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Catch the very best of MRS this summer in Manchester!

Over the past 12 months, MRS has showcased some extraordinary research and convened brand and agency experts to address the biggest issues facing insight teams today. This July, Manchester will host MRS Best of Events and Awards.

We’ll bring together regional insight leaders to discuss how to address these transformative changes facing our sector. And we’ll celebrate some of the most highly regarded research being delivered by insight teams with a northern focus.

We’ve collated a selection of our favourite sessions from recent events and awards, so insight professionals in the North don’t miss out on this year’s highlights. Join client-side and agency regional insight leaders as they share their fascinating research journeys to improving consumer understanding, engagement and experience. Find out how to pack a punch with your insights by maximising the delivery, reach and impact of research with key audiences.

Key contributions from, Co-op * Google * L’Oreal * BBC * Whitbread * LadBible * Samworth Brothers * Scientific Games

Book now to:

  • Discover how generative AI is leading to an insights revolution with a BBC hosted discussion
  • Decode online decision making with Google
  • Examine how L’Oreal has generated data driven insights to optimise customer buying experiences
  • Gain new cultural insights into the political muses of Gen Z from Ladbible
  • Hear how Co-op, Whitbread and Samworth Brothers embed the voice of the consumer at the heart of organisational decision making
  • Improve your evidence-based storytelling to drive understanding and action with Scientific Games
Venue

Co-op Headquarters
1 Angel Square, Manchester,M600AG

With special thanks to:

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Sarah Ashley, EMEA Marketing Insights, Google
Sarah has led several in-depth studies at Google into evolving shopping behaviour and media viewing habits. During her 10 years in the industry, she has enjoyed an eclectic set of roles, from brand strategy to innovation. Whether it’s launching award winning products or championing equity and inclusion, she is passionate about delivering insights that place customers at the heart of business decision-making. She has a first class degree in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. She is a regular speaker on evolving consumer behaviour and represents Google in a range of UK marketing and research forums.

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”.

Bethan Blakeley, Research Director, Boxclever

Sarah De Caux, Lead Analytics & Insights Manager, Co-Op
Sarah De Caux leads Co-op’s award-winning research team. After a long time leading agency teams she moved clientside in 2020. Her experience is broad and eclectic, having worked on some of the first community panels in the UK. At Co-op she is now responsible for colleague insight, CX tracking and ad hoc research across all business units. During her career, Sarah has led numerous industry training courses and presented at research conferences across Europe.

Emily Driscoll, Head of Data, Intelligence and Planning, LadBible Group
Emily Driscoll is Head of Data, Intelligence and Planning at LADbible Group and has been at LADbible nearly 5 years. Before this, she had experience working in market research agencies, with a focus on cross media campaign measurement, and also was at Bauer Media in the commercial research team. Her team at LADbible is now made up of 11 great insight and effectiveness people, who run LADnation (a youth panel) engage young people in research studies and are constantly turning our wealth of data into great insight.

Jane Frost CBE, CEO, MRS

Louise Hazell, Senior Research Manager, Human8
Louise Hazell is a Senior Research Manager at Human8, working with clients including those in the travel and tourism industry. In her 17 years in market research, she has worked with a wide variety of brands, using a broad range of methodologies. With all the variety of work, her focus has always been on delivering insights that improve customer experience. Since joining Human8, the travel and tourism industry has seen a lot of changes, including technological advancements, increased customer expectations and the need to adjust to a post-Covid-19 world. Whilst challenging, these changes make for an exciting role where she can support her clients through new initiatives that put customers at the heart of business decisions.

Lucy Hobbs, Research Director, Boxclever Consulting
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.  

Tony Lewis, CEO, Vision One
Tony Lewis is the CEO and founder of Vision One, a leading international research agency with 40 years of experience. He has worked across the business spectrum, from start-ups to global brands such as Virgin, LEGO, IKEA, and McDonald's, and across sectors, from French fashion houses to charities and political parties. A seasoned market researcher and brand expert, Lewis's insights have been shaped by hundreds of successful brand studies. The Brand Momentum Agency (launching later this year) carries the Brand Momentum philosophy forward with training and business consultancy.

