B2B Research Conference 2024

James Endersby, CEO, Opinium
James is CEO of Insight Agency Opinium, Chair of the Market Research Society, and founder of media platform Significant Insights, and the Global 30 Under 30 List.

Dr Christine Bailey, Senior Director of Marketing, Moody’s
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 Director, Ipsos
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, Research 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. 

Liz Montgomery, Director, Sharp Research
Liz has worked in the industry for almost 40 years and has run her own micro-agency, Sharp Research Ltd, for the last 14 years, after holding senior positions at companies such as GfK NOP, Research International, BPRI and Research Solutions Ltd (which became Breaking Blue Research, and is now part of 2CV Research).
She focuses on international B2B and technology research adding a growing corpus of work in financial services more recently.
Clients have many research problems and challenges running all the way through the product and services lifecycle, from identifying new opportunities, product and service testing, communications development and tracking through to understanding customer experiences. She has been able to deploy the ever-expanding quantitative and qualitative toolsets available to those involved in research and insight to help clients explore their various existing and potential markets, and working with them to identify solutions as well as successes.
She is also involved in supporting students for the MRS Advanced Certificate and Diploma as an Academy Associate at The Research Academy, sharing her own skills and understanding of our industry with the new generation of researchers and insight professionals.

Richard Levy, Founder, Sophera Marketing
Richard is the founder and CEO of Sophera Marketing (www.sopheramarketing.co.uk).  With a wealth of experience in driving commercial success across the globe, he has extensive experience of building and enhancing brands through every marketing channel.  He has led high performing teams in the UK, EMEA and North America for illuminous companies such as GE, Santander, First National and MoneyGram. He has also worked with a number of UK based companies, including Tesco, Halfords, Homebase and British Gas.
Richard's expertise spans digital marketing, brand management, CRM, analytics, research, strategy development, social media, agency management and marketing communications.
His talent for forging strong relationships with internal teams, external partners and key decision makers ensures that marketing strategies are perfectly aligned with organisational goals.
Away from the office, Richard enjoys life in London with his wife, Poppy and their two daughters.  A devoted Leyton Orient FC fan, he can often be found park running on Saturday mornings.  

Julia Kirkpatrick, Director of New Product Research, Figma
Julia is the Director of New Product Research, tasked with identifying, developing, and launching new products and technologies to expand Figma's portfolio and support the organization's horizontal strategic initiatives. Julia started her career at the Nielsen Company before spending over a decade in VC-backed start ups across an array of verticals, including ModCloth, HotelTonight, and Pinterest. In each organization, she has been charged with establishing and expanding the research function, bridging various research disciplines and growing research's capacity and influence in strategic decision making.  A product of her start up experience, Julia is a strong advocate for T-shaped researchers and the concept of "just enough research" paired with business insights to maximize impact.

Paul Lawson, Executive Director, Verve
I’m an Insight Specialist with specific experience of developing solutions that bring together the best of Cultural and Human understanding with the revolutionary power of AI. In my 25+ years in insight, I've run local and global accounts, overseen large research teams and led Sales & Marketing strategy and implementation, all the while focusing on how to help clients develop new ways of identifying insights. This experience leaves me perfectly placed for the next great change within insight: helping clients unlock new value though AI.

Kate Downer, Director, Verve
I lead Verve’s professional services vertical, specialising in B2B and B2B2C research that combines AI with cultural and human insights, and that helps businesses make smarter, more agile decisions. While my work over the last 20 years has spanned energy, tech, financial and professional services, the focus has always been on uncovering motivations, need states, and opportunities for growth. I’m here to help businesses solve challenging problems and make actionable change.

Nick Seeley, Strategy Director, MTM
Nick Seeley is a strategy consultant who focusses on helping organisations better understand their market and customers, identify opportunities for growth and performance improvement, and develop strategies and plans to put this into action. Currently a Director at MTM, he focusses primarily on technology, media, advertising and entertainment sectors, with experience across Americas, Asia-Pacific, Middle East & Africa. He has worked with over the last 6 years on various studies of the digital advertising sector, including a multi-year study on small business understanding and uptake on digital ad services which he will be talking about today.

Gareth Lyon, IAB UK
Gareth Lyon is Public Affairs Lead at IAB UK, working on behalf their members to raise the profile of the IAB and the industry with political stakeholders so they have a better understanding and appreciation of our role and value as well as feeling more positive towards and supportive of digital advertising. He has 18 years experience working in public affairs and policy in a variety of sectors including digital advertising, engineering, education, health, housing and social care.