Consumer Qual 2023

Paul Burditt, Customer Insight Manager, M&S Clothing & Home

Konrad Collao, Founder, Craft
Konrad has 20 years' experience investigating how people engage with media, technology and entertainment. He co-founded Craft in 2011. Based in London but with global reach, Craft is a boutique agency that helps its clients anticipate and react to changes wrought by the ongoing digital revolution. Using a mix of cultural insight, audience understanding and content development, Craft helps some of the world's biggest entertainment, news and sports brands to develop audience strategies and create content. 

Gemma Baldwin, Insight Director, Relish

Charlotte Duff, Head of Insight, FlexMR
Charlotte has been actively involved in the market research industry for over 12 years, and in that time has worked across a variety of sectors, from utilities to financial services, media to CPG and beyond. A background in healthcare has helped Charlotte build a strong appreciation and affinity for research and data analysis, with a particular skill in diagnosing business challenges and devising the most appropriate solutions. Delivering actionable insights that help put consumers at the heart of business is key to Charlotte's approach. Her work has been regularly recognised by the industry; in 2018, Charlotte won the Best New Speaker award at IIeX EU conference for her ‘Man vs. Machine’ research, where Charlotte investigated the power of both AI and expert researchers in their analyses of interesting online insights.

Nick Eves, Head of Customer Insight, Southern Water

Lauren Fox, Senior Research Executive, Walnut Unlimited 
Lauren has a degree in Psychology and started her career in corporate investigations before joining the Qualitative team at Walnut in 2022. As an analytical thinker with a passion for understanding human behaviour, Lauren loves figuring out true motivations and perspectives behind every point of view. Since joining Walnut, she has worked with a range of methodologies with a particular interest in ethnography and depth interviews.

Trish Green, Senior Research Director, Ninth Seat

Trish brings over 25 years as a Qualitative Researcher,  supporting global clients  in their business strategy and growth from early stage product innovation through to launch and post launch.
Starting her research career in branding and communications, she learnt to navigate the  subtleties in visual, verbal and aural cues and how consumers process and interpret what they see and hear. The challenge and need to bring differentiation in enticing consumers to your brand or product, rather than simply doing a job for the category, landed firmly in her mind early in her career.
Her intuitive understanding and forensic eye in recognising all consumer touchpoints in the consumer experience of brand, product, pack and wider comms brings a particular edge to Trish’s analysis.  
She brings a natural desire to tease out subtleties from language  or observation and to identify the nuances which can then be used to spark areas of opportunity for growth
She never tires in her passion for detail and identifying that ‘special something’ in every project.

Nicola Hathaway, Consumer Insight Lead - Homecare, Unilever
Nicola is expert in Consumer Technical Insights and has over 15 years’ experience working in Home Care, generating actionable consumer insights for the next generation of product innovations. She enjoys bringing the consumer to life for the cross functional teams she works with and seeing how innovations impact the lives of consumers globally.
Nicola loves working in consumer insight and never ceases to be amazed at the new things you can learn from talking to consumers.

Naomi Humphrey, Senior Customer Experience Manager, KFC
A customer experience specialist of 20 years in the industry of understanding customer needs and expectations, whilst shaping the proposition and delivery of the branded customer journey, ‘end to end’. With retail experience in key high street brands such as Currys, Carphone Warehouse, Argos and Sainsburys to name a few. Naomi is an expert in developing customer experience strategy from thought leadership through to implementation with the ability to piece together the business puzzle to build, align and lead cross functional teams to a common purpose to work together to deliver brilliant outcomes and value for customers and the business.

Imre Kiss, Consumer Insights Manager, KIA
Imre is the manager of CX Intelligence at Kia Europe, being responsible for brand and customer research projects across the European Kia subsidiaries. In addition, Imre also plays a role in mentoring the more junior insights colleagues at Kia Europe and advising on some of Kia’s global projects.
Before joining Kia, Imre built an extensive experience in market research, working both on client and agency side for more than 20 years, in his home country, Hungary, and in Western Europe.
Other than the main work projects, his main interests are how bounded rationality impacts purchase decision, and the say/do, or intention/action gap that can be observed in market research.

Sarka Krizkova, Head of Data & Analytics, Dialect

Amy Morris, Research Director, Walnut Unlimited
A qualitative specialist of 12 years with a passion for speaking to people, hearing about their experiences, and finding out what makes them tick. Whether it’s intercepting, chatting online or immersing herself in their world, she truly loves to understand people and their experiences, as they happen. She has an abundance of experience across a range of sectors, with a main focus on Retail and Technology brands. 