Liga Magdelenoka-Keen, Director of International Insights, Scientific Games
Liga Magdalenoka-Keen has been working in Consumer Insights for over 20 years across Europe at various industry leading companies, including Gaz de France, Unilever, SKY Betting and Gaming and for the past 7 years at Scientific Games (one of the global leaders in the lottery industry) where she is a Director of International Insights. Liga specialises in setting up and leading multijurisdictional research projects in Europe, Asia and Africa, with a view to produce actionable insights for the stakeholders.
Liga’s work centres around weaving different methodologies into distinct research initiatives. The research in turn delivers empowering outputs to lotteries around the world.  With an estimated $115 billion generated for lottery beneficiaries globally in the past year, it’s safe to say that it is a very rewarding work indeed.

Nick Meagher, Head of Insight & Research, Co-Op
Nick currently leads Advanced Analytics and Insight across the Cooperative Group, a unique role in what could well be one of the original purpose lead businesses, founded long before that term was even coined.  The group spans sectors, from the everyday to more significant moments in customer’s lives, provides a precious opportunity to connect data-sets to drive strong customer understanding and empathy. 
Nick is a seasoned ‘client side’ insight specialist, with a passion for deploying insights to make the complex (more) simple, and driving a business from discussions to decisions.  After some early roles in Nielsen and Kelloggs he spent over ten years at Cadburys / Mondelez across categories and regions.  He joined Unilever in 2015 as a Global Insight Director, a great place to hone his insight skills and embrace more digital approaches.  From there Nick took a new challenge to move into retail, in a new role heading up Customer Insights at Tesco.  Here he worked across the Own brand, Communications, Foresight and their Clubcard loyalty proposition, and whilst there the team won two MRS awards on the bounce!  Moving to a more data-rich retail environment gave him that chance to combine analytics and 'numbers' with human insights into what makes us tick and often drives people's surprising irrational behaviours.   

Alex Meehan, Senior Leader in Data Science, Co-op
Alex is Data Science Products Lead at the Co-op, leading a team dedicated to developing cutting-edge in-house AI products and providing expert guidance on external AI solutions.  Before joining the Co-op, Alex regularly worked with market research in a range of strategy and commercial roles for Pets at Home, PepsiCo, and Bain & Company consulting.  Lockdown prompted a “data epiphany”(!), which led to an MSc in Data Science and paved the way to the Co-op.  The Co-op have a diverse portfolio of AI products, ranging from the more traditional ML forecasting models to the latest in recommenders, vision recognition, and Generative AI chatbots.

Dipesh Mistry, Associate Director, The Behavioural Architects
Dipesh is a quantitative behavioural scientist with a BSc in Neuropsychology and an MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience.
He has close to a decade’s experience in research, which has centred around applying his strong academic background to the commercial research sector. Dipesh’s career has centred around creating innovative methods to address a range of behavioural questions across a wide range of sectors.

Nick North, Director of Audiences, BBC
Nick North leads the Audiences department at the BBC, which comprises audience planners, researchers and analysts in Content, Radio & Education, News, and Design and Engineering; central audience measurement specialists, marketing scientists and brand insight teams; and the Audience Services team handling direct interactions between the BBC and its audience; all working to ensure that the BBC puts the audience at the heart of its decision making. And with a growing volume of signed-in data from over 17 registered users, the data from BBC audiences is shaping not only decisions but personalised product experiences.
Nick joined the BBC in September 2014 from GfK where he spent 10 years in the management of its media research and audience measurement businesses, developing new data partnerships and technology acquisitions.

Katherine Roe, Senior Insight Manager, Whitbread
Katherine Roe heads up the insight team at Whitbread, a progressive team covering ad-hoc research, analytics and CX. Whitbread brands include Premier Inn, Beefeater, Brewers Fayre, Bar & Block and Whitbread Inns. In the 4 years Katherine has been at Whitbread a lot has happened in hospitality, making it a very exciting sector to work in. Prior to Whitbread Katherine worked in insight for 18 years, in retail and FMCG. Experience gained from starting off client-side at WHSmith, followed by a long and very enjoyable stretch agency side in data analytics and market research at IRI, then Kantar working closely with and learning from a wide variety of clients such as Kellogg’s, Unilever and Coca-Cola. Customer Experience is a major focus at Whitbread and Katherine is proud that a lot of progress in insight capability has been made in the last few years and the Customer Experience Framework has been a key part of this.

