Customer Experience & Marketing

Why organisations work with Mike Saunders His HumanCentric framework forces transformation teams to test technology decisions against the people who will or will not adopt them, which changes how budgets get allocated. He runs the agency he speaks from. Digitlab has delivered digital work for Vodafone, IBM, Toyota, KPMG and Bidvest, so the room hears practice from a live operator. He brings an emerging-market lens that most digital strategy speakers do not carry, drawn from running an agency in South Africa with delivery into the UK, Europe, US, Australia and Dubai. His Gear Analogy, developed for his TEDx Durban talk, gives leadership teams a working method for picking which ideas deserve real investment and which to drop. He pairs published frameworks with original sector research, including Digitlab’s annual Insight: State of Digital report on where customer behaviour, AI and martech are moving. Biography highlights CEO and Founder of Digitlab, a digital strategy agency with clients spanning South Africa, the UK, Europe, the US, Australia and Dubai. Author of HumanCentric: Technology Fails Unless It Means Something to Someone, which sets out a four-part model (explore, ideate, intersect, create) for human-centred digital transformation. TEDx Durban speaker on Gearing for Greatness: Your Ideas, Your Impact, introducing the Gear Analogy for idea evaluation and execution. Opening chapter author in Doers & Dreamers, a global business compendium also featuring Seth Godin, Tim Ferriss and Brian Chesky. Founder of the Digitlab Academy in partnership with Vega School of Branding, training over 1,000 marketers a year. Awarded Special Honours at the New Generation Awards for contribution to the digital industry; named among “Top Global Digital Marketing Experts & Influencers” (2019). Biography Most digital transformation programmes still get sold to boards as technology projects. The investment lands and the adoption that was supposed to follow does not. The gap is where commercial returns disappear. This is the gap that Saunders has spent more than fifteen years working in. As CEO of Digitlab, the South African agency he founded, he has run digital programmes for Vodafone, IBM, Toyota, KPMG and Bidvest. He argues that technology fails unless it means something to someone, and that digital is a people conversation that happens to run on technology. His book HumanCentric: Technology Fails Unless It Means Something to Someone sets out the four-part model he uses with clients: explore, ideate, intersect, create. Each phase forces a transformation team to test technology decisions against the human stakeholders who will or will not adopt them. It functions as a working framework, and it shows up in his keynote work as practical structure for leadership audiences. His TEDx Durban talk Gearing for Greatness introduced the Gear Analogy, a tool for evaluating which ideas to back and which to drop. He contributed the opening chapter of Doers & Dreamers, the global business book that also features Seth Godin, Tim Ferriss and Brian Chesky. Each year, Digitlab publishes its Insight: State of Digital report mapping where customer behaviour, AI, search and martech are actually moving. Key speaking topics Human-centred digital transformation Customer experience and digital strategy AI and data-driven marketing Marketing technology and innovation Digital consumer behaviour The Fourth Industrial Revolution in business Ideal for CMOs and digital marketing leaders running transformation or martech programmes CEOs and CDOs are accountable for digital strategy and adoption outcomes Boards and executive teams setting commercial AI and data direction Marketing, sales and IT leadership teams are trying to align around shared revenue outcomes Audience outcomes A working framework for testing digital decisions against the real people who will or will not adopt them A method for separating ideas worth backing from ideas worth abandoning, drawn from the Gear Analogy Specific signals on what is shifting in customer behaviour, AI, search and martech, drawn from Digitlab’s annual State of Digital research A view of how marketing, sales and IT teams should align around a single revenue model

