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Unlocking Significance & Decoding Cultures
Join the MRS for a day of case studies from around the world, demonstrating how semiotics and cultural research are solving multiple branding and communication challenges. Hear how brand leaders are engaging new audiences by recoding messaging into modern, nuanced narratives. Examine the impact AI will have on visual culture and the implications for semiotics and cultural analysis.
Hear real world case studies from:
NewsCorp * Panasonic EU * Baileys * LEGO *Shiseido * GambleAware
Dr Kishore Budha, Insights Director, Bryter
Kishore Budha is an accomplished Insights Director at Bryter Ltd, specialising in cultural research within the market research industry. With over 27 years of experience, Kishore has built a strong expertise in semiotics, cultural research, and design thinking for product innovation, communication, and 3D/2D product design. His extensive industry knowledge spans various sectors, including technology, consumer packaged goods (including durables and electronics), retail, and B2B (digital transformation, government, manufacturing, retail, financial services, customer service, integrated healthcare).
Kishore's qualitative research skills encompass anthropology, semiotics, ethnography, discourse analysis, and phenomenology. He delves into user behaviours, decoding signs and symbols they interact with. This understanding aids collaboration with insight and brand managers, shaping impactful toolkits. These toolkits include words, images, icons, colours, and materials that resonate with end users, driving compelling propositions and creatives.
Aaron Chan, Semiotician, Sign Salad
Specialising in Semiotics and Cultural Foresight at Sign Salad, Aaron leads global projects across a wide range of categories – identifying emerging cultural trends to help make brands more relevant and meaningful. Using a combination of semiotic & language analysis, social listening tools, desk-based research and fieldwork, Aaron advises clients on strategic, creative and innovation workstreams.
With a background in linguistics, Aaron is a member of the Language Analysis team at Sign Salad and has decoded the meanings of new product names for a leading pension services provider, distilled post-pandemic discourses around work life for a co-working space group in the UK, and investigated the shifting meanings of ‘replenishment’ in China for a multinational consumer goods group, to deliver pragmatic, commercially-driven, and actionable insights to support strategic business challenges and help brands achieve cultural relevance.
Sheila Cunningham, Global Planning Director, Baileys
Sheila has been Global Planning Director for Baileys for the past 7 years – a delightful and delicious role. Working with markets all over the world, Sheila is part of the tenacious team that has delivered the transformational turnaround success of the most loved spirits brand in the world. Sheila is also passionate about her role in championing the I&D agenda at Diageo.
Sheila started out her career in The National Lottery in the UK. She worked in the Irish market Diageo market team across all the beer brands and then spent 10 years as an independent strategic planner working with large ad agencies, other fmcg clients as well as lecturing in marketing. What has stayed true throughout her career is her love and curiosity for every aspect of planning from consumer research/insight to strategy and from semiotics to creative development and everything in between.
John Cranstone, Discover.ai
Dr. Bridget Dalton, Consultant and Semiotic Expert
Dr. Nick Gadsby, Founder & Principal, The Answer
Nick is a highly experienced and expert Commercial Semiotician and Cultural Analyst, as well as lecturer in Cultural Anthropology at UCL, and founder of semiotics and brand strategy agency, The Answer. He created The Answer to provide clients with high quality strategic semiotics based on the following principles: Simple, Profound Insights; Clear Strategic Direction, and; Actionable Outputs. With The Answer, he has innovated a number of unique semiotic methods, including Oculog, an approach designed to analyse consumer images.
Nick has worked in commercial research and brand strategy for over 20 years and the list of clients he has worked for in this time includes Google, Microsoft, P&G, GSK, Diageo, Coca Cola, Beiersdorf, Mondelez, Walgreen Boots Alliance, Tesco, O2, TfL. He is an experienced conference speaker and presenter with regular appearances at the MRS Annual Conference (which he has been nominated for Best Presentation twice, and Best Workshop once), ESOMAR, and numerous other events such as AQR and the Mindshare Huddle.
Roberta Graham, Director, Space Doctors
Dr Shane Hanson, Head of Insight & Innovation, Panasonic EU
Shane is a Senior Marketing Insight & Innovation professional with expertise in combining analytical and creative thinking to deliver actionable insights that helped drive customer value for blue-chip companies such as P&G, KP Snacks, Philips and Panasonic. She is experienced in strategic as well as ad hoc insight initiatives across key markets in Europe, Middle East, North America, Latin America and Asia. She has developed training programmes for sharing best practices in Commercialising customer insights across different sectors and employs a collaborative approach to drive the “Voice of the customer” in commercial decision making.?
