Behavioural Economics

Why organisations work with Les Binet The 60:40 brand-to-activation framework he co-developed with Peter Field is the most cited effectiveness benchmark in UK marketing strategy. Organisations use it to build a defensible, evidence-based case for long-term brand investment to boards focused on quarterly ROI. His analysis of the IPA Effectiveness Databank covers more than 1,000 case studies across 700 brands, 83 sectors and over three decades of commercial data. No comparable longitudinal evidence base for marketing investment decisions exists in published form. The Share of Search metric he developed gives organisations a free, predictive tool for tracking brand health and anticipating market share movements, validated across automotive, energy and handset categories using publicly available Google Trends data. Research he presented at the 2025 IPA Effectiveness Conference showed that marketing budget is eight times more important than ROI in driving effectiveness. Most CMOs surveyed believed the opposite – a gap his work directly addresses. His grounding in Physics, Artificial Intelligence research and LSE econometrics makes him one of the few voices in effectiveness who can construct, interrogate and critique the statistical models organisations use to evaluate their own campaigns. Biography highlights Co-author of The Long and the Short of It (IPA, 2013) and four further IPA effectiveness reports; has contributed to more IPA Effectiveness Awards papers than any other individual (per the Advertising Association) Former Group Head of Effectiveness at adam&eveDDB; joined BMP account planning in 1987 and remained across all iterations of the agency for more than three decades Recipient of the IPA President’s Medal (2014), the highest honour the UK advertising industry can award Elected IPA Honorary Fellow (2004); Convener of Judges, IPA Effectiveness Awards (2005) Board Advisor, Journal of Advertising Research; named in Campaign Magazine’s “40 over 40” (2023) MA Physics, Oxford; MPhil Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh; postgraduate Economics (Birkbeck) and Econometrics (LSE) Biography The Long and the Short of It, published by the IPA in 2013, is one of the most-cited effectiveness documents in marketing. Its co-author, Les Binet, spent three decades at adam&eveDDB building the evidence that most organisations structure their marketing investment around the wrong metrics. The research drew on 996 advertising effectiveness case studies across 700 brands, 83 sectors and more than 30 years of IPA Databank data. Its central finding of the “60:40 heuristic” recommended that most consumer brands allocate roughly 60% of marketing budget to brand building and 40% to short-term activation. The report has since been cited in over 70 academic publications and referenced across multiple languages. Binet’s subsequent work has continued to extend the evidence base. The Share of Search metric he developed gives organisations a free, predictive tool for tracking brand health using Google Trends data, validated across automotive, energy and handset categories. At the 2025 IPA Effectiveness Conference, he presented research with Medialab showing that budget is eight times more important than ROI in driving marketing effectiveness. Most CMOs surveyed believed the opposite. He read Physics at Oxford and completed an MPhil in Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh, later adding postgraduate study in Economics at Birkbeck and Econometrics at the LSE. Elected an IPA Honorary Fellow in 2004, he received the IPA President’s Medal in 2014. He serves as a Board Advisor to the Journal of Advertising Research and consults independently through Binet Consulting. Key speaking topics Marketing effectiveness measurement Brand building versus short-term activation The 60:40 investment framework Share of Search and brand demand indicators Econometrics and advertising evaluation Media effectiveness in digital environments Evidence-based marketing investment strategy Ideal for CMOs and senior marketing leaders making significant media and brand investment decisions CFOs and finance functions reviewing marketing accountability and budget allocation Boards and executive teams evaluating the commercial return on advertising investment Strategy, planning and insight functions in organisations with major advertising spend Audience outcomes A clear, evidence-grounded framework for distinguishing short-term ROI from long-term profit growth, and why the difference matters to boards Practical understanding of the 60:40 brand-to-activation heuristic and how to adapt it by sector, brand maturity and business context A working introduction to Share of Search as a predictive brand health indicator, applicable without specialist tools or budget A stronger internal case for protecting brand investment in organisations under pressure to demonstrate immediate measurable returns Familiarity with the specific effectiveness patterns – reach, share of voice, emotional advertising – that the IPA data consistently identifies as drivers of commercial results

Why organisations work with Tim Harford Translates economic and statistical research into commercial decisions, drawing on a Financial Times column that has run for nearly two decades and a body of ten published books. Brings credibility on numbers that very few speakers can match: Honorary Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and OBE for services to economic understanding. Reframes innovation as an evidence-based discipline grounded in adaptation and failure, the central thesis of “Adapt” and “Messy”, rather than the usual creativity rhetoric. Equips senior audiences to interrogate their own data culture using the rules from “How To Make The World Add Up”, a practical antidote to misleading statistics inside organisations. Trusted as a host, moderator and after-dinner speaker by serious audiences because his radio craft on “More or Less” and “Cautionary Tales” carries directly into the room. Biography highlights Senior columnist, Financial Times, writing “The Undercover Economist”. Presenter, BBC Radio 4’s “More or Less”, the long-running statistics-in-the-news programme. Host of “Cautionary Tales”, a Pushkin Industries podcast, and creator of “Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy”. Author of ten books, including “The Undercover Economist”, “Adapt”, “Messy”, “How To Make The World Add Up” and “The Truth Detective”. Honorary Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and of Brasenose College, Oxford; Associate Member of Nuffield College, Oxford. OBE for services to Improving Economic Understanding; winner of the Bastiat Prize (twice), the Wincott Journalist of the Year award, and the Royal Statistical Society award for journalistic excellence. Biography Most organisations claim to be evidence-led. Few are. Decisions are framed in numbers but driven by narrative, and innovation programmes routinely refuse to learn from the failures that contain the most useful information. Harford’s work, across the Financial Times column, ten books and two long-running BBC and Pushkin productions, has been built around exactly that gap. His books map the intellectual territory leaders care about. “The Undercover Economist” reframed everyday markets through the lens of price, scarcity and incentive, and has sold more than 1.5 million copies in thirty languages. “Adapt” and “Messy” argue that progress depends on disciplined trial, error and tolerance for disorder, a more honest account of innovation than most corporate playbooks allow. “How To Make The World Add Up” gives senior audiences a practical method for testing the numbers they are asked