Debbie Newbold, Founder and Managing Director, Flume

Nic Newman, Senior Research Associate - Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Oxford University

Sarah Padden, Head of Insight – Brand and Product, Greene King Pubs
Sarah started her career working in Category and Insight roles across a range of FMCG companies from Coca-Cola Enterprises to Danone and Molson Coors. For the last 5 years, Sarah has worked within hospitality, and for the last 2 at Greene King heading up the Brand and Product Insight team working closely with Brands and Marketing with a focus on  putting the customer voice into the heart of plans around food range, menu design, drinks merchandising and investment designs.
Sarah loves bringing the customer voice into the business strategic plans and seeing the difference it can make, even with the smallest of nudges to drive change based on truly understanding the needs and motivations on different occasions.

Lucy Farrow, Associate Partner , Thinks Insight
Lucy Farrow is one of the UK’s leading deliberative research practitioners with over 10 years’ experience involving citizens in the decisions that affect their lives, with a particular focus on environmental futures. She specialises in creative and participatory research design, with a focus on ensuring participant voice is amplified and that research delivers real impact. Alongside her role at Thinks Insight & Strategy she is a Fellow of Lancaster University, focusing on participatory climate policy making as part of the Climate Citizens initiative.
An environmental psychologist by training, Lucy has a particular interest in how humans interact with the physical environment, and the psychology of behaviour change. She has designed and delivered dozens of projects exploring how people understand and interact with future technology from autonomous vehicles to carbon capture and storage, personalised medicine to AI. 

Rebecca Posner, Head of Social and Behavioural Research, DfT
Rebecca is an experienced behavioural and transport psychologist and the Head of Social and Behavioural Research within the UK’s Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles where she is leading the UK Government’s programmes of social and human factors research and behavioural change in relation to self-driving vehicles. As part of this she focuses on using innovative research methods and applying behavioural science to understand the needs and concerns of all transport users and embedding these into the development of future transport systems (vehicles, infrastructure and services) ensuring that the UK is taking a user centred approach to automated transport systems. She also advises and works closely with industry and academia to ensure the best scientific and research principles are adhered too in government and grant funded research, including acting as an advisory board member to UK and EU funded projects. Her work builds the actionable evidence that enables the development of the most relevant interventions relating to automated transport systems including policies, regulations and standards.

Tamsin Robinson, Head of Customer Insight, M&S Clothing & Home

Heeru Sajnani, Senior Research Director, Ninth Seat
Throughout her career as a Qualitative Researcher, Heeru has worked across diverse markets and a wide range of categories, gaining invaluable expertise in effectively exploring the intricacies of consumer preferences, motivations, and perceptions. Her comprehensive knowledge and keen understanding of qualitative research methodologies make her a sought-after researcher in unlocking the deeper layers of consumer insights.
With a deep passion for human behaviour and a natural curiosity for cultures, her interests in research are driven by observing consumers, empathizing with them and finding patterns, distilling complex qualitative data to meaningful and compelling narratives that inform strategic decision-making.
Her findings have guided product development, brand positioning, and marketing strategies for numerous leading brands across diverse industries.

Karen Schofield, Head of Qual and Head of People, Blue Yonder
Karen is an award-winning speaker and co-author of an Amazon best-selling book on gender equity. She’s lived and worked in the UK and Asia, and over her 20+ years in research, has worked with brand leaders across a diverse range of sectors, markets and cultures. She has also presented talks and run training sessions on insight, creativity, storytelling, consumer psychology, happiness and resilience around the world.
She’s on the Senior Leadership Team at Blue Yonder and has a dual role, heading up both the qualitative insight team, as well as the business’s People Strategy, where she’s responsible for recruitment and retention, internal culture, training, development, wellness and DE&I initiatives.

Elina Shcop, Global Customer Insight Manager, Logitech G (Blue)

Maria Twigge, CSO, FlexMR

Victoria Ulph, Head of Research & Insight, Dialect

Dr. Russ Wilson, MD of Qualitative at Quadrangle

Tom Woodnutt, Founder, Feeling Mutual
Tom Woodnutt is founder of agile online qual specialists Feeling Mutual.   Tom has been a pioneer of online and mobile qual for almost 20 years.  Feeling Mutual work across diverse categories (from technology to media and FMCG) on a range of briefs (from brand and communications development to customer journey and innovation projects).  Tom's background is in advertising and brand strategy and he was a research director and then director of digital at Hall and Partners before launching his own consultancy in 2010.