Customer Experience & Marketing

Why organisations work with Jeremy Schwartz He has sat in the chief executive seat at The Body Shop and as interim joint CEO at Pandora, so the advice on transformation comes from someone who has signed off the trade-offs, not described them. He led the launch of “Enrich Not Exploit” at The Body Shop, a sustainability commitment with hard 2020 targets across ingredients, packaging, suppliers and stores, and oversaw the business through the 1bn euro sale to Natura. He proposed the consumer concept behind Coca-Cola Zero during his time as Marketing and Innovation Director for Coca-Cola Europe, giving him credibility on commercial brand creation as well as ethical repositioning. His current mandates as Practice Chairman at Kantar and advisor to McKinsey’s Business Transformation Practice keep him close to live programmes inside large consumer and retail organisations. Few speakers can argue the commercial case for sustainability from inside the P&L of a global beauty business and the boardroom of a listed jewellery company. Biography highlights CEO of The Body Shop, 2013-2017; led the “Enrich Not Exploit” sustainability strategy and the 1bn euro divestment from L’Oreal to Natura. Chief Operating Officer and interim joint CEO of Pandora A/S. Managing Director, L’Oreal UK; Marketing and Innovation Director, Coca-Cola Europe; Brand Director, Sainsbury’s; CMO, News International. Practice Chairman, Kantar Sustainable Transformation Practice; Senior Advisor, McKinsey Business Transformation Practice. Founder and host of the “Saving Tomorrow’s Planet” podcast. Founding trustee, Against Malaria Foundation. Biography The hardest job in a consumer business right now is holding two clocks at once. The quarterly clock that the market reads, and the multi-year clock that sustainability commitments, digital re-platforming and supply chain redesign actually run on. Schwartz has run a business under both. As CEO of The Body Shop from 2013 to 2017, he led the launch of “Enrich Not Exploit”, a sustainability commitment with measurable 2020 targets on ingredients, packaging, fair trade sourcing and habitat protection. Over the same period he steered the business back to growth and through the 1bn euro sale from L’Oreal to Natura. Before that he was Managing Director of L’Oreal UK, Marketing and Innovation Director for Coca-Cola in Europe (where he proposed the consumer concept behind Coca-Cola Zero), Brand Director at Sainsbury’s, and CMO at News International. He later served as Chief Operating Officer and interim joint CEO of Pandora. His advisory work now sits inside the practices that buy-side leaders actually use. He is Practice Chairman of Kantar’s Sustainable Transformation Practice and Senior Advisor to McKinsey’s Business Transformation Practice. That keeps the speaking material close to live transformation programmes rather than retrospective case studies. He hosts the “Saving Tomorrow’s Planet” podcast, interviewing leaders who are reducing emissions inside operating businesses, and is a founding trustee of the Against Malaria Foundation. The through-line across all of this is the same argument he makes to boards: sustainability and commercial growth are not parallel agendas to be balanced, they are the same agenda once the operating model is set up to carry both. Key speaking topics Consumer brand transformation Sustainability and commercial growth Retail leadership CEO and executive team performance Marketing and innovation in consumer businesses Purpose and culture in transformation Digital transformation in retail Ideal for CEOs and executive committees in consumer, retail and FMCG businesses balancing growth targets with sustainability commitments. CMOs and brand leaders rebuilding propositions around purpose without losing commercial discipline. Boards and chairs evaluating ESG and transformation programmes with real P&L implications. Senior leadership teams inside transformation, sustainability or digital programmes that need an outside CEO voice. Audience outcomes A working argument for why sustainability and commercial growth belong in the same operating plan, drawn from a CEO who has run it. Specific examples from The Body Shop, Pandora, L’Oreal and Coca-Cola of how brand, marketing and sustainability decisions look from inside the P&L. A clearer view of where consumer transformations stall and what senior leaders can do about it before they reach the operating teams. Practical reference points for boards on how to set sustainability targets that survive contact with quarterly performance.