to act on. The credentials behind that work are unusual. Honorary Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, Associate Member of Nuffield College Oxford, an OBE for services to economic understanding, and a body of awards from the Bastiat Prize to the Wincott. As presenter of BBC Radio 4’s “More or Less”, Harford has spent years publicly stress-testing the statistics that shape policy and business commentary, which makes him one of the few speakers who can hold a senior room on data culture without resorting to platitudes. For boards and leadership teams, the value is concrete. Sharper questions about innovation portfolios, a working method for separating signal from noise, and a more honest model of how organisations actually learn. The recent “Cautionary Tales” series, which dissects high-profile organisational failures, has become a reference point for leaders thinking seriously about how decisions go wrong. Key speaking topics Behavioural economics in commercial decision-making Innovation, adaptation and learning from failure Statistical literacy and data culture in organisations Economic forces shaping business and policy Creativity, disorder and team productivity Cognitive bias and judgement under uncertainty Ideal for Boards and executive committees confronting decisions where the numbers are contested Strategy, innovation and R&D leaders building portfolios under uncertainty CFOs and finance functions reviewing how evidence is presented and challenged internally Senior leadership offsites where the brief calls for serious intellectual content with broad relevance Audience outcomes A working method for interrogating statistics and management dashboards before acting on them A clearer model of innovation as managed trial and error, with practical implications for portfolio choice Sharper recognition of the cognitive errors that recur in senior decision-making Concrete references from “Cautionary Tales” and “More or Less” that audiences can use to reframe their own debates

Why organisations work with Steven Pinker His argument that human cognitive biases – availability, confirmation, narrative distortion – are not random errors but predictable and correctable patterns gives organisations a diagnostic framework that most behavioural science speakers only gesture towards. The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now provide leaders with a rigorously evidenced counterweight to crisis-driven decision-making: a data-grounded case for long-run institutional progress that challenges the assumption that things are categorically worse than before. Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters grew out of a Harvard course on reasoning, and offers organisations a structured, named toolkit – logic, Bayesian probability, causal inference, game theory – applied directly to the kinds of collective judgments institutions face. His work on language and common knowledge (the study of what people know that others know they know) gives communicators and senior leaders rare analytical precision about why messaging fails, why consensus breaks down, and how shared understanding is actually constructed. Recognised by the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award and elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Pinker brings a level of peer-validated scholarly authority that very few public-facing intellectuals in this space can match. Biography highlights Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Harvard University; faculty career spanning Harvard, MIT (1982–2003), and Stanford Elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2016) Author of thirteen books, including The Better Angels of Our Nature, Enlightenment Now, and Rationality BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Humanities and Social Sciences (shared with Peter Singer) William James Book Prize (three times); Los Angeles Times Science Book Prize; Cundill Recognition of Excellence in History Award Ranked by Academic Influence as the second most influential psychologist in the world, 2010–2020 Regular contributor to The New York Times, Time, and The Atlantic; named to Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World and Foreign Policy‘s 100 Global Thinkers Biography Organisations that operate in complex, information-saturated environments face a specific and underappreciated failure mode: not a shortage of data, but a systematic distortion in how that data is processed. Leaders overweight vivid recent events, underweight statistical baselines, and build strategy around narratives that feel coherent rather than evidence that is reliable. The cognitive science underlying these failures is well-documented – but rarely applied with rigour inside institutions. Steven Pinker has spent four decades studying the mechanisms of language, reasoning, and human cognition at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. His research is not popularised work drawn from others’ findings: it is original experimental scholarship in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and the psychology of social relations, conducted at the Johnstone Family Chair in Harvard’s Department of Psychology. What distinguishes his public work is the consistent application of that scientific foundation to questions that organisations – and civilisations – actually face. His most argued books form a coherent intellectual project. The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) used historical data across centuries to make the case that violence and conflict have declined measurably – not as opinion, but as documented empirical fact – and identified the institutional and psychological forces responsible. Enlightenment Now (2018) extended that analysis across all major indicators of human welfare, arguing that reason, science, and Enlightenment institutions remain the engines of progress. Rationality (2021) turned the lens directly onto decision-making: what cognitive tools are required to think clearly, why they are rarely applied, and how organisations and democracies can build structures that reason more reliably. The book emerged from a course Pinker teaches at Harvard and addresses logic, Bayesian probability, causal inference, and game theory as practical instruments for institutional judgment. Recognised by the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Humanities and Social Sciences – for contributions to the understanding of human rationality and progress that have entered the mainstream of public debate – and elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Pinker occupies a rare position: a research scientist whose work is directly legible to senior leaders grappling with the quality of organisational reasoning and the reliability of their own institutions. Key speaking topics Cognitive biases and institutional decision-making Rationality and evidence-based reasoning Language, communication, and common knowledge The psychology and history of violence Enlightenment values and organisational progress Human nature and social behaviour Clarity and effectiveness in professional communication Ideal for C-suite and board audiences wrestling with strategic decision-making under uncertainty Policy, government, and public affairs leadership Strategy, risk, and scenario planning functions Executive development and leadership faculty programmes Audience outcomes A working understanding of how specific cognitive biases – availability, confirmation, narrative distortion – shape organisational decisions, and what structures can correct them A data-grounded framework for assessing long-run institutional and societal progress, reducing reliance on media-driven perception of perpetual crisis Practical reasoning tools from logic, probability, and causal inference, applied to the kinds of collective judgments senior leaders actually face Greater precision about how language shapes shared understanding – and why institutional communication so often fails to build the common knowledge it intends A clearer sense of where human nature helps and where it hinders, grounded in evolutionary psychology rather than management metaphor

