Sustainability Summit 2023

Ed Ayton, Sustainability & Ethics Advisor, Abel & Cole
Ed Ayton is the Sustainability & Ethics Advisor for the organic delivery company Abel & Cole, leading on supply chain impacts such as biodiversity, animal welfare and human rights. With a passion for wildlife, sustainability and good food, he believes all three can meet with mutual benefit, and finds there’s usually a good story behind it all too.

Caroline Bates, Founding Partner Citizen Good Consulting

Kate Bayliffe, Group Insight Manager, Samworth Brothers
Kate Bayliffe is a Group Insight Manager at Samworth Brothers; with 15 years’ experience in client side research gained at Boots, Avon and Npower.  With equal passion for understanding consumer behaviour and food trends Kate loves bringing the consumer to life to help embed a customer centric culture focussing on delivering impactful, engaging insights turning “so-what’s” into “now what’s”.

Julia Brannigan, Senior Researcher, Bulbshare

Louise Burns, Senior Consultant, PACE Dimensions
Louise focuses on ensuring brands grow in value by constantly evolving to remain relevant to their most valuable customer segments, and build loyalty and affinity through the customer experience. She has led every marketing discipline in her career in travel and luxury automotive.
Before joining PACE, Louise was part of the leadership team of Bentley Motors where she headed all roles from CRM, Customer Experience and Retail Strategy to Brand Experience and Communications, employing the latest insights and fusing digital innovation with traditional channels, to ensure the brand remained relevant to existing and emerging customers and maximised ROI. She led their 2030 Sustainable Luxury strategy, securing investment in go-to-market and brand transformation programmes to deliver the ten-year profit targets.
Amongst her achievements are the design and execution of the multi-million, cost-neutral programme to launch their Sustainable Luxury vision, reaching over 85% of HNWI, significantly shifting brand perception, and redesigning the brand experience globally to attract a new segment, at zero cost increase to franchisees. During her time with Bentley sales grew by over 50%, advance order banks were secured for all new products, advocacy reached 95% and the company turned from loss-making to profit.
Prior to Bentley, Louise held key global Brand and Communications roles at British Airways dedicated to revenue generation and growing brand value across the airline, subsidiary brands, and extensions. She developed her early career in a range of marketing roles in hospitality, telecoms, and publishing.
Louise has travelled extensively for business and pleasure and has worked on major projects with partners in the Middle East, China, Australia, and Americas. She combines clear strategic direction with a realistic focus on delivery and an incredible eye for detail. Louise is a champion of brand with a passion for ensuring business has a strong purpose and customer centric strategy at its core.

Dan Cooper, Director, STRAT7 Incite
Dan is a Director in the Incite STRAT7 Services team. A qualitative specialist by trade, Dan led this particular sustainability project for Visa Europe as part of a wider STRAT7 coalition. Dan leads a number of Incite STRAT7’s key accounts and has worked on multiple sustainability-related challenges for clients spanning the financial services, telecoms and FMCG sectors. He has a particular interest in applying qualitative techniques to facilitate more open and honest conversations with consumers around sustainability issues – challenging and unpacking the gap between stated and actual behaviour that so often comes through in quantitative data.

Richard Cope, Senior Trends Consultant, EMEA, Mintel
Richard is the author of Mintel’s annual Global Outlook on Sustainability survey and a graduate of the University of Cambridge Institute for  Sustainability Leadership’s Business Sustainability Management programme. He has two decades of experience in market research, macro trends and futurology. As Senior Trends Consultant in Mintel's Consulting team he works on a range of bespoke Foresight and Landscaping projects. He is a frequent sustainability and trends commentator, publishing thought leadership pieces and making conference, webinar and podcast appearances. 

Carina Ealam, Consultant, Savanta
Carina is one of the co-founding members of the MRS &More Young Person’s Sustainability Collective which formed in early 2022 with the aim of empowering young people to create a sustainable industry for the future. She is a Consultant working within Savanta’s Consumer and Public teams, and works across both qual and quant projects. She has a particular interest in sustainability, both in terms of the types of projects / clients she has the opportunity to work with, and in campaigning for a more future-proof, sustainable research industry. As well as the YPSC, she is also part of Savanta’s internal Sustainability & Impact workstream and the Next15 green team (Green15).

 Lou Ellerton, Partner, Kantar Consulting Division
Lou has more than 25 years’ experience advising on brand and innovation strategy, working with clients across industries ranging from FMCG, telecoms and media to property and retail. She’s passionate about driving growth for brands and businesses, and enjoys nothing more than getting her teeth into a new challenge. As a Partner within Kantar’s consulting business, she works hand in hand with leadership teams and senior clients to help them unlock growth from and transform their offerings with sustainable innovation & innovation strategy, purpose and positioning.

Sarah Emmerson, Insight Manager, VISA Europe
Sarah is responsible for pan-European work across Visa Europe. She helps the business and its partners - from banks and fintechs to merchants - understand ever changing consumer and SMB needs, using storytelling skills developed over a decade agency side. She has a particular passion for the business's impact questions, helping stakeholders navigate society's needs when it comes to sustainability and social impact.

Mark Fisher, Partner, Kantar Sustainable Transformation Practice
Mark has been working in brand strategy for the last 15 years. Recently he has put his brand expertise to use to support his clients on their sustainability journeys. Mark leads that work Kantar does globally to support client track the impact and ROI of their sustainability initiatives. Mark is passionate about developing sustainability metrics to give a strategic feedback loop and make a positive impact because  ‘what gets measured gets done’.

