Semiotics and Cultural Insights Conference 2024

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.