Why organisations work with Rory Sutherland His Alchemy argument, that businesses leave their most valuable opportunities untapped by optimising for logic rather than psychology, is built on 30 years of commercial practice at Ogilvy, not academic research. He founded and runs a dedicated behavioural science practice inside one of the world’s largest advertising agencies, where small contextual changes have produced large, documented commercial results, including tripling a call centre’s conversion rate through script changes alone. His concept of “psycho-logic” gives commercial teams a named, usable framework for the decisions that resist rational modelling: pricing, positioning, and customer experience chief among them. His two TED talks have passed seven million combined views, meaning his arguments are already part of the strategic vocabulary of many senior audiences, any conversation with him starts further ahead. He founded Nudgestock, the annual festival of behavioural sciences – making him an institutional builder in the field, not simply a commentator on it. Biography highlights Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK; co-founder and leader of Ogilvy’s Behavioural Science Practice, established 2012 Author of Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense (Penguin, 2019); co-author of Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet? (2021) Two TED Talks – “Life Lessons from an Ad Man” and “Sweat the Small Stuff” – with over 7 million combined views Former President of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising; former Chair of Judges, Direct Jury, Cannes Lions Fortnightly “The Wiki Man” columnist, The Spectator; founder of Nudgestock, the annual behavioural sciences festival Studied Classics at Christ’s College, Cambridge; joined Ogilvy as a graduate trainee in 1988 Biography In 2012, Rory Sutherland did something unusual for an advertising agency: he built a team of psychology graduates inside Ogilvy and pointed them at commercial problems. The premise was direct. Most organisations optimise for the logical version of what customers want, not the psychological reality of how they decide. Three decades of commercial practice have made that premise difficult to argue with. His 2019 book Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense sets out the argument in full. Human decision-making, Sutherland contends, follows a “psycho-logic”, a coherent but non-rational set of rules governing what people buy, how much they’ll pay, and how satisfied they feel. Richard Thaler and Robert Cialdini both appear in its pages; Nassim Nicholas Taleb described it as “a breakthrough book.” The Behavioural Science Practice he founded at Ogilvy tests these ideas commercially. Small contextual adjustments – changes to a call centre script, a reframing of a product’s positioning, a tweak to the sequence of a customer journey – have produced measurable results. It is the kind of evidence that makes his argument practical rather than purely theoretical. He served as President of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising and as Chair of the Judges for Cannes Lions’ Direct Jury. His two TED talks have passed seven million combined views. He writes a fortnightly column in The Spectator and founded Nudgestock, the annual festival of behavioural sciences. Key speaking topics Behavioural economics and commercial strategy Consumer psychology and decision-making Perception, value, and pricing psychology The limits of data-driven marketing Creativity and non-rational problem-solving Behavioural design and customer experience Nudge theory in organisational contexts Ideal for Chief Marketing Officers and marketing leadership teams rethinking growth strategy Commercial strategy and innovation leaders exploring alternatives to pure data-led optimisation Senior executives and boards examining how psychological insight can improve pricing, product design, and customer experience Conference audiences in financial services, retail, consumer goods, and technology where customer behaviour directly drives commercial performance Audience outcomes A named framework, “psycho-logic”, for identifying where logical optimisation is producing diminishing returns in marketing and commercial strategy Specific, documented examples of small behavioural interventions that produced large commercial results A clearer understanding of why the most effective growth moves often look counterintuitive, and how to make the internal case for them Practical grounding in behavioural economics principles applicable to pricing, customer experience, and product design A more honest audit of where data-driven approaches reach their limits and what to reach for instead

Why organisations work with Roger Myerson He is one of three living architects of mechanism design, the field that won the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and now underpins serious thinking on auction design, procurement, regulation and incentive contracts. His revelation principle and revenue-equivalence results are not abstractions for a senior team setting bid rules, supplier contracts or commission structures. They tell you when an incentive system can be made truth-telling at all, and when no rule will work without changing the information environment. He occupies the David L. Pearson Distinguished Service Professorship in Global Conflict Studies at Chicago, which means his second body of work, on political leadership, federalism and post-conflict state-building, is directly relevant to boards exposed to weak-institution markets. His textbook Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict has trained a generation of economists, regulators and strategists, which makes him unusually effective with audiences who already speak some of the language and want the original source rather than a popularisation. Past president of both the Econometric Society and the Game Theory Society, member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations: a level of peer recognition that travels into board rooms and policy settings without further explanation. Biography highlights Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, 2007, shared with Leonid Hurwicz and Eric Maskin for the foundations of mechanism design theory. David L. Pearson Distinguished Service Professor of Global Conflict Studies, University of Chicago, with appointments in the Harris School of Public Policy and the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics. PhD in applied mathematics, Harvard University, supervised by Kenneth Arrow; twenty-five years on the faculty at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management before moving to Chicago in 2001. Author of Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict (Harvard University Press) and Probability Models for Economic Decisions (now in a second edition with MIT Press). Past President of the Econometric Society (2009) and the Game Theory Society (2012 to 2014); Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize, 2009. Member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the Council on Foreign Relations. Biography Most rules inside an organisation are written as if everyone has the same information and roughly aligned