Why organisations work with Jim Knight Twenty years inside Hard Rock International leading global training, not a consultant looking in from outside. The frameworks he teaches were stress-tested across cafes, hotels, and casinos in fifty-plus countries. A culture and service argument anchored in the Culture That Rocks series: Culture That Rocks, Leadership That Rocks and Service That Rocks (the latter two Amazon No. 1 bestsellers), and now Engagement That Rocks, the final book in the series. Four books, one consistent thesis, not a topic catalogue. Practical fluency in the operating mechanics of training, onboarding, and frontline development. The work translates for hospitality, retail, franchise, and any business where the customer meets the brand through a junior employee. A delivery style built for energy-driven audiences. Knight’s background as a music teacher and his Hard Rock pedigree mean conference and franchise audiences treat him as a peer, not an academic visitor. Biography highlights Twenty years leading Global Training and Development for Hard Rock International, including Corporate University, e-learning, and leadership transition programmes. Founder and CEO of Knight Speaker, delivering culture, leadership, service, and engagement programmes worldwide. Author of the Culture That Rocks series: Culture That Rocks (third edition), Leadership That Rocks and Service That Rocks (both Amazon No. 1 bestsellers), and Engagement That Rocks, the final book in the series. Contributing member of the Rolling Stone Culture Council since 2020. Multiple Telly Awards for corporate training video, plus Brandon Hall Gold Best in Class for service recovery e-learning. Lifetime member of CHART. Culture That Rocks featured by Entrepreneur Magazine among the books most likely to change how a business is run. Biography Hard Rock built a global brand on the idea that the cafe, the hotel, and the casino should each feel like a live show. Holding that standard across more than fifty countries is not a marketing job. It is a training job. For two decades, Jim Knight ran that training function. That experience sits behind the Culture That Rocks series. The first book argued that culture is the operating system, not the wallpaper, and was named by Entrepreneur Magazine among the books most likely to change how a business is run. Leadership That Rocks and Service That Rocks carried the thesis into how leaders behave and how the customer feels the brand, and both reached Amazon’s No. 1 spot. Engagement That Rocks, the most recent book in the series, closes it on the argument that engaged employees are the mechanism holding all of it together. The work translates particularly well for organisations whose product is delivered by frontline staff at scale: hospitality, retail, franchise systems, healthcare networks, and any consumer brand where a twenty-year-old in a uniform is the face of a billion-dollar logo. Knight speaks to those audiences as someone who has trained that workforce, not theorised about it. Beyond the speaking practice, he contributes to the Rolling Stone Culture Council and supports No Kid Hungry and Cannonball Kids’ Cancer through book and speaking proceeds. Among bureau-circuit culture speakers, the rarity is the operator pedigree. Most started as consultants. Knight started inside the room. Key speaking topics Organisational culture Customer experience and service differentiation Employee engagement and retention Leadership development Team building and frontline talent Hospitality, franchise, and consumer-brand operations Ideal for CHROs, learning and development leaders, and culture leads in consumer-facing organisations Franchise systems and multi-site operators where culture must scale across independent owners Hospitality, retail, and service-brand leadership audiences Conference and annual-meeting audiences looking for a high-energy culture keynote with operating substance Audience outcomes A working definition of culture as an operating system, with the mechanisms that hold it in place at scale Specific moves on hiring, onboarding, and frontline development drawn from Hard Rock’s training playbook A service-design lens for separating a brand experience from competitor parity Language and structure leaders can use to talk about engagement without falling into wellness-industry generalities

Why organisations work with Jinsop Lee He gives commercial teams a usable grading method for sensory experience, the Five Senses framework, that translates design theory into something a marketer, product manager or operator can apply without a design background. His TED Talk on multisensory design has been viewed over 1.6 million times, which means audiences arrive primed for the argument and leave able to recall and reuse it. He has shipped work for LG and Jaguar Land Rover and exhibited at CES, 100% Design London and Light + Building Frankfurt, giving him operating credibility with product and brand functions, not just lecture-circuit credibility. Recognition from Red Dot and Good Design anchors the talk in professional design judgement, not opinion. He pairs serious craft with a comic, story-led delivery, which lands the substance with audiences who would tune out a more academic treatment. Biography highlights TED Global Talent Search winner, TED Long Beach 2013; “Design for All 5 Senses” has over 1.6 million views. Founder of design firm Uncle Oswald Is My Hero. Former Associate Professor of Industrial Design, Kyung-Il University, Korea. Red Dot Design Award and Good Design Award recipient. Work exhibited at CES Las Vegas, 100% Design London, Good Design Tokyo, and Light + Building Frankfurt. BA Industrial Design, Syracuse University; MBA, Yonsei University. Biography Most product categories now look the same across the price ladder. Visual design is solved, and customers have learned to scroll past it. What still separates one product from the next is the texture of the experience itself: the sound a car door makes when it closes, the resistance of a button, the smell of a packaged good when it is opened for the first time. This is the territory Jinsop Lee works in. His Five Senses framework, presented at TED Long Beach in 2013 and viewed more than 1.6 million times since, gives a usable way to grade any product or experience across sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. It is not a designer’s tool. It is a grading sheet that a brand or product team can run through in a meeting. The underlying craft is serious. Lee studied industrial design at Syracuse University, took an MBA at Yonsei, and served as Associate Professor of Industrial Design at Kyung-Il University. His commercial work has shipped through Uncle Oswald Is My Hero, his own design firm, and through engagements with LG and Jaguar Land Rover. His pieces have been shown at CES, 100% Design London, Good Design Tokyo, and Light + Building Frankfurt, and have collected Red Dot and Good Design awards. For commercial audiences, the value is that he can take a senior team through the same grading exercise they will see online from him, then turn it on their own products. Most buyers leave with two or three specific experiences they can no longer evaluate the old way. Key speaking topics Multisensory design Customer experience design Design thinking Creativity and innovation method Product development craft Brand and experience differentiation Ideal for CMOs and brand directors rebuilding around experience rather than awareness Heads of product and product design in consumer goods, automotive, hospitality and retail Innovation and R&D leaders running new product development programmes Customer experience leads in service-led businesses Audience outcomes A working knowledge of the Five Senses framework, applied to a product or experience the audience already owns. Specific examples of multisensory design done well and badly, drawn from familiar consumer categories. A sharper instinct for where current products under-deliver against customer expectation. A shared vocabulary that commercial, design and operations functions can use in the same meeting.