Hannah Rogers, New Business Director, Kokoro
Trained by Unilever’s Global Best Practice teams in qual, quant, shopper and ethnography, Hannah has been a researcher for over 15 years, recently moving to award-winning agency Kokoro. Throughout her career, she’s been lucky enough to work all over the world for leading global brands including Unilever, The National Lottery, TalkTalk and Cambridge University, with experience spanning categories including travel, retail, FMCG, hospitality, automotive and finance. Founder of The Campaign for Real Innovation, her passion is innovation – both methodological innovation and getting innovation and propositions off the ground – plugging into possibilities, people and pushing boundaries.

Karen Schofield, Head of Qual, Blue Yonder Research
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 – and told research stories to – brand leaders across a diverse range of sectors, markets and cultures. She has also presented talks and run training sessions on 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.
Outside work she is a committee member of her local theatre group and regularly helps run and performs in local productions, most recently as Rapunzel’s evil stepmother. She’s hoping not to get booed off stage this time though…

Shafeeq Shajahan, Product Director, Streetbees
Shafeeq is the VP of Product at Streetbees. A product leader with over 7 years of Machine Learning experience in the FMCG and TMT sectors, Shafeeq has contributed to the growth of zero-to-one AI products in APAC and EMEA, specialising in chatbots, voicebots and other Natural Language Processing applications. Shafeeq has been innovating in the Market Research space for three years now, empowering traditional research use-cases with AI (e.g. conversational surveys, multi-media classification and insight generation).

Lynsey Showman, Chief Growth Officer, is an experienced Consumer & B2B insight professional.
Lynsey joined Basis in 2012 as Head of Quant, before more recently transitioning into a Business Development role (where she remains close to project work to not lose her passion for research). Lynsey is a firm believer in the power of strong client/agency partnerships as through this, she can help her clients translate insights into action. Lynsey is therefore delighted to share an example of how getting to know a client’s business enabled informed recommendations to shape future strategy and direction.

 

09.15 Registration

 

09.45 Opening remarks – Jane Frost CBE, CEO, MRS

 

9.50 Chair opening address
Nick Meagher, Head of Insight & Research, Co-Op

 

09.55 Panel – Generative AI
The GenAI Revolution - sharing experiences of using generative AI and how it will change the research industry
This session will explore how Generative AI will change our worlds – the opportunities and the threats; the concerns we have – as consumers, as citizens, as employees; and how GenAI is now being applied in the world of insight and analytics – the services offered by research agencies, tech companies and consultancies, and how client-side researchers are already taking advantage of its potential.
Chair: Nick North, Director of Audiences, BBC
Panellists:
Alex Meehan, Senior Leader in Data Science, Co-op
Bethan Blakeley, Research Director, Boxclever
Shafeeq Shajahan, Product Director, Streetbees
 

10.35 Data Driven Insights
Building the beauty store of the future
L’Oreal wanted to create a seamless online and offline beauty retail experience for its global customer base. In this session, you’ll hear how a project which combined qualitative, quantitative and AI and placed voice of the customer research at the heart of L’Oreal’s decision making, helped internal and external stakeholders quickly understand how to craft the best buying experience for different consumers in different markets.
Lynsey Showman, Chief Growth Officer, Basis
Alexia Scherier, Global Consumer Insight Director, L’Oreal Consumer Products Division – joining by pre-recorded video as Alexia is unable to join live on the day

 

11.05 – Break

 

11.25 CX UX MR
Creating & embedding a customer-centric framework in Premier Inn
This session will show how Human8 and Premier Inn worked together to design a research programme that would deliver a customer-centric framework based on the voices of hotel guests. The project, was driven forward by a cross-functional working group across nine functions. It helped Premier Inn understand customers’ emotions, influences, pain points and opportunities at every journey touchpoint. The research scope was broad in nature, covering key customer journey touchpoints from research to stay. It also had ambitious objectives per touchpoint, drilling down into incredible detail. Hear how the research has already delivered impact and how Premier Inn is using the CX framework for future strategic work. 
Louise Hazell, Senior Research Manager, Human8
Katherine Roe, Senior Insight Manager, Whitbread

 