interests. Procurement contracts, sales commissions, internal capital allocation, joint-venture terms: the rule is set, and then people behave as the rule incentivises them to behave, which is rarely what the designer intended. Mechanism design is the formal answer to that problem, and Roger Myerson is one of the three economists who built it. The 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences recognised that body of work, shared with Leonid Hurwicz and Eric Maskin. Within it, two of Myerson’s results carry the most operational weight. The revelation principle tells designers when a system can in principle be made truth-telling. The revenue-equivalence theorem, derived in his auction work, tells sellers when superficially different bidding rules produce the same outcome and when they do not. Senior teams designing auctions, bid processes or contracts use these ideas whether they cite him or not. His training is Harvard, applied mathematics, supervised by Kenneth Arrow. The career sat at Northwestern’s Kellogg School for twenty-five years before he moved to the University of Chicago in 2001, where he now holds the David L. Pearson Distinguished Service Professorship in Global Conflict Studies, with joint appointments in the Harris School of Public Policy and the Griffin Department of Economics. Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict, published by Harvard University Press in 1991, remains a standard graduate text. The Pearson chair signals the second arc of his work. Over the past fifteen years he has applied the same incentive-and-information lens to political institutions: how leaders build reputations, how federal structures change the supply of credible politicians, how post-conflict states succeed or fail at building durable government. For boards with serious exposure to weak-institution markets, that is a different and rarer kind of advisor than a geopolitical commentator. Key speaking topics Mechanism design and incentive systems under asymmetric information Auction design and competitive bidding Game theory for strategy and negotiation Contract and procurement design Political economy of leadership and state-building Federalism and the design of democratic institutions Ideal for Boards and executive teams designing auctions, bid processes, procurement frameworks or major partnership contracts. CSOs, CFOs and corporate development leaders working on incentive structures, internal capital allocation or commission and bonus design. Regulators, central bank teams and policy bodies working on market design, spectrum or asset auctions, and institutional reform. Leadership teams of multinationals with substantive exposure to weak-institution or post-conflict markets. Audience outcomes A working understanding of mechanism design as a tool for setting rules when the other side knows more than you do. The ability to recognise when an auction, bid or contract structure is fighting against the information environment rather than working with it. A clearer view of where incentive design can solve a coordination problem and where the underlying information asymmetry has to be changed first. A grounded perspective on how political incentives shape the operating environment in fragile or institutionally weak markets. Direct exposure to one of the three living architects of the field, with the precision that brings to questions teams are usually forced to answer with intuition.

Why organisations work with Robert Shiller He provides Nobel-level empirical authority on asset bubbles, housing cycles, and equity valuation, the questions a board faces when deciding whether to commit capital at the top of a cycle. He named the bubbles others missed. Irrational Exuberance warned of the dot-com peak in 2000 and the housing peak before the subprime crisis, both calls now in the public record. He gives leaders the indicators they can actually use, including the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices and the CAPE ratio, both of which sit inside the standard toolkit of professional investors. His work on Narrative Economics gives boards a structured way to think about how stories move markets and consumer behaviour, which matters when sentiment shifts faster than fundamentals. He is one of the few macroeconomists who built behavioural finance into the mainstream, co-authoring Animal Spirits and Phishing for Phools with George Akerlof. Biography highlights Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University and Fellow of the International Center for Finance at Yale School of Management. 2013 Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences, shared with Eugene Fama and Lars Peter Hansen. Co-creator of the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices and the Cyclically Adjusted Price-to-Earnings ratio (CAPE / Shiller PE). Author of Irrational Exuberance, Narrative Economics, Animal Spirits, Phishing for Phools, Finance and the Good Society, and The New Financial Order. Regular Project Syndicate columnist and former New York Times “Economic View” columnist. Narrative Economics named a Financial Times Best Book of 2019. Biography Asset prices have a habit of detaching from fundamentals long before anyone calls it a bubble. The challenge for boards and investors is recognising the moment, separating durable conviction from collective story, and acting on it. That problem has defined Robert Shiller’s working life as an empirical economist. Shiller is Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale and a Fellow at the Yale School of Management International Center for Finance. The 2013 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, shared with Eugene Fama and Lars Peter Hansen, recognised his empirical analysis of asset prices, including the work showing that stock prices move far more than dividends justify. The implication for capital markets has shaped a generation of valuation thinking. His infrastructure sits inside the toolkit of serious investors. The S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, developed with Karl Case, became the reference series for US housing and the basis for CME futures. The Cyclically Adjusted Price-to-Earnings ratio, built with John Campbell, gave equity investors a long-cycle valuation lens. Irrational Exuberance, first published in 2000, named the dot-com peak in real time and was updated to identify the housing bubble before the subprime crisis. The later work moved into territory most macroeconomists avoid. Animal Spirits and Phishing for Phools, both with George Akerlof, brought behavioural and psychological forces into mainstream macro. Narrative Economics, a Financial Times Best Book of 2019, made the case that the stories people tell each other about money and markets shape outcomes as much as the numbers do. For senior leaders, that is the practical question: which narratives are moving capital right now, and which ones are about to break. Key speaking topics Asset prices and market valuation Housing markets and price cycles Behavioural finance Narrative economics Bubbles and financial volatility Macroeconomic risk and forecasting Innovation in finance and risk management Ideal for Boards and investment committees making capital allocation decisions under cycle and valuation uncertainty CFOs, CIOs, and treasury leaders in banks, asset managers, and insurers Senior policymakers, central bank audiences, and regulators working on financial stability Real estate, mortgage, and housing finance leadership Audience outcomes A clearer read on where current asset prices sit relative to long-cycle valuation benchmarks like CAPE A working understanding of how narrative and sentiment translate into measurable market behaviour A sharper framework for spotting bubble dynamics before they reverse Behavioural finance applied to specific decisions on housing, equities, and credit Direct exposure to the empirical evidence behind Nobel-recognised work on asset pricing