Why organisations work with JJ Delgado He runs a corporate venturing unit inside a century-old beverages group, so his AI and digital arguments are backed by current P&L responsibility, not consulting distance. His Amazon background gives him a working view of how the world’s most operationally disciplined digital company actually builds growth, which he translates for non-digital natives. He works across both EMEA and LATAM markets, useful for groups whose digital strategy has to land in mature and emerging consumer markets at once. He brings a named portfolio of work across Burger King, Pepsi, Ford, Bosch, Siemens, Vodafone, and Telefonica, which means his case material is recognisable to senior commercial audiences. Biography highlights General Manager, MOVE Estrella Galicia Digital, the open innovation and digital ventures unit of Hijos de Rivera. Former Head of Marketing, Southern Europe, at Amazon, where he led the company’s largest international sales day at the time. PhD Cum Laude in Digital Economy; MBA from London School of Business and Finance. Guest teaching at the London School of Economics and IE Business School on digital economy and consumer behaviour. Author of three books published on Amazon, including Smash It, an Amazon international bestseller in 2021. Named #1 Amazon LinkedIn profile in the UK across 2016 and early 2017 (self-reported ranking). Biography Amazon’s largest international sales day at the time was run out of Southern Europe by a marketing team led by JJ Delgado. That experience, three years inside the operational engine of the world’s most disciplined digital retailer, is the spine of his work today. He moved from running Amazon’s marketing in the region to running a digital ventures unit inside a legacy corporate, which is a more useful vantage point for the audiences he now speaks to. He is General Manager of MOVE Estrella Galicia Digital, the corporate venturing and open innovation arm of Hijos de Rivera, the Spanish beverages group behind Estrella Galicia. The remit is to build and scale new digital businesses for a company whose core is 100 years old, and to invest in startups that can accelerate that shift. The role gives him live operating responsibility for the questions he speaks on: AI deployment, Web3 commerce, and how a non-digital-native organisation actually generates new revenue from new technology. His commercial track record spans 15 years across EMEA and LATAM, with named work for Burger King, Pepsi, Hertz, Ford, Bosch, Siemens, Vodafone, Telefonica, and Estrella Galicia. He holds a PhD Cum Laude in Digital Economy and teaches as a guest at the London School of Economics and IE Business School. He has written three books on Amazon, the most recent being Smash It, an international bestseller on the platform in 2021, and runs an AI-focused newsletter with a large subscriber base. What makes him useful to boards is the angle of attack. He is not an academic on AI, nor a consultant pitching frameworks. He is an operator who has run digital growth inside Amazon and now runs new business creation inside a traditional corporate, and he speaks from that seat. Key speaking topics AI and ChatGPT in commercial operations Digital transformation in legacy corporates Web3 and new digital business models Consumer behaviour and the emotion behind the click Corporate venturing and open innovation Voice and conversational interfaces (Alexa as customer channel) Ideal for CMOs and chief digital officers in non-digital-native organisations Corporate venturing, innovation, and new business leads Senior commercial and growth leadership teams across EMEA and LATAM Boards weighing AI and Web3 investment decisions Audience outcomes A working view of how Amazon actually built growth from inside one of its regional marketing teams A concrete picture of what AI deployment looks like inside an operating business unit, not a pilot Recognisable case material from named global brands across consumer, automotive, and telecoms A clearer sense of where Web3 has commercial traction and where it does not

Why organisations work with Jo Malone She has built, sold, and rebuilt a luxury consumer brand from scratch. Few founders speaking on entrepreneurship can claim that arc twice. Her creative process is concrete: how a scent becomes a product, how a product becomes a counter, how a counter becomes a category. Useful for marketing, retail, and innovation teams who deal in intangibles. She speaks honestly about selling a business that carries your name, the non-compete years that follow, and the discipline of starting again. Rare territory for founder talks. Her story converts personal adversity into commercial argument without sentimentality. Dyslexia, leaving school at 13, and a cancer diagnosis at 40 are framed as inputs to how she built, not as motivational set pieces. She brings the credibility of a brand that defined a category, alongside the operator’s view of what it took to do it. Biography highlights Founded Jo Malone London in 1994; opened the first store in Walton Street, London; sold the company to The Estee Lauder Companies in 1999. Served as Creative Director of Jo Malone London after the sale, departing in 2006. Founded Jo Loves in 2011, building a second fragrance house from her kitchen table in London. Author of Jo Malone: My Story, published by Simon and Schuster UK in 2016. Co-presented BBC One’s High Street Dreams (2010) with Nick Leslau, mentoring small product entrepreneurs. Awarded MBE in 2008 and CBE in the 2018 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to the British economy and the GREAT campaign. Biography Jo Malone London opened on Walton Street in 1994 with a handful of scents and almost no marketing budget. By 1999 it had been acquired by The Estee Lauder Companies and built into one of the defining luxury fragrance houses of the next two decades. The founder stayed on as Creative Director until 2006, then left the brand that carried her name. Five years of non-compete agreement followed. In 2011 she launched Jo Loves, again from a kitchen, this time with the experience of having scaled a category leader and the constraint of building a fragrance brand without trading on her own name in the way she had before. Two distinct businesses, both rooted in the same craft of scent as a commercial proposition. The personal arc behind the businesses is unusually direct. Severely dyslexic, she left school at 13 and trained as a facial therapist. In 2003, two years after the sale to Estee Lauder, she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer and treated in New York. Both episodes appear in the 2016 memoir Jo Malone: My Story, and in her speaking work, as material rather than backdrop. For