Nancy Hervey-Bathurst, Strategist, Discover.ai
With a background in commercial semiotics & cultural insight, I love any opportunity to understand what makes different places, people, and products tick. Combining academic studies and professional experience, I have spent the last five years working and leading projects that scrutinize emerging spaces in culture - discerning how trends and developments in technology, media, and beyond impact the way we engage with brands across lifestyle categories.
Bethan Hockey, Research Director, NewsCorp
Bethan, a seasoned cultural and consumer insights specialist, currently a Research Director at Newscorp Australia's Growth Intelligence Centre. Her role focuses on delivering cultural and consumer insights to inform audience and editorial challenges, as well as practical market lead insights and thought leadership through the Growth Distillery, Newscorps dedicated brand-oriented program. This blends her passion for insights with her background in journalism and video production, enabling her to deliver strategic insights with a significant impact.
Bethan joined Newscorp after an 8-year tenure at Kantar, where she specialised in cultural strategy and human insights consulting, to inform some of the biggest Australian and international consumer brands. Here she also led the Sustainable Transformation Practice Lead, advising on everything from packaging innovation and communication to the development of thought leadership to mobilise businesses and inform strategy.
Cato Hunt, Director, Space Doctors
Chris Illsley, Global Insights Manager, the LEGO Group
Mirjam Grari, Associate Director, Future & Innovation, Verve Australia
Mirjam is Verve Australia’s Associate Director of Futures & Innovation. Her experience spans from consumer & cultural insight, foresight & innovation and she has worked globally across multiple categories with global brands such as Absolut Vodka, Volvo Cars, LVMH & Colgate-Palmolive to name a few. Her passion lies in seeing cultural & human patterns that most miss out on and making sense of it in a brand and business context.
Gareth Lewis, Director, Space Doctors
Oliver Lewis, Research Director, Convosphere
Oliver has 15+ years experience as a research professional, including roles as Head of Social Insight leading agencies and tool providers. He has worked closely with clients in a range of industries to develop bespoke solutions for their research needs and is constantly looking for new ways of doing things that leverage data and technology most efficiently.
Cecily Long, Senior Strategy Director, TRIPTK
Cecily is an experienced cultural theory specialist who has headed up global cultural insights departments in London and New York, and consulted with organizations across the private, public, and third sector.
Cecily has worked with multinational corporations to improve their representation of gender, and with global non-profits to develop culturally-rooted mitigation strategies tackling complex policy challenges like child marriage and adolescent girls’ migration. She has also worked with high-profile media clients including Twitter and the BBC, on award-winning work unpacking the drivers of successful content on Twitter and shaping future strategy for BBC World Service.
Her work has been presented at Cannes and the UN, and has garnered multiple industry awards. She co-authored a report into child marriage (‘Child Marriage in Sierra Leone, Guinea, Nicaragua and Indonesia: Cultural Roots and Girl-Centered Solutions’), which has since been presented at an African Union High-Level Meeting on Child Marriage by the First Lady of Sierra Leone, endorsed by the United Nations Representative to Indonesia, and presented as part of a Girls Not Brides summit during United Nations General Assembly Week.
Florence Mornat, Head of Analytics, Media efficiency and Consumer Insights, Shiseido
Florence is a highly-regarded, senior insight professional with a unique blend of experience and expertise spanning both luxury and high street / grocery brands. As Head of Analytics, Media and Consumer Insights at Shiseido (UK & Ireland), she is responsible for a portfolio of premium and luxury beauty and fragrance brands including Shiseido, Drunk Elephant, Clé de Peau Beauté, NARS, Issey Miyake, Serge Lutens, Tory Burch and Narciso Rodriguez. Over the last 6 years, she has built from scratch a thriving, expert data and insights function and orchestrated strategic cross-functional projects involving digital, marketing, media and commercial teams, as well as being the voice of the UK consumer at senior management level to support smarter and more data-driven decision making.