Amy Greenwood, Senior Research Manager, DJS Research
Amy joined the DJS Research team in 2021 after a ten year career with an online research agency where she led the research & insight team. Amy has wide-ranging experience across qual and quant methodologies, but particularly in online methods. In 2020, Amy was featured as an up-and-coming insights industry leader in the GRIT Future List by Greenbook, which recognizes leadership, professional growth, personal integrity, and a passion for excellence in the next generation of insights creators. As one of our most experienced Project Managers, Amy has led on many of our projects for WRAP, including the Reuse and Refill study; Amy will be available after our presentation to take any questions about the study.

Rhys Hillan, Research Consultant, Appinio
Rhys is a Co-founder of the Young Persons' Sustainability Collective, a group aimed at empowering young people to create a sustainable industry for the future. Rhys also sat on the MRS’s Sustainability Council between 2021 and 2023, where he has wrote guides on establishing sustainability groups in international market research associations, as well as Net Zero strategy guides for MRS members.
After obtaining a masters degree in educational research from the University of Cambridge, Rhys joined Zappi's research team in 2021. As Research Manager, he lead their Expert Content Initiative, managing their research focused thought leadership until mid-2023, when he joined Appinio as a Reseach Consultant.

Lucy Hobbs, Research Director, Boxclever
Lucy Hobbs is a Senior Research Director at Boxclever; with 25 years of experience in qualitative research. Her expertise has helped many brands gain a deeper understanding of their audiences. Lucy relishes unearthing unmet needs by exploring values, behaviours and beliefs and then sharing these with her clients in order to build their understanding, so that they can then go on to better meet customer needs.

Mark James, CEO, Differentology
Mark James is the Founder and CEO of Differentology, a new breed research consultancy, working at the intersection of data, human behaviour, technology and creativity. With an entrepreneurial mindset, Mark has scaled Differentology from a one person start up, to a team of 50 working across London, Newcastle and Hong Kong. As a previous winner of the MRS Breakthrough Business of The Year, Differentology signed up to the Net Zero Pledge in 2022, and is one of the pioneering research organisations in the sustainability measurement journey.

Bill Marshall, Global Director, Human & Cultural Futures, Unilever
With a career running insight teams in telecoms, chemicals and FMCG, Bill Marshall has been Global Director of Human & Cultural Futures at Unilever for over eight years.  His role drives expertise in macro trends, foresight and cultural insight across the company. In addition, Bill is the consumer insight specialist at Unilever for sustainability and the insight partner to the sustainability team and the Unilever corporate brand.

Lisa Miles, Marketing Manager, On Device Research
On Device Research is a global brand measurement company leveraging advanced technical capabilities to measure and enhance advertising effectiveness. As a result, we provide brands with informed, actionable and relevant insight that drives better campaign understanding and positive results across the media and advertising industry.

Patrick O’ Meara, Head of Partnerships & Business Development, The Sustainable Hospitality Alliance
The Sustainable Hospitality Alliance is an industry body supported by all the major hotel groups and is playing a lead role in getting the industry to collaborate on the pursuit of a ‘net positive’ goal, so Patrick is exceptionally well-placed to comment on the value and importance of consumer research to provide evidence for a key stakeholder group. https://sustainablehospitalityalliance.org/

Gill Redfern, Research Director, DJS Research
DJS Research is an employee-owned market research company with offices in Stockport and Leeds; we deliver full-service market research solutions for our clients and also specialise in fieldwork and data-only services. Gill Redfern has more than twenty years’ experience in research, the last eleven of which have been at DJS Research. Gill’s expertise primarily revolves around collaborating with retail and FMCG clients. In recent years, her focus has evolved to cater to the pressing demand for insight into diverse sustainability related challenges faced by retailers and brands. Gill heads up the WRAP account team at DJS Research and has worked in partnership with WRAP since 2020, supporting on a whole host of qualitative and behaviour change intervention research studies; we’re delighted to be sharing details about one of those studies with our research colleagues at the MRS Sustainability Conference!

Mark Roberts, Lead Analyst, WRAP (Waste and Resources Action Programme)
Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) is a climate action NGO working around the globe to tackle the causes of the climate crisis and give the planet a sustainable future. As a Lead Analyst in behaviour change at WRAP, Mark’s focus is the design, delivery and evaluation of approaches to changing citizen behaviour by applying behavioural science expertise to the delivery of interventions and campaigns directly to citizens and through WRAPs partners. Mark’s role at WRAP has included providing behaviour change expertise to the delivery of projects aimed at changing how citizens buy, use and dispose of products and packaging. 

Dr Crispian Tarrant, Chairman, BVA BDRC

Walter Tucker, Customer Relationship Manager, Compare Your Footprint

Caroline Wren, Managing Director, MTM 

Jack Young, Consultant, Sustainable Transformation Practice, Kantar
Jack leads STP’s corporate ESG expertise, with experience in both sustainability marketing strategy and corporate ESG strategy, reporting and regulation. He is on Kantar’s ESG Governance Committee and works alongside its executive and global leaders to develop its own ESG strategy. He also represents Kantar on MRS’ Sustainability Council, recently leading on MRS’ recent study into their pledgees’ journey towards Net Zero.