Why organisations work with Mike Harris He has done the actual job, twice. First Direct (1989) and Egg (1998) were both built from scratch into category-defining UK consumer brands while sitting inside or alongside incumbent institutions, Midland Bank and Prudential. That kind of new-business creation inside a large organisation is rare among innovation speakers. He took Egg from concept to a £1bn flotation in under two years. When he talks about pace of execution, it is from a CEO who delivered it under public-market scrutiny. As Chairman of Group Innovation at RBS (2005-2009), he has worked both sides of the innovation problem: building the new business, and governing the innovation portfolio at scale inside a major bank. His operating framework comes directly from First Direct: customer-led, and built around how distinct segments actually want to be served. It is set out in Find Your Lightbulb (Wiley, 2008) and applied through the IconicShift programme across companies in FinTech, pharmaceuticals and consumer health. As co-founder of Monument Partners and a non-executive chairman at FinTech ventures including Monolith, he is still active at the investor and founder edge of financial services. The material is current. Biography highlights Founding CEO of First Direct (1989), the world’s first major 24/7 telephone bank, launched as a subsidiary of Midland Bank Founding CEO of Egg (1998); floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2000 at a £1.3bn valuation Chief Executive of Mercury Communications (1991-1995), the first major competitor to BT in UK telecoms Chairman of Group Innovation at Royal Bank of Scotland, 2005 to 2009 Co-founder and Chairman of Garlik, sold to Experian in 2011; Tim Berners-Lee on its advisory board Author of Find Your Lightbulb (Wiley/Capstone, 2008); winner of the BT Flagship Award for Innovation, 2008 Co-founder of Monument Partners (2012), a FinTech-focused advisory firm; regular speaker at the MIT Sloan School mid-career MBA programme between 1996 and 2008 Biography First Direct launched in 1989 as a 24/7 telephone bank, owned by Midland but kept far enough away from it to behave differently. The result was a brand that has spent decades at or near the top of UK customer service rankings across every industry. The CEO who built it was Mike Harris. He left Midland to run Mercury Communications, the first major competitor to BT in UK telecoms, where turnover grew from £1bn to £1.6bn during his tenure. In 1995 he founded Prudential Banking, which became Egg in 1998. Egg floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2000 at a £1.3bn valuation, less than two years from launch. After leaving Egg, he turned to innovation governance. As Chairman of Group Innovation at Royal Bank of Scotland from 2005 to 2009, he built a group-wide innovation programme inside an institution then under acute strategic pressure. His book Find Your Lightbulb (Wiley, 2008) set out the operating principles. The IconicShift mentoring programme has since applied them across companies in FinTech, pharmaceuticals, food, fashion, law and consumer health. Most innovation speakers have either built a new business or governed innovation portfolios. Harris has done both, and continues to do both. He is co-founder of FinTech advisory firm Monument Partners, and a non-executive chairman at FinTech ventures including Monolith. Key speaking topics Innovation strategy and execution Customer-led growth Building new businesses inside large organisations Brand and proposition design FinTech and financial services innovation Entrepreneurship and scale-up leadership Digital identity and consumer trust Ideal for CEOs and group strategy leads in financial services and telecoms wrestling with category disruption Chief Innovation Officers and heads of new ventures who need to sponsor breakthrough propositions inside legacy structures Boards and ExCos of established consumer-facing organisations under pressure to reinvent the customer relationship FinTech founders and corporate venture investors looking for current operating perspective Audience outcomes A clearer view of why most innovation programmes produce activity instead of new customers, and what to do about it Operating principles for taking a new proposition from concept to revenue at speed, drawn from First Direct, Egg and Garlik A diagnostic for whether the current organisation can house the new business it is trying to build, and what to change if it cannot How chairmen and CEOs can use innovation governance to back the right bets without smothering them

Why organisations work with Michael Solomon His textbook Consumer Behavior: Buying, Having, and Being is the most widely adopted course text on the subject worldwide, which means the conceptual vocabulary used by a generation of marketers traces back to his work. He has advised Calvin Klein, Levi Strauss, Under Armour, BMW, Procter & Gamble, eBay, and United Airlines on consumer psychology applied to brand, retail, and product decisions. He brings academic discipline to fast-moving commercial questions: AI consumer trust, avatar identity, metaverse engagement, and post-pandemic spending behaviour, all grounded in published research. Holder of the Dirk Warren ’50 Sesquicentennial Chair at Saint Joseph’s University and recognised among the ten most productive scholars in advertising and marketing communications. Regular Forbes.com contributor, with commentary picked up by The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Adweek, and Time, giving clients a speaker whose framing is already in market. Biography highlights Dirk Warren ’50 Sesquicentennial Chair and Professor of Marketing, Haub School of Business, Saint Joseph’s University. Author