senior audiences the value is concrete. She has run the founder’s job at two different stages, knows what acquisition does to a brand and to its founder, and can describe the specific decisions, pricing, packaging, retail design, distribution, that translated an idea into a category. Her CBE in 2018 was awarded for services to the British economy and the GREAT campaign, recognising the export weight of what she built. Key speaking topics Founder craft and consumer brand building Scaling luxury from kitchen table to global counter Selling a business that carries your name Reinvention after acquisition and non-compete Creativity as commercial discipline Resilience under personal and commercial pressure British creative industries on the international stage Ideal for Founders, CEOs, and boards of consumer, retail, and luxury businesses Marketing, brand, and product leaders building or repositioning premium propositions Innovation and creative teams translating intangible craft into commercial outcomes Leadership audiences working through acquisition, integration, or post-exit founder questions Audience outcomes A founder’s account of how a category-leading brand is actually built, priced, and merchandised, told from inside the decisions A direct view of what selling and integration do to a business and its founder, useful to anyone preparing for or living through that transition A working example of creative discipline: how a scent, a candle, a counter become a coherent commercial proposition A grounded perspective on resilience, drawn from severe dyslexia, a cancer diagnosis, and starting twice from nothing Renewed conviction that craft and commercial scale are not opposites in consumer business

Why organisations work with Jochen Wirtz He wrote the textbook the global services marketing field teaches from. Services Marketing: People, Technology, Strategy, co-authored with Christopher Lovelock, has sold over a million copies and shaped how MBAs are taught the discipline in more than 26 countries. He has paired that academic authority with two operator-facing AI books, Intelligent Automation and Agentic Artificial Intelligence, written with Pascal Bornet. Few service strategy voices can speak as fluently to both a CMO and a Chief Automation Officer. His Christopher Lovelock Career Contributions Award from the American Marketing Association and the Gronroos Service Research Award are the two most senior honours in the global services research community. Boards get a recognised authority, not a generalist. He has been Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher in economics and business in 2022, 2023, and 2024, which means his frameworks are the ones other researchers and practitioners are actively building on. He spent fifteen years running the UCLA-NUS Executive MBA Programme as founding director, so the audiences he addresses most naturally are senior leaders, not students. Biography highlights Vice Dean of MBA Programmes and Professor of Marketing, NUS Business School, National University of Singapore. Co-author of Services Marketing: People, Technology, Strategy (9th edition) with the late Christopher Lovelock, adapted for over 26 countries. Co-author of Intelligent Automation (2021) and Agentic Artificial Intelligence (2025) with Pascal Bornet, with contributors including Thomas H. Davenport. Christopher Lovelock Career Contributions Award (AMA, 2019) and Christian Gronroos Service Research Award (2024). Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher in economics and business, 2022, 2023, and 2024; over 200 academic articles and six features in Harvard Business Review. Academic Scholar at Cornell Institute for Healthy Futures; International Fellow at Karlstad University Service Research Center; Global Faculty at Arizona State University Center for Services Leadership. Biography Service businesses are where AI is hitting the operating model first. Customer interactions, advisory work, claims handling, hospitality, healthcare reception, professional services delivery: all of it is being rewired around intelligent agents, and very few people on the academic side have stayed close to that shift in practical terms. Jochen Wirtz has. He is Vice Dean of MBA Programmes and Professor of Marketing at NUS Business School, and the co-author, with the late Christopher Lovelock, of Services Marketing: People, Technology, Strategy. The textbook is now in its ninth edition, has sold over a million copies, and has been adapted for more than 26 countries. It is the spine of the discipline globally. What makes him useful in a leadership room rather than a classroom is the second body of work. With Pascal Bornet he wrote Intelligent Automation in 2021 and Agentic Artificial Intelligence in 2025, with contributions from Thomas H. Davenport and others. Both are written for operators making real choices about where to put AI inside their service architecture and where not to. The credentials line up behind that: the Christopher Lovelock Career Contributions Award from the American Marketing Association, the Christian Gronroos Service Research Award, three consecutive years as a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher in economics and business, and fifteen years as founding director of the UCLA-NUS Executive MBA Programme. Boards get an academic with the authority to set the agenda and the operator literacy to follow it through. Key speaking topics Services marketing and service management AI agents and intelligent automation in service organisations Service strategy and organisational redesign Customer experience in AI-enabled service Platform business models Corporate digital responsibility and governance Cost-effective service excellence Ideal for CEOs, COOs, and CMOs of service-led businesses redesigning operations around AI agents. Chief Digital, Transformation, and Automation Officers building the AI-and-services roadmap. Boards and executive committees in financial services, professional services, hospitality, healthcare, and telecoms working through service productivity and customer impact at the same time. Audience outcomes A clearer view of where AI agents create durable advantage in a service business and where they create new risk. A working vocabulary for the service strategy choices behind automation programmes, drawn from the field’s leading textbook. Frameworks from Intelligent Automation and Agentic Artificial Intelligence that translate AI investment into service design decisions. A sharper sense of corporate digital responsibility as service interactions become increasingly machine-mediated. Confidence that the operating model conversation and the customer experience conversation are the same conversation.

