairfelt, Managing Director of Prevision Research and Chair, MRS B2B Network
Panelists
Jessica Ashcroft, Customer Insight Officer, Brother International Europe
Liz Montgomery, Director, Sharp Research
Santosh Makhani, Senior Research Director
Amy Middleton, Director, Beam Fieldwork
Richard Levy, Founder, Sophera Marketing
Jordan Wood, Associate Director, Opinium
16.10 Building a robust, in-house, B2B insight function (on a shoestring)
Micro / SME digital insurance company, Simply Business, has been on a 2-year journey to evolve its Insights team and optimise its impact for stakeholders.
In 2021 Simply Business was like many small client-side Insight functions; a team of one/two, with limited budget, poor in-house capabilities and where enlisting market-leading research agencies on retainers was simply not feasible. This case study will show the journey of how the small team set a new vision, evolved its core insight programmes, aligned the Insight function with the UX and UR functions, and transformed the way it embeds insight to win the respect and trust of stakeholders.
Karin Lombard, Lead - Global Customer and Behavioural Insights Function, Simply Business
16.40 How Figma and MTM leveraged research to drive business impact
Digital design platform, Figma has gone through a transformational journey over the past year, from being a potential acquisition target for Adobe, to launching and evaluating a new feature for software developers and growing its user base and revenue. This session will explore how Figma has used research to navigate these challenges and opportunities.
Find out how Figma and MTM have collaborated in an agile and flexible way, using a range of research methodologies and techniques. Hear how the research team has evolved and the challenges and benefits of having embedded researchers. Examine how Figma is breaking down silos and specialisation in research, and adopting a holistic approach that integrates product, UX, market, and marketing research.
Carrie Condino, Research Director, MTM
In conversation with
Marcus Brandford, Research Manager, Figma
Julia Kirkpatrick, Research Director, Figma
17.10 Closing comments from the Chair
17.20 End of conference & networking drinks reception
Delegates are invited to continue discussions with industry colleagues at the post conference drinks reception
To book for someone else click here.
one company partner voucher will cover the cost of one delegate ticket
£575 + VAT
£675 + VAT
£575 + VAT
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