MRS Best of Events and Awards, Manchester 2024

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.