Why organisations work with Philip Hesketh A behavioural framework, the Seven Drivers of Motivation, published by Wiley and built specifically for sales, pricing, and client conversations, not generic influence theory. Direct operator credibility: he ran a 150-person advertising agency with clients including the BBC, Nestle, Disney, and HSBC, so the case studies come from his own P&L. A specific, repeatable answer to the pricing question. His “How to hold high prices and fees” session is built around what makes buyers concede on value rather than discount. Two Amazon number-one books on persuasion, giving the speaker a public reference point the audience can revisit, share with their teams, and use as a working text. Biography highlights Founder and managing partner of Advertising Principles, Leeds, grown over 17 years to £48m in billings with 150 staff and clients including the BBC, Nestle, Disney, and HSBC. Author of two Amazon UK number-one bestsellers on persuasion, “How to Persuade and Influence People” and “Persuade”, both published by Capstone/Wiley, and a third book, “The Golden Rules for a Happy Life”. Psychology graduate of Newcastle University and former Procter & Gamble salesperson, named P&G Salesman of the Year. Vistage UK “Outstanding Performer” and “Most Requested Speaker”; TEC Australia “Overseas Speaker of the Year” 2009. Visiting Fellow of Newcastle University. Has delivered keynote and training programmes for sales, professional services, and leadership audiences across more than 20 countries. Biography Most pricing pressure does not come from competitors. It comes from how sales and account teams handle the conversation when a client pushes back. The behavioural science of why people say yes, why they concede on value, and why they stay loyal sits at the heart of that conversation, and it is the territory Philip Hesketh has worked in for two decades. Hesketh is a Newcastle University psychology graduate who started in sales at Procter & Gamble, where he was named Salesman of the Year. In 1986 he founded Advertising Principles in Leeds and built it over 17 years into a £48m agency with 150 staff and clients such as the BBC, Nestle, Disney, and HSBC. The frameworks he now teaches were developed inside that business, not bolted on afterwards. His two Wiley books, “How to Persuade and Influence People” and “Persuade”, set out the Seven Drivers of Motivation: a working model of what moves buyers, decision-makers, and colleagues to act. Both reached number one on Amazon UK in their categories. The model is built for commercial use, with direct application to pricing, negotiation, and client relationship work. Vistage UK named him “Outstanding Performer” and “Most Requested Speaker”; TEC Australia named him “Overseas Speaker of the Year”. Beyond the awards, the practical proof is repetition: chief executive groups book him back, which only happens when the content moves the conversations leaders are actually having about value, fees, and customers. Key speaking topics Psychology of persuasion and influence Pricing and value negotiation Client acquisition and retention Sales performance and conversion Behavioural drivers of buyer decisions Customer experience and loyalty Ideal for CCOs, sales directors, and revenue leaders facing margin compression Professional services partners and client-facing leaders in agencies, law, accountancy, and consulting Account management and key client teams in B2B environments Leadership audiences at Vistage, YPO, EO, and similar peer-group settings Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for the seven psychological drivers behind buyer decisions Specific techniques for holding price and defending fees in negotiation A sharper read on why clients defect, and what conversations keep them Practical questions and conversational moves teams can put to work the next day A clearer separation between price objections that are real and price objections that are tested

Why organisations work with Paolo Surico He has shown, using household and firm micro-data, that most of the consumption response to interest rates comes from mortgaged households, which is the single most useful framing for any business modelling consumer demand under a rate cycle. His American Economic Review paper on the long-run effects of government spending was cited in the UK Chancellor’s Spring Statement, which is rare evidence that academic work has moved actual fiscal policy. His advisory portfolio with the Bank of England, European Central Bank, European Commission, and Financial Conduct Authority means he reads central bank communications from the inside, not as a commentator. His ESRC GBP 1 million grant and ERC Starting Grant put him in the top tier of European macroeconomists by independent funder validation. He translates technical macro into language a non-economist board can use, which is the reason financial services and professional services firms book him repeatedly. Biography highlights Professor of Economics, London Business School Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research; Research Associate, LSE Centre for Macroeconomics Co-author, “The Long-Run Effects of Government Spending,” American Economic Review (2025), cited in the UK Chancellor’s Spring Statement Awarded a GBP 1 million ESRC grant for “Long-Run Consequences of Business-Cycle Fluctuations”; recipient of an ERC Starting Grant Former Adviser to the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee; consultant to the European Central Bank, European Commission, and Financial Conduct Authority Regular contributor and commentator in the Financial Times, The Economist, Il Sole 24 Ore, and Corriere della Sera Biography Most macroeconomic commentary stops at the aggregate. Surico’s work begins where it usually ends: with the household and the firm. Using micro-data from the US and UK, he has shown that mortgaged households drive most of the consumption response to interest rate changes, while outright owners barely move at all. That finding has reframed how central banks think about transmission, and it gives commercial leaders something more useful than a forecast. His 2025 American Economic Review paper with Juan Antolin-Diaz, “The Long-Run Effects of Government Spending,” used 125 years of US data to show that military and public R&D spending produce large, persistent growth effects through their composition, not their size. The paper was cited in the UK Chancellor’s Spring Statement, which is an unusually direct line between academic research and fiscal policy. The credentials are substantial. Fellow of CEPR, Research Associate at the LSE Centre for Macroeconomics, former Adviser to the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, current consultant to the European Central Bank and European Commission. A GBP 1 million ESRC grant and an ERC Starting Grant sit behind the academic record. He writes regularly for the Financial Times, The Economist, and the major Italian financial press. What sets him apart for boardroom audiences is the bridge he builds between empirical macro and decisions a leadership team has to make this quarter. When he talks about household debt, demographic change, or the redistributive effects of monetary policy, the argument lands in concrete terms that a CFO, a head of strategy, or a wealth-management chief can act on. Key speaking topics Monetary policy transmission and household debt Public debt sustainability and fiscal outlook Government spending, innovation, and long-run growth Inequality and the macroeconomy Housing, credit, and financial markets Demographic change and macroeconomic policy Ideal for CFO, treasury, and finance leadership teams in financial services, asset management, and insurance Boards and executive committees stress-testing strategy against rate, fiscal, and policy scenarios Wealth and private banking client events where senior clients want substantive macro analysis Strategy and economic-policy functions in industrials, real estate, and consumer-facing sectors Audience outcomes A clearer view of how rate decisions actually move through mortgaged households, renters, and balance sheets, rather than aggregate models A framework for reading central bank communications from the inside of the policy process Specific implications of public debt and government spending trajectories for medium-term growth and capital allocation A grounded read on inequality as a macroeconomic amplifier, not a social commentary point