Why organisations work with Jodie Kidd A recognisable on-camera presenter with two decades of live broadcast experience, including Channel 5’s The Classic Car Show and ITV’s coverage of the Isle of Man TT, equally at home with a live audience and a camera. Genuine credibility in automotive, motorsport and lifestyle briefs: a former Maserati Trofeo Series driver, Mille Miglia competitor, and Top Gear “Star in a Reasonably Priced Car” series leader. An operating entrepreneur, not a name on a brand. Owner since 2017 of The Half Moon in Kirdford, an AA 2-Rosette gastropub featured at Tom Kerridge’s Pub in the Park; co-owner of beauty brand Skin & Tonic. A reinvention story with substance behind it: Vogue covers and the McQueen debut runway, then a Maserati seat, then a working pub through the post-pandemic hospitality squeeze. Useful when a brief calls for a panel voice on backing yourself outside a single career lane. Polished, warm, unflappable on stage. The kind of host clients rebook for the second year because the first one ran on time. Biography highlights International fashion model from age 15. Vogue covers, opened for John Galliano, walked Givenchy and Alexander McQueen’s debut runway show. Maserati Trofeo Series racing driver. Competed in the Mille Miglia for Jaguar. Top Gear “Star in a Reasonably Priced Car”: topped the leader board across an entire series, becoming a long-running Top Gear reference point. Co-presenter, Channel 5’s The Classic Car Show, and ITV’s coverage of the Isle of Man TT. Strictly Come Dancing (BBC One, 2008) and Celebrity MasterChef finalist. Owner since 2017 of The Half Moon, Kirdford, a Grade II listed gastropub holding AA 2 Rosettes four years running and featured at Pub in the Park from 2019 to 2022. Author of Balance Your Life (2019); co-owner of beauty brand Skin & Tonic; host of YouTube automotive channel Kidd in a Sweet Shop. Biography Television careers built on a single specialism are easier to write about than ones built across several. Jodie Kidd has covered fashion, motorsport, lifestyle and food on BBC, ITV and Channel 5 over more than two decades, and the through-line is the live work: a host who can carry an awards room, a paddock interview, a cookery final or a panel on hospitality. The starting point was modelling. Discovered at 15, she was on the cover of British Vogue at 17, opened shows for John Galliano and walked Alexander McQueen’s debut runway. The pivot into broadcast came through cars. She raced in the Maserati Trofeo Series, competed in the Mille Miglia for Jaguar, and topped the Top Gear leader board for an entire series, which translated into long-running automotive presenting on Channel 5’s The Classic Car Show and ITV’s Isle of Man TT coverage. In 2017 she took on The Half Moon in Kirdford with two business partners, learning the gastropub business from the kitchen out. The pub holds AA 2 Rosettes four years running and has appeared at Tom Kerridge’s Pub in the Park. She co-owns the beauty brand Skin & Tonic and wrote Balance Your Life, a six-week diet and exercise book published in 2019. For event organisers, the value is straightforward. A senior buyer hiring Kidd is hiring an experienced live broadcaster with genuine subject footing in automotive, lifestyle and small-business hospitality, and a calm hand on a long evening. She works as host, awards presenter, panel moderator and panellist, and as a speaker on her own reinvention across fashion, motorsport and entrepreneurship. Key speaking topics Awards hosting and event presenting Panel moderation Automotive, motorsport and the classic car world Hospitality and independent pub ownership Entrepreneurship and brand-building outside a primary career Reinvention across industries Health, wellbeing and lifestyle Ideal for Brand and consumer events in automotive, lifestyle, fashion and hospitality Industry awards evenings looking for a recognisable, experienced live host Conference panels on entrepreneurship, small-business hospitality, or career reinvention Internal leadership or sales conferences wanting an after-dinner speaker with a broad public profile Audience outcomes A live event that runs on time, with an audience that stays in the room Panel conversations that draw out senior speakers without drifting A first-hand account of building and running a working hospitality business through a difficult market A frank reinvention story across modelling, motorsport, broadcasting and small business For automotive and motorsport audiences, an interviewer who knows the subject

Why organisations work with Joerg Niessing He teaches inside the C-suite of the brands most boards benchmark against, Google, L’Oréal, Roche, Walmart, Marriott, Diageo and Samsung among them, and brings that pattern recognition into the room. Before INSEAD he was a Partner at Prophet, the brand and customer experience consultancy, after more than a decade in strategy consulting. That operating background plus a senior faculty role is a combination very few digital strategy speakers credibly hold. His book The Definitive Guide to B2B Digital Transformation is built around a specific argument that customer centricity, not technology stack, is the variable that separates growth from stalled programmes. The Case Centre’s 2025 Outstanding Case Teacher award recognises a rare ability to make complex transformation cases land with senior executives, which translates directly into keynote and workshop work. Most AI and digital advice fixates on the technology. Niessing co-directs INSEAD’s Leading AI and Digital Marketing Strategy programme and leads instead with the question executive teams actually own: how do we turn AI and data investment into profitable growth? Biography highlights Senior Affiliate Professor of Marketing, INSEAD. Former Partner, Prophet. Co-author of The Definitive Guide to B2B Digital Transformation (2020) with Fred Geyer. Winner, Outstanding Case Teacher Competition 2025 (The Case Centre); previous Best Marketing Case award winner. Co-director, INSEAD executive programmes including Leading Digital Marketing Strategy and Leading AI and Digital Marketing Strategy. Has authored 30+ executive cases on companies including Google, Jaguar Land Rover, AccorHotels, BMW Startup Garage and Majid Al Futtaim. Has delivered executive education and keynotes in more than 40 countries for over 200 global organisations. Biography Digital transformation programmes do not usually fail on technology. They fail because the strategy, the culture and the data operating model are not aligned, and the customer