A French national with more than 25 years in senior insight global and local roles including 10 years in the UK, Florence has also worked agency-side for Nielsen and Kantar TNS, and for companies ranging from Danone Waters to L'Occitane En Provence and L’Oreal UK. She is passionate about bringing consumers and data insights together with internal expert teams to build collaboratively strategic and operational insights for the short and longer term.
Maddy Morton, Founder and CEO, Lucid
Maddy is Founder and CEO of Lucid, a qualitative insight, brand and innovation consultancy with a reputation for clarity and the use of innovative methods informed by neuroscience, including movement-based and spatial techniques. Lucid works with a wide range of respected brands across the private and not for profit sectors. As well as Shiseido, recent clients include Mondelez, Danone, Intersnack, Pernod Ricard, JDE, Reckitt, Eurostar, Prostate Cancer UK and the National Theatre.
Having started out in advertising, Maddy worked in senior marketing roles for Arts Council England and English National Opera before moving into business planning and marketing consultancy, when she lead the ‘Not For the Likes of You’ project, a seminal work on the role of leadership behaviour and customer engagement in audience expansion. She then became a senior insight consultant at Stimulating World Research before setting up Lucid. Maddy has been described as a ‘maestra’ with groups and is valued by clients for her energy, passion and commitment as well as the razor-sharp clarity of her strategic thinking, insight and expression.
Rikki Pearce, Managing Director, Verve Australia
Rikki leads the Verve Australia business and Global Centre of Excellence for Advanced Quant and Analytics. She is passionate about blending compelling research with innovative techniques to generate culturally resonant foresight. She has a love for exploring knotty brand challenges and have experience across a broad range of industries, driving data led customer strategy. Rikki has advanced degrees in marketing, psychology and statistics as well as direct experience using behavioural science to increase positive behaviours.
Dan Riley, Research Lead for Advertising and Brand, GambleAware
Dan is currently the lead commissioner on research to help develop and evaluate GambleAware’s marketing activities and strategy. He also commissions wider research projects to help GambleAware understand those experiencing gambling harms and synthesises wider research to inform GambleAware's consultation responses and policy narratives. He previously worked at Kantar Public leading mixed-methods research projects to help develop and evaluate some of the largest behaviour change campaigns in the public and/or third sector (e.g., This Girl Can for Sport England, #WeAreTheNHS for NHS England). LinkedIn.
Dr. Jennifer Simon, Associate Director & Semiotics Lead, Crowd DNA
Jennifer is an Associate Director at Crowd DNA, where she specialises in commercial semiotics, cultural insight and brand strategy. As Semiotics lead, she has integrated semiotic approaches with AI technology to provide robust solutions for client’s brand and communication strategies. She has delivered semiotic insights for a wide range of brands spanning multiple markets and sectors, including tech, media, luxury, alcohol and FMCG. She has both written for and presented at AQR and guest lectures on Semiotics in Consumer Research at UAL. Her background also includes academic research and teaching at Rice and Georgia State University in the US. Jennifer relishes the opportunity to help clients craft powerful narratives that resonate with their consumers.
09.30 Welcome from the Chair
Gareth Lewis, Managing Director, Space Doctors
09.40 Decoding the Australian meaning of luxury
The luxury category is evolving from a narrow convention to an increasingly broad, dynamic, and diverse space. There’s an opportunity for brands to create new value by catering to a more diverse set of luxury expressions and evolving consumer needs.
Together with NewsCorp, Verve set out to explore the notion of luxury in the Australian market combining cultural analysis and semiotics-at-scale through Ignite AI. Join the conversation, with Verve and NewsCorp, as they discuss the approach and insights, before shifting the focus to the key breakthroughs and impact for NewsCorp.
Rikki Pearce, Managing Director, Verve Australia
Mirjam Grari, Associate Director, Future & Innovation, Verve Australia
In conversation with
Bethan Hockey, Research Director, NewsCorp
10.10 How Panasonic reframed men’s grooming through new codes of masculine self-care
Panasonic sought cultural and category insights for the launch of a men's multi-function grooming product in Europe and North America. This case study presents the journey of how, working with Bryter, they embarked on a project to identify enduring, positive masculine archetypes, analyse coding of customisability, simplicity and self-care and create a semiotic framework for category analysis.
Hear how the semiotic codes and archetypes are internally recognised as a breakthrough for Panasonic insights, innovation, and marketing teams and are supporting the development of culturally rooted and compelling messaging.