Why organisations work with Paco Underhill He invented the methodology behind modern in-store consumer research. Envirosell’s video-tracking and observational fieldwork, built up over four decades, is the empirical foundation that most behavioural retail consulting now borrows from. His client base is the proof point. Envirosell has worked with more than a third of the Fortune 100 across 50-plus countries, on stores, banks, restaurants, malls, and digital interfaces. Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping is taught in MBA and design programmes globally and has been published in 27 languages, giving him a shared vocabulary with the buyers in the room. Malcolm Gladwell’s 1996 New Yorker profile “The Science of Shopping” turned Underhill’s work into one of the most reprinted pieces the magazine has ever run, anchoring his standing as the named figure in the field. He works in concrete categories, food and beverage, beauty, telecoms, fashion, supermarkets, malls, financial branches, not abstract retail strategy, which is what category leaders actually need. Biography highlights Founder and former CEO of Envirosell Inc., the behavioural research and consultancy firm he established in 1986 Author of four Simon & Schuster titles: Why We Buy, Call of the Mall, What Women Want, and How We Eat Why We Buy published in 27 languages and used in MBA and design school curricula worldwide Subject of Malcolm Gladwell’s 1996 New Yorker profile “The Science of Shopping” Vassar College graduate; also studied at Columbia University and Ewha University, Seoul; former adjunct instructor in the doctoral programme in Environmental Psychology at City University of New York Owner of Peckshee LLC; columnist for Design: Retail and The Robin Report Biography In 1986, almost no one was studying what customers actually did inside a store. Marketers had surveys, retailers had sales data, and architects had floor plans, but no one had a continuous record of human behaviour at the shelf. Envirosell, founded in New York that year, was built to fix that. Paco Underhill borrowed the basic premise of environmental psychology, that surroundings shape behaviour, and turned it into a fieldwork practice using video cameras, trained observers, and large-sample tracking inside live commercial space. The output, after four decades, is a body of work that consumer brands and retailers across more than 50 countries have used to redesign stores, formats, packaging, and service flow. Envirosell’s client list spans more than a third of the Fortune 100. The categories range from grocery and food service to beauty, fashion, financial branches, telecoms, and malls. Underhill’s books, published by Simon & Schuster, took that work into the public domain. Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping has appeared in 27 languages and is taught in MBA and design schools globally. Call of the Mall, What Women Want, and 2022’s How We Eat extended the method into specific commercial terrains. The work earned wider recognition through Malcolm Gladwell’s 1996 New Yorker profile, “The Science of Shopping,” one of the most reprinted articles in the magazine’s history. It introduced ideas that have since become standard vocabulary in retail design: the decompression zone at a store entrance, the butt-brush effect, the way physical adjacency shapes purchase decisions. Underhill’s role in this is specific. He is the figure most consistently named when the field is described. He stepped back as CEO of Envirosell in 2020 and now advises through Peckshee LLC. The intellectual position has not changed. Stores, malls, food retail, and the consumer-facing parts of banking and telecoms remain the terrain, and direct observation of behaviour remains the method. Key speaking topics The science of shopping and retail psychology Consumer behaviour in physical and digital commercial environments Food, beverage, and grocery retail transformation Female-friendly markets and the rise of women as commercial decision-makers The future of malls, high streets, and retail real estate Brand experience at the point of purchase Cross-market retail trends from 50-plus countries Ideal for Chief marketing officers, chief customer officers, and brand leaders inside consumer-facing businesses Retail and merchandising leadership inside grocery, food service, beauty, fashion, and electronics Real estate, mall, and property executives planning the next generation of commercial space Boards and leadership teams of consumer banks, telecoms, and service businesses with branch or storefront networks Audience outcomes A clearer read on how customers actually behave inside their own stores, sites, and branches Specific levers, layout, adjacency, signage, dwell time, that move conversion and basket size A grounded view of how food, beauty, fashion, and grocery retail are shifting across markets A practical sense of where female consumers are reshaping product, format, and service design An external reference point for internal debates on store closures, format changes, and digital integration

Why organisations work with Ning Zhu A specific thesis on China, not a country briefing. China’s Guaranteed Bubble argues that implicit state support is the load-bearing feature of Chinese growth, and the source of its systemic risk. Audiences leave with a frame they can actually use. One of the few China-economy voices with peer-reviewed standing in the Journal of Finance and Review of Financial Studies, which means his macro reading is built on disciplined empirical work, not commentary. Operating experience inside Lehman Brothers and Nomura in Hong Kong, so the talk is calibrated to how capital allocators and quantitative desks actually think, not to a classroom audience. Behavioural finance fluency that translates into how Chinese retail investors, regulators and state-owned enterprises behave under pressure. This is rare combined with macro authority on the same market. Faculty Fellow status at Yale’s International Center for Finance and senior faculty roles at SAIF and Tsinghua, which gives him standing across Chinese policy circles and Western financial institutions in equal measure. Biography highlights Deputy Dean and Professor of Finance, Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance (SAIF), Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Faculty Fellow, Yale University International Center for Finance. Author of China’s Guaranteed Bubble (McGraw-Hill), The Investors’ Enemy and The Investors’ Friend. Sun Yefang Financial Innovation Book Award, 2018. Named among Elsevier’s “China’s Most Cited Scholars,” 2022. Former Senior Executive at Lehman Brothers and Nomura Securities, Hong