experience that results is incoherent. That gap between investment and commercial outcome is the territory Joerg Niessing has spent his career on. At INSEAD, he is a Senior Affiliate Professor of Marketing and co-directs flagship executive programmes including Leading Digital Marketing Strategy, Leading AI and Digital Marketing Strategy and B2B Marketing Strategies. His research and teaching focus on digital customer experience, marketing analytics, brand management and the strategic implications of AI for commercial leaders. Before moving to full-time faculty work he was a Partner at Prophet, the brand and customer experience consultancy, where he led client engagements with global businesses across consumer goods, automotive, healthcare and B2B technology. That operating background sits underneath his 2020 book with Fred Geyer, The Definitive Guide to B2B Digital Transformation, which argues that growth comes from prioritising customers over technology, an argument that has aged well as more transformation budgets are scrutinised. The Case Centre named him Outstanding Case Teacher in 2025, recognition of a 30-strong case portfolio on companies including Google, Jaguar Land Rover, AccorHotels, BMW Startup Garage and Majid Al Futtaim. For a senior buyer, that body of work is the substance behind the keynote: he is testing these arguments on executives from the world’s largest brands every week. Key speaking topics Customer-centric digital transformation B2B digital transformation and growth AI strategy and transformation AI and data in marketing, brand and customer experience Brand building in a digital and AI-driven world Data and analytics as a commercial capability Business model innovation from product to solution Culture and leadership of transformation programmes Ideal for CMOs, Chief Customer Officers and Chief Digital Officers running enterprise transformation programmes. CEOs and boards reviewing the commercial return on multi-year digital and AI investment. B2B leadership teams shifting from product-led to customer-led and solution-led growth. Senior marketing, brand and customer experience teams inside large consumer and B2B businesses. Audience outcomes A sharper view of where customer centricity, not technology, is the binding constraint on growth. A working framework for connecting strategy, culture and data inside a transformation programme. Practical reference points from named global brands, not generic case study language. A clearer commercial agenda for AI in marketing, customer experience and brand. Confidence to challenge the technology-first defaults in their own transformation plans.

Why organisations work with John Ellis He ran Ford’s developer program and the team behind SmartDeviceLink. He has direct operating experience of building a connected-product platform inside a global manufacturer, not a consultant’s view of one. His central thesis, set out in The Zero Dollar Car, gives boards a sharp frame for a question most are still avoiding: when sensor data is worth more than the product that generates it, what business are we actually in? He works across automotive, insurance, smart home, mobile and public infrastructure. Leaders get a view of how the same data economics are restructuring multiple sectors at once, not a single-industry case study. Through Ellis & Associates he advises companies on the commercial reality of connected-product strategy. The keynote content is grounded in current client work, not retrospective career stories. Biography highlights Former Global Technologist and Head of the Ford Developer Program, Ford Motor Company Author, The Zero Dollar Car: How the Revolution in Big Data will Change Your Life (#1 Amazon Best Seller, Auto Industry) Founder and Managing Director, Ellis & Associates, management consultancy at the automotive, consumer, connectivity and software intersection Led the team that delivered SmartDeviceLink, the open-source platform now used by Toyota, Mazda, Subaru and others Prior senior leadership roles at Motorola across engineering, product management, software, services and strategy Featured on NBC’s TODAY Show on the future of connected vehicles and data Biography The cars on the road today produce more usable data per mile than the entire commercial internet did a decade ago. Most of that data still ends up captured by the manufacturer, the platform owner, or the insurer, rarely by the customer who generated it. That asymmetry is the operating question behind John Ellis’s work. As Global Technologist and Head of the Ford Developer Program, Ellis ran the team that delivered SmartDeviceLink, the open-source platform underneath Ford’s AppLink and now adopted by Toyota, Mazda and Subaru. He saw, from inside, how a global manufacturer turns a vehicle into a software platform and what that does to the economics of the product. His book The Zero Dollar Car takes that operating insight and pushes it to its logical end. If sensor data is valuable enough, the vehicle itself becomes a loss leader, financed by what it tells the world while it moves. The argument is now playing out across insurance, smart home, mobility infrastructure and public-space management, each sector that Ellis & Associates currently advises. What Ellis brings to a senior audience is the rare combination of having built one of the early connected-product platforms at scale and then translating that experience into a clear commercial argument that boards in any sector can apply to their own products. The Motorola years sit underneath: two decades inside a company that learned, expensively, what happens when a hardware business misreads a software shift. Key speaking topics Connected vehicles and the future of mobility Data monetisation and the economics of sensor data Business model disruption in hardware industries Software platforms inside traditional manufacturing Smart cities and public-space management Technology disruption across automotive, insurance and smart home Ideal for Boards and executive teams in automotive, mobility, insurance and infrastructure CTOs, CDOs and Chief Digital Officers in product and manufacturing businesses Heads of strategy and corporate development assessing platform and connected-product plays City, transport and public-sector leaders managing connected infrastructure decisions Audience outcomes A clear view of how value migrates from the connected product to the data it generates, and what that does to incumbent business models A working frame, drawn from The Zero Dollar Car, for assessing where their own products sit on that curve Concrete examples from automotive, insurance and public infrastructure of who is winning and losing the data argument A sharper question set for board and executive conversations on connected-product strategy