of more than thirty books, including the global bestselling textbook Consumer Behavior: Buying, Having, and Being and The New Chameleons. Former faculty at NYU, Rutgers, Auburn University, and the University of Manchester. Forbes.com contributor; commentary in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Adweek, Time, and on Today, Good Morning America, and CNN. Cutty Sark Men’s Fashion Award recipient for research on the psychology of clothing. Client roster spanning Calvin Klein, Levi Strauss, Under Armour, BMW, P&G, eBay, Subaru, United Airlines, Microsoft Advertising, and the U.S. Army. Biography The textbook that trained a generation of marketers in consumer behaviour, Buying, Having, and Being, sits on Michael Solomon’s CV. So does a Forbes column read by the executives who now run those marketers’ employers. That dual position, academic standard-setter and commercial commentator, is what brings serious brands to him for strategic reads on customer psychology. Solomon holds the Dirk Warren ’50 Sesquicentennial Chair at Saint Joseph’s University’s Haub School of Business, with prior faculty posts at NYU, Rutgers, Auburn, and the University of Manchester. His PhD in social psychology from UNC Chapel Hill anchors a research career that has placed him among the ten most productive scholars in advertising and marketing communications, and the fifteen most cited in behavioural sciences and fashion. The applied work is where the academic record converts into commercial value. Solomon has advised Calvin Klein, Levi Strauss, Under Armour, BMW, Procter & Gamble, eBay, Subaru, and United Airlines on questions of brand identity, customer experience, and category disruption. His current speaking work centres on consumer trust in AI and avatars, the post-pandemic spending psychology he frames as G.A.S., and the dissolution of traditional consumer categories he treats in The New Chameleons. For senior marketing, brand, and customer-experience leaders, the value is access to a thinker who can defend a claim about consumer behaviour from the underlying psychology, then translate it into a brand or product decision a board can act on. Key speaking topics Consumer psychology and decision-making Brand identity and customer experience Marketing implications of AI, avatars, and the metaverse Fashion psychology and the symbolic meaning of products Post-pandemic consumer behaviour Retail disruption and category evolution Cross-cultural consumer meaning-making Ideal for CMOs and brand directors rebuilding strategy after segmentation models stop working Retail and consumer goods leadership teams confronting category disruption Customer experience and insight leads in financial services, automotive, apparel, and FMCG Boards of consumer-facing businesses assessing exposure to AI-mediated commerce Audience outcomes A sharper read on the psychology driving current consumer switching, loyalty, and category exit. Specific frameworks for thinking about AI and avatars in brand and retail experience, not generic technology commentary. Named research and case examples that senior marketers can cite internally to defend a strategic shift. A more rigorous internal vocabulary for consumer behaviour, drawn from the academic standard text in the field.

Why organisations work with Michael Brenner His core argument; that empathy outperforms authority as both a marketing and a leadership lever, is grounded in practitioner experience inside SAP and NewsCred, not academic research; senior leaders engage with it as a claim someone has actually lived, not theorised His book Mean People Suck gives CMOs and CHROs a shared language for the link between culture, employee engagement, and revenue outcomes, making it useful in conversations that usually stay siloed The “Champion Leader” model is a named, transferable alternative to command-and-control management: specific enough to teach, tested across both large enterprises and early-stage startups His content marketing work is anchored in a measurable ROI framework from The Content Formula, translating content investment into financial terms for leaders who need to justify budgets to the CFO, not just the marketing team He has operated on both sides of the client-agency relationship, which means his diagnosis of where organisations waste marketing spend carries a credibility most single-perspective speakers cannot match Biography highlights CEO and Founder of Marketing Insider Group, a content marketing agency serving Fortune 500 brands and B2B technology companies Former VP of Global Content Marketing Strategy at SAP and Head of Strategy at NewsCred Author of three books: Mean People Suck: How Empathy Leads to Bigger Profits and a Better Life (2019), The Content Formula, and Digital Marketing Growth Hacks Named Top CMO Influencer by Forbes and Top Business Speaker by The Huffington Post Contributor to Forbes, The Economist, and The Guardian; contributor at Content Marketing Institute Featured in Entrepreneur