Dr Kishore Budha, Insights Director, Bryter
Dr Shane Hanson, Head of Insight & Innovation, Panasonic EU
10.40 Morning break
11.05 Panel: Strange bedfellows: semiotics & AI in the generative age
AI, generative language and image models will have a growing impact on visual culture. Join panellists as they consider the role and evolution of semiotics within an increasingly AI driven world.
Chair
Nancy Hervey-Bathurst, Strategist, Discover.ai
Panellists
Grace Flavin, Freelance Cultural Analyst and Semiotician
Dr. Jennifer Simon, Associate Director & Semiotics Lead, Crowd DNA
Dr. Bridget Dalton, Consultant and Semiotic Expert
John Cranstone, Discover.ai
11.45 From emergent to emergence; why we need more imagination in foresight
Semiotics and cultural analysis has always looked to the future. But what will be possible in the future is being shaped by a rapidly evolving context of multiple systems in collapse. Consequently, our ability to anticipate multiple possible futures is needed more than ever.
In this presentation Space Doctors will introduce innovative cultural foresight methods grounded in speculative and critical design to demonstrate how semiotics and cultural understanding must move beyond 'what's emergent' and engage more directly with the idea of 'what's possible'. The LEGO group will share how it thinks about different futures and how to create more positive and meaningful ones.
Cato Hunt, Managing Director, Space Doctors
Roberta Graham, Director, Space Doctors
Chris Illsley, Global Insights Manager, the LEGO Group
12.15 Lunch
13.15 Using Semiotic language analysis to reduce stigma around gambling harms
GambleAware were looking to identify socially constructed sources of stigma related to gambling harms. The stigma of gambling harms is a proven barrier to support seeking alongside negatively impacting the wellbeing of those experiencing it.
This case study explores Sign Salad’s semiotic analysis of stigma in British culture, identifying visual and language material driving this process of stigmatisation, as well as a number of less prevalent, but more empowering cultural constructions.
Hear how the analysis has led to the production of an accessible language guide and helped to inform a programme of work by GambleAware which aims to reduce stigma in this area.
Aaron Chan, Semiotician, Sign Salad
Dan Riley, Research Lead for Advertising and Brand, GambleAware
13.45 From Diamond to Double-Helix: integrating semiotics and qual for Shiseido
This session will explore how Lucid and The Answer designed a deeply integrated approach that seamlessly combined qualitative methods with semiotics to help Shiseido understand which of its brand assets produced in Japan, EMEA, US and locally would most resonate with UK consumers.
Hear how the insights combined the bigger cultural picture of the meaning of premium skincare in different markets with a granular understanding of different personas and provided a clear set of practical, visual and messaging guidelines that could be used to grow engagement with the brand in the UK.
Dr. Nick Gadsby, Founder & Principal, The Answer
Maddy Morton, Founder & CEO, Lucid
Florence Mornat, Head of Analytics, Media efficiency and Consumer Insights, Shiseido
14.15 Afternoon break
14.45 Navigating socio-cultural forces to deliver genuinely comparative and comparable insights
Social data, as evidenced in consumer-generated conversations and media usage, serves as both a mirror and an amplifier of societal trends, values and behaviours. Understanding the wider cultural contexts that shape any level of conversation, from simple brand preference to nuanced political and social attitudes, is vital when delivering multi-market projects.
Drawing from a wide range of social data-driven cross-cultural projects, Convosphere will spotlight methods to unearth meaningful cultural insights and, in particular, prevent the
misinterpretation of quantitative results.
Oliver Lewis, Research Director, Convosphere
15.15 Using Semiotic insight to cement Baileys’ status as a worldwide treating leader
In 2016, Baileys set a new ambition: to become the world’s leading adult treat brand, aiming to transcend its category and tap into the broader world of delicious treats. From the start of this transformation, Baileys has integrated semiotic insight into every facet of the brand, from brand world and creative messaging to innovation strategy, packaging design and localised cultural activations.
Examine how a localised, progressive approach which mapped emergent semiotic spaces against key treating occasions identified priority opportunity moments that could supercharge growth resulting in a successful activation of the treating strategy in markets all across the globe from Mexico to the UK and from Canada to Nigeria.
Cecily Long, Senior Strategy Director, TRIPTK
Sheila Cunningham, Global Planning Director, Baileys
15.45 Closing comments from the Chair
15.55 End of conference
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