Why organisations work with John Hall He has built two commercial businesses around the problem he speaks on: Influence & Co., which scaled content as a managed marketing function for senior executives, and Calendar, which monetises the attention his first company taught leaders to capture. Top of Mind (McGraw-Hill) gives sales and marketing teams a named operating model for staying memorable to specific decision-makers, not a generic content playbook. Weekly Forbes and Inc. columns, plus contributions to Harvard Business Review, Fortune and Fast Company, mean his frameworks are tested in public against a senior business readership every week. Influence & Co. was ranked No. 72 on Forbes’ Most Promising Companies in America and won EY Entrepreneur of the Year for Best Emerging Company, so the underlying methodology has commercial proof, not only platform reach. He translates content marketing out of the marketing department and into a CEO and revenue conversation, which is where buying decisions about brand authority actually sit. Biography highlights Co-founder of Calendar, a scheduling platform used by millions of professionals. Co-founder and former CEO of Influence & Co., the content marketing firm ranked No. 72 on Forbes’ Most Promising Companies in America. Author of Top of Mind, published by McGraw-Hill in 2017. Weekly columnist for Forbes and Inc. Contributor to Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Fast Company, Entrepreneur and Mashable. EY Entrepreneur of the Year (Best Emerging Company) and Business Journals’ Top 100 Visionaries. Described by Inc. as “one of the most powerful people in media you’ve never met” and by Forbes as a “must-see keynote speaker”. Biography Most companies treat brand visibility as a marketing line item. Buyers experience it as the shortlist they already had in their heads before procurement opened a process. Closing that gap, between how visibility is funded internally and how it is consumed externally, is the commercial problem John Hall has worked on for more than a decade. Top of Mind, his McGraw-Hill book, sets out the operating logic. Trust is built by useful content delivered consistently to the specific people whose decisions matter, and it compounds. The book is not a content marketing manual. It is a framework for executive and corporate visibility, built from running Influence & Co., the agency that productised the discipline for senior leaders and was ranked No. 72 on Forbes’ Most Promising Companies in America. Hall scaled that thesis into a second business, Calendar, which sits on the other side of the equation. Once a leader has captured attention, time becomes the constraint. Together the two companies bracket the commercial problem his keynotes address: how to be the name buyers reach for, and how to manage the demand that creates. His weekly columns for Forbes and Inc., and contributions to Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Fast Company, Entrepreneur and Mashable, keep the argument public and tested. EY named him Entrepreneur of the Year for Best Emerging Company. The Business Journals listed him among its Top 100 Visionaries. Key speaking topics Building executive and corporate visibility Content as a trust-building system Sales influence and decision-maker engagement Top-of-mind brand strategy Time management and executive productivity Talent attraction through company culture and content Ideal for CMOs, CROs and heads of brand reassessing how content drives pipeline CEOs and founders building personal and corporate authority in a contested market Sales leadership teams measuring trust as a leading indicator of revenue Marketing and communications functions inside professional services, B2B technology and financial services Audience outcomes A working definition of top-of-mind status and the specific behaviours that produce it inside their organisation Named criteria for deciding which content earns attention from senior buyers and which dilutes it A clearer line between brand spend and revenue contribution, framed for finance and board conversations Tactics for converting executive expertise into published authority without consuming executive time

Why organisations work with John Ridding He ran the playbook the rest of the news industry copied. The FT moved to a paywall in 2002, a metered model in 2007, and trial-led subscriptions in 2015, reaching one million subscribers in 2019 and 2.9 million paying users by 2023. He brings the inside view of a cross-border acquisition that worked. The 2015 sale of the FT from Pearson to Nikkei is one of the cleanest examples of a Japanese parent acquiring a Western media asset without breaking it. He has signed the first UK national publisher licensing deal with OpenAI, which gives him a current operator perspective on how content businesses negotiate with foundation model companies, not a commentator’s view. He spent 35 years inside one institution and ran it for almost 20. That tenure is unusual at his level and gives him a coherent argument about long-horizon transformation rather than a sequence of quarterly bets. Biography highlights Chief Executive Officer of the FT Group, May 2006 to June 2025. Special Executive Director of Nikkei, parent company of the Financial Times since 2015. Honorary Chairman of the Financial Times following his transition from CEO. Previously Publisher of FT Asia and Chairman of Pearson Asia, 2003 to 2006. Foreign correspondent for the FT in Seoul, Paris and Hong Kong, with reporting from China, Japan, India and Indonesia. First-class honours degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Oxford University. Biography The reader-revenue model now treated as orthodoxy across global news media did not exist as a serious commercial strategy when the Financial Times began charging for online journalism in 2002. The decision was contested inside the building and dismissed outside it. Two decades later, it is the model the New York Times, the Washington Post and most of the European broadsheets have adopted in some form. John Ridding ran that experiment to scale. As CEO of the FT Group from 2006 to 2025, he took the paper from print-led economics to a paying audience of 2.9 million and revenues of GBP 500m, with more than two-thirds of revenue from digital subscriptions. The headline numbers matter, but the operating