Kong, leading quantitative and portfolio advisory teams. Former tenured Professor of Finance at the University of California (Davis) and Chair Professor at Tsinghua University. Biography China’s economy does not behave like a textbook market. Implicit state guarantees underpin large parts of its credit system, shaping how banks lend, how households save, and how risk migrates into shadow channels. China’s Guaranteed Bubble, published by McGraw-Hill, sets out that argument in detail and is the work that defines Ning Zhu’s public profile. Zhu sits at the intersection of academic finance and operating practice. He is Deputy Dean and Professor of Finance at the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and a Faculty Fellow at the Yale International Center for Finance. His peer-reviewed work has appeared in the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies and Management Science, with a particular focus on behavioural finance and Chinese capital markets. Before returning to academia full-time, he was a Senior Executive at Lehman Brothers and then Nomura in Hong Kong, where he led quantitative strategy and portfolio advisory teams. That period gives his China commentary a useful directness: he has sat on the desk that has to act on the analysis, not only write it. He has also held tenured and chair appointments at the University of California, Davis and Tsinghua University. His work has been recognised with the Sun Yefang Financial Innovation Book Award, considered one of the highest honours in Chinese economics, and inclusion on Elsevier’s list of China’s most cited scholars. For boards and investors, the value is the combination: a researcher whose behavioural finance training shows him how investors and regulators actually behave, applied to the Chinese system he has studied and worked in for two decades. Key speaking topics China’s macroeconomy and financial system Implicit state guarantees and systemic risk Behavioural finance Shadow banking and credit risk in China Global financial order and capital flows Chinese investor and household behaviour Fiscal sustainability and financial reform Ideal for Boards, CFOs and CIOs with material China exposure assessing systemic risk Investment committees, asset managers and family offices allocating to or away from Chinese assets Banking and financial services leadership teams shaping China strategy Policy and regulatory audiences working on cross-border capital and financial reform Audience outcomes A working model for how implicit state guarantees shape Chinese credit, equity and property markets A clearer view of where systemic risk actually sits inside China’s shadow banking and SOE structures A behavioural finance lens applied to Chinese retail investors and institutional decision-makers A more disciplined reading of Chinese policy signals and what they imply for capital allocation Specific questions a board or investment committee should be asking about its China exposure

Why organisations work with Martin Lindstrom He built his reputation on primary research, not commentary. The fMRI study behind Buyology covered 2,000 consumers across five countries; the fieldwork behind Small Data covered 2,000 families across more than 70 countries. He gives senior teams a method, not a slogan. Small data is a working approach for finding the unspoken consumer signal that quantitative research routinely misses. He has advised brands across categories most consultants never touch in the same year, from Pepsi and Nestle to Burger King, Lowe’s, LEGO, and Disney, which means his diagnoses translate across very different commercial contexts. He treats internal bureaucracy as a brand problem. The Ministry of Common Sense names a tension every CEO recognises: the gap between what the company promises customers and what its own processes allow employees to deliver. His authority is independently signalled. TIME’s 100 Most Influential People, repeated Thinkers50 rankings, and a Wall Street Journal verdict on Brand Sense as one of the five best marketing books ever written are not bureau claims; they are matters of public record. Biography highlights Founder and chairman of Lindstrom Company, advising Fortune 500 clients including Pepsi, Nestle, Google, Burger King, Lowe’s, LEGO, Disney, and Unilever. Named to TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in the Scientists and Thinkers category. Multiple-time Thinkers50 ranked thinker, including positions of #18, #36, and #20 in successive listings. Author of seven New York Times bestsellers, translated into roughly 60 languages, including Buyology, Brandwashed, Small Data, Brand Sense, and The Ministry of Common Sense. Columnist for TIME, Fast Company, and Harvard Business Review; recurring contributor on NBC’s TODAY show. Featured in Morgan Spurlock’s documentary The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (2011). Biography The fMRI study behind Buyology scanned the brains of 2,000 consumers across five countries to test what advertising and branding actually do inside the human head. Most of what the marketing industry believed about why people buy did not survive the data. That study, and the books that followed, made Martin Lindstrom one of the few branding voices senior leaders take seriously on the science of consumer decision-making. He runs Lindstrom Company, a brand and culture transformation firm whose client list reads as a cross-section of the global economy: Pepsi, Nestle, Google, Burger King, Lowe’s, LEGO, Disney, Unilever. The work is not pitch theatre. It is rebuilding brand strategy around evidence drawn from ethnographic fieldwork, neuroscience, and the unguarded behaviour of real customers in their own homes. His Small Data method came out of more than a decade visiting families in over 70 countries, looking for the small inconsistencies that point to unmet consumer needs. The thesis is direct. Big data tells you what is happening at scale. Small data tells you why, and where the next product or positioning idea actually lives. It is a working method, used inside the Lindstrom Company practice, not a publishing concept. The Ministry of Common Sense extends the same instinct inward. Lindstrom argues that most large companies have engineered themselves into a state where employees cannot do the obvious right thing for a customer without breaching a process. Strip the bureaucracy, restore common sense, and brand performance follows. Buyers who book him for the marketing thesis often find the organisational thesis is the one their executive team keeps quoting back six months later. Key speaking topics Brand strategy and consumer neuroscience Small data and ethnographic customer insight Culture transformation and corporate common sense Customer experience and behavioural decision-making Marketing effectiveness in the AI era Future of retail and physical-digital strategy Ideal for CMOs and brand leaders rebuilding propositions around customer evidence rather than category convention. CEOs and COOs whose internal processes are eroding the customer experience their brand promises. Strategy, innovation, and customer insight teams looking for a working method to find unmet needs. Global leadership conferences and senior offsites where the brief is commercial reinvention. Audience outcomes A clearer reading of why current consumer research keeps producing the wrong answers, and what to use instead. A practical introduction to small data as a method for surfacing unmet customer needs. A direct view of where internal bureaucracy is quietly killing brand and commercial performance. Named examples from Fortune 500 engagements that translate into questions a leadership team can ask the next morning.