11.55 Behavioural Economics
Decoding decisions: how do people decide what to buy?
Decoding Decisions is Google and The Behavioural Architects’ research programme that addresses a simple but fundamental question for marketers: how do people decide what to buy?Hear highlights from the newest edition of the work which tackles three environments where marketers have the potential to use BeSci to supercharge the information they present about their brands - Search, website content & apps, and in the places where brands make their products available for sale.
Dipesh Mistry, Associate Director, The Behavioural Architects
Emily Allen, Google

 

12.25 Sponsor address from Vision One
Tony Lewis, CEO and Founder, Vision One

12.35 Lunch

 

13.35 Human centred decision making
Mind the gap: driving human centred decision-making through big business
‘Customer closeness’ and ‘closer to the consumer’ are mantras in Insight. Rightly so. We spend our lives deep diving into how people engage with, think and feel about brands…then bury this depth in dreary PowerPoint or swamp it in too much detail: we need to inject life and bravery into delivery and inspire stakeholders to act. We need to be bold.
BUT there is risk here too.
Stakeholders are people, and not all people respond in the same way. What agencies consider ‘fun’, ‘high impact’ and ‘memorable’ can actually become an excruciating cringeworthy experience for client-side teams – and your session is remembered for all the wrong reasons.
If your extraverted stakeholders have aspirations of ‘Am Dram’ and love being the centre of attention, ‘role play focus groups’ can navigate the empathy gap beautifully. If they are introverts, you have humiliated them and left them feeling so uncomfortable they will remember nothing but the pain of the pseudo-GSCE drama experience.
In this practical session, Co-Op and Kokoro (and Kokoro’s The Score) share some startling stats on your stakeholders, give you the tools to get to understand them as people, and challenge you to find the best way to land the message.
Hannah Rogers, New Business Director, Kokoro
Sarah De Caux, Lead Analytics & Insights Manager, Co-Op
 

14.25 Short break


14.35 Cultural Insights & Gen Z
Gen Z in the political year ahead
We’re a long way away from where we were for the December 2019 general election, so we are going to see a very different election to what we have seen before. This will be the first year for 1 in 4 of Gen Z to have the chance to vote, and many are unsure of things around politics, meaning they may learn and change their minds and position. Emily Driscoll talks us through what to expect to see from Gen Z in the political year ahead.    
Emily Driscoll, Head of Data Intelligence and Planning, LadBible

 

15.05 Break

 

15.25 Sustainability Research
Sustainability 2022 & beyond?: immersive research shared through immersive storytelling
Food manufacturer Samworth Brothers has been working with Boxclever to uncover what sustainability means for consumers today and for the future. This is the story of how an immersive program of research into consumer attitudes to sustainability, made a deep and lasting impact with all stakeholders thanks to some original thinking and innovative storytelling.
Lucy Hobbs, Research Director, Boxclever Consulting
Kate Bayliffe, Group Insight Manager, Samworth Brothers

  

15.55 EDI Research
Mirrors & Windows: media and identity in modern Britain
Google undertook an ambitious research programme with MTM to understand how people’s identity informs what they love to watch, and what that means for the U.K. media industry. We learnt that marketing & media have the power to make us all feel, whatever our identity, like we belong. That’s a pretty big responsibility and an exciting opportunity for our industries! In recent years the advertising industry has made progress towards becoming more inclusive and portraying a more diverse and representative picture of Britain. However, it’s still often easier to solve this challenge ‘in front of the camera’ (with diverse talent) than ‘behind the camera’ (in production, planning, strategy, etc). This session will introduce you to some of the award-winning research and planning work within inclusive media, and present insights from both audiences and experts that might help inform your thinking.
Sarah Ashley, EMEA Marketing Insights, Google
 

16.25 Storytelling
The art of the spectacle
Drawing on techniques from theatre and stage, journalism, books and beyond, Karen and Liga will share their experiences of using different techniques in various settings to better tell stories and leave audiences feeling inspired. We might not want people booing and hissing during a debrief, like they would in a pantomime, but we want them to engage in our stories, to be moved by them, and to act on them as a result. 
Karen Schofield, Head of Qual, Blue Yonder Research
Liga Magdelenoka-Keen, Director of International Insights, Scientific Games

 

16.55 Closing comments from the chair

 
17.00 Conference close

17.15 Sponsored drinks reception at New Century Bar 


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