choices behind them are what executives in other sectors find useful: how to price confidently when the market expects free, how to redesign the product around habit rather than transactions, how to build a direct data relationship with a reader. He also managed two structural events most CEOs never face. The 2015 sale of the FT from Pearson to Nikkei moved a British editorial institution into Japanese ownership without disturbing the journalism. In April 2024 the FT became the first UK national publisher to license its content to OpenAI, an early test of how content owners negotiate with foundation model companies on terms rather than waiting to be scraped. Before running the business he reported from it. Postings in Seoul, Paris and Hong Kong covered the Asian financial crisis, the rise of China as a commercial power, and the early years of the Eurozone. That reporter background is the throughline. He talks about the digital subscription business the way a foreign correspondent talks about a country, in specifics, not abstractions. Key speaking topics Subscription and reader-revenue business models Digital transformation of legacy businesses AI and the future of content, media and intellectual property Cross-border M&A and post-acquisition integration Global business through the lens of news and capital flows Leadership of long-horizon transformation The economics of trust in a fragmented information market Ideal for CEOs and CFOs of subscription, media, publishing and content businesses Boards of legacy companies designing direct customer-revenue strategies Chief Strategy and Chief Commercial Officers wrestling with pricing in commoditising markets Senior teams negotiating content, IP or data licensing terms with AI platforms Audience outcomes A clear account of how a legacy business shifted from advertising to direct customer revenue, with the sequencing decisions that made it work A framework for thinking about pricing, product and data as one operating system rather than three departments An informed read on what content owners are actually negotiating with foundation model companies, beyond the headlines A view on cross-border integration that treats culture and editorial autonomy as commercial assets, not soft factors

Why organisations work with Jonah Berger He has built two operating frameworks, STEPPS for word of mouth and REDUCE for overcoming resistance, that translate directly into product, marketing and change decisions rather than sitting at the level of theory. The research base is unusually deep for a commercial speaker: 80+ peer-reviewed articles, much of it using natural language processing on real consumer and organisational text, not anecdote. His client work spans Apple, Google, Nike, Amazon, GE, Moderna, Facebook and the Gates Foundation, which means the frameworks have been pressure-tested across consumer brands, platforms and mission-driven organisations. Contagious won the Berry-AMA Book Prize for the best book in marketing, the field’s most credible peer recognition. He addresses two distinct buyer problems with one body of work: how things spread (marketing, product, communications) and how to move people who do not want to move (change, transformation, sales). Biography highlights Marketing Professor at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. PhD in Marketing, Stanford Graduate School of Business; BA Stanford. Author of Contagious, Invisible Influence, The Catalyst and Magic Words; books published in over 35 countries. Berry-AMA Book Prize for Best Book in Marketing (Contagious). Wharton Iron Professor Award for faculty research; recognised by the American Marketing Association as a top-five most productive marketing researcher. Research and commentary featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review and NPR. Biography Most attempts to change behaviour rely on more pressure: more advertising spend, more incentives, more internal communication. The research suggests the opposite often works better. Removing the friction that holds people in place changes more behaviour than pushing harder against it. That argument sits at the centre of Jonah Berger’s work as a marketing professor at the Wharton School. His book The Catalyst sets out a five-part model, REDUCE, for identifying and dismantling the specific barriers that stop customers, employees and citizens from changing their minds. It is paired with the earlier STEPPS framework from Contagious, which names the six factors that make products and ideas spread. The academic foundation is substantial. Berger holds a PhD in Marketing from Stanford and has published more than eighty peer-reviewed articles, much of it applying natural language processing to large bodies of consumer and organisational text. Contagious won the Berry-AMA Book Prize for the best book in marketing. Invisible Influence and Magic Words extend the same methodology into social influence and the language of persuasion. The frameworks have been used inside Apple, Google, Nike, Amazon, GE, Moderna, Facebook and the Gates Foundation. The value to a senior team is the same in each case: a defensible, named model for two questions that boards and chief marketing officers ask repeatedly, why some things spread and others do not, and why people resist change even when the case for it is sound. Key speaking topics Word of mouth and viral marketing Behavioural science in commercial strategy Change and persuasion Consumer behaviour and decision-making Language and influence Social influence and choice architecture Branding and customer engagement Ideal for Chief marketing officers and brand leadership teams setting strategy on growth, virality and customer engagement. Transformation and change leaders running programmes where employee or customer resistance is the binding constraint. Sales and revenue leaders looking to apply behavioural science to pricing, messaging and conversion. Product and innovation teams working on adoption of new offerings. Audience outcomes A working knowledge of the STEPPS framework and how to apply each principle to a current product, message or campaign. The REDUCE model as a diagnostic for stalled change, with the five categories of resistance named and addressable. Specific language techniques from Berger’s natural language processing research that shift persuasion outcomes. A sharper read on which behavioural levers genuinely move customers and employees, and which ones do not. Concrete examples drawn from consumer brands, platforms and mission-driven organisations Berger has worked with.