Why organisations work with Ken Hughes His Blue Dot Consumer framework gives leadership teams a named model for the modern consumer – one who places themselves at the centre of every interaction and expects brands to be instant, personal, and emotionally authentic. It replaces vague customer-centricity language with a concrete diagnostic tool. Taylormaking, his 2025 book, uses Taylor Swift’s 12 studio albums as a structured analytical framework for brand intimacy – demonstrating how emotional loyalty, tribal belonging, and values-led branding operate in practice and what that requires from commercial strategy. A career spanning strategy consulting at Accenture, consumer insight at Nielsen, and 25 years as CEO of Glacier Consulting gives him a rare combination: analytical training in how consumers behave and sustained practical experience of what actually shifts in boardrooms. Named by CX Network among the Top 50 CX Leaders to Follow in 2025 and the Top 50 AI Leaders in CX to Follow in 2026, he brings an externally validated, current perspective on where consumer expectations are heading – not where they have been. His interdisciplinary base – consumer psychology, behavioural economics, digital anthropology, and cyberpsychology – lets him explain brand decisions as outcomes of human behaviour, not just marketing choices. That distinction is particularly valuable in conversations with senior leaders who have grown sceptical of CX as a function. Biography highlights CEO and founder of Glacier Consulting, a consumer insight agency whose clients include Coca-Cola, IKEA, AXA, Unilever, Walmart, Google, Microsoft, and PayPal Former Strategy Consultant at Accenture and Manager of Consumer Insight at Nielsen Part-time lecturer in Consumer Behaviour at University College Cork Author of Taylormaking: A New Era of Modern Branding and Customer Connection (2025), a CX strategy book structured around Taylor Swift’s 12 studio albums TEDx speaker at TEDxUniversityofNicosia; talk has received more than 100,000 online views Named by CX Network among the Top 50 Customer Experience Leaders to Follow in 2025 and Top 50 AI Leaders in CX to Follow in 2026 Biography Customer loyalty has become harder to earn as the expectations of consumers – particularly Gen Z and Gen Alpha – have shifted from satisfaction to emotional belonging. Ken Hughes built Glacier Consulting around one persistent question: why do people buy, and what does that mean for how brands should behave? After earlier careers as a strategy consultant at Accenture and a consumer insight manager at Nielsen, he has spent more than two decades embedding behavioural science into commercial practice. His named concept, the Blue Dot Consumer, gives organisations a specific model for the modern customer – one who treats themselves as the centre of every interaction, expecting brands to be instant, personal, and emotionally intelligent. That framework, rooted in consumer psychology, digital anthropology, and behavioural economics, underpins both his consultancy work and his keynote practice across five continents. His 2025 book, Taylormaking, extends that argument into a structured analysis of brand intimacy, using Taylor Swift’s 12 studio albums as a framework for understanding emotional loyalty, tribal community, and values-led leadership. It is a useful index of how Hughes works: making the mechanisms of consumer psychology legible and commercially actionable for leadership audiences well beyond the CX function. A part-time lecturer in Consumer Behaviour at University College Cork and named by CX Network among the Top 50 CX Leaders to Follow in both 2025 and 2026, Hughes speaks more than 80 times annually. His client roster – spanning Coca-Cola, Unilever, Walmart, Google, Microsoft, and PayPal – reflects both the breadth of sectors in which his behavioural arguments apply and the seniority of the audiences he typically addresses. Key speaking topics Consumer psychology and shopper behaviour Customer experience strategy Brand connection and emotional loyalty Generational consumer shifts – Gen Z and Gen Alpha AI and the future of customer experience Creativity and innovation in commercial culture Ideal for CMOs and marketing leaders focused on building brand loyalty in a competitive, AI-influenced landscape Customer experience leaders navigating the shift from transactional to emotionally driven consumer relationships Senior commercial and retail leaders seeking behavioural insight into how younger consumer cohorts make brand decisions Transformation and innovation leads rethinking how brands earn and sustain connection with modern audiences Audience outcomes A named model – the Blue Dot Consumer – for diagnosing how modern consumers make brand decisions and what they expect from every brand interaction Practical understanding of how emotional loyalty differs from satisfaction, and what organisations must do differently to build it Insight into how Gen Z and Gen Alpha are reshaping brand expectations and what that requires from commercial and marketing strategy Clarity on AI’s role in the future of customer experience – where automation strengthens brand connection and where it risks eroding it A framework, drawn from Taylormaking, for building tribal brand belonging through authenticity, community, and values-led leadership