Magazine; facilitated content strategy workshops for MarketingProfs Biography Most organisations treat their marketing problem as a content problem. The more accurate diagnosis is a leadership one: companies default to self-promotion when their customers need help, and they build management cultures that reward compliance when growth requires empathy. Michael Brenner spent two decades working from the inside of that tension – as VP of Global Content Marketing Strategy at SAP, as Head of Strategy at NewsCred, and as CMO across a series of high-growth technology startups. His 2019 book Mean People Suck: How Empathy Leads to Bigger Profits and a Better Life argues that low employee engagement and weak marketing performance share a common root: a leadership culture that has traded empathy for authority. The research and case evidence he assembles make it a commercial argument, not a motivational one. As founder and CEO of Marketing Insider Group, Brenner has built content marketing programmes for more than 75 brands. His earlier book, The Content Formula, provides a practical ROI framework that converts content investment into financial language – useful for marketing leaders who need to make the commercial case to a CFO, not just a brand committee. His keynote work is structured around two named concepts: the “Champion Leader,” a model for leaders who close the gap between what organisations ask their teams to do and what actually drives results; and the “Bullseye Organisation,” which frames customer-centricity as a structural discipline rather than a values statement. A contributor to Forbes, The Economist, and The Guardian, and named Top CMO Influencer by Forbes and Top Business Speaker by The Huffington Post, Brenner speaks across the United States and Europe, primarily to senior marketing, commercial, and leadership audiences. Key speaking topics Customer-centric marketing strategy Content marketing ROI and measurement Empathy-led leadership Employee engagement and culture The Champion Leader model Organisational alignment around the customer B2B marketing and demand generation Ideal for CMOs and marketing directors seeking a measurable framework for content marketing investment CHROs and culture leads addressing the connection between employee engagement and commercial performance CEOs and senior leadership teams weighing the limits of authority-based management B2B technology and SaaS organisations building customer-first marketing and go-to-market capabilities Audience outcomes A practitioner-built argument for why empathy is a commercial lever, with specific cases and research rather than aspiration The “Champion Leader” framework as a named, teachable model for shifting from directive to customer-oriented leadership A measurable ROI methodology for content marketing that can be used in internal budget and investment conversations A practical method for identifying where self-promotional bias is costing the business in audience reach and revenue Clearer criteria for distinguishing marketing that serves the customer from marketing that serves the organisation’s ego

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 Martin Glenn He has run the P&L at four large consumer businesses and a national governing body, so brand arguments arrive with operator credibility, not agency theory. The Walkers story is a working case study, not an anecdote: he took share from roughly 30 percent to over 60 percent and built the Lineker campaign that still defines the category. He has done the hard version of culture change at the FA, including a 40 percent revenue lift and a record commitment to women’s football, while the senior England teams reached the 2018 World Cup semi-final. He led the United Biscuits turnaround through to a clean exit to Yildiz Holdings in 2014, which gives boards the rare combination of brand instinct and a private-equity-grade financial outcome. He is one of the few UK CEOs to have reached the top through marketing, which makes him useful when a board needs to rewire how the marketing function is positioned and resourced. He chairs PGMOL through one of the most publicly scrutinised reform programmes in English sport, and chaired Chapel Down through its admission to AIM and 2025 strategic review. Biography highlights Former Chief Executive of The Football Association, 2015 to 2019. Former CEO of United Biscuits, Birds Eye Iglo, and President of PepsiCo UK and Ireland. Architect of the Walkers crisps growth story, including the Gary Lineker advertising campaign. Chair of Professional Game Match Officials Limited since January 2024, the body that runs every referee in English professional football; Chair of the Football Foundation since 2020. Former Chair of Chapel Down Group, England’s largest winemaker, 2020 to 2025; oversaw the company’s admission to AIM in December 2023. Author of “The Best Job in the World”; President of The Marketing Society, 2014 to 2017; PPE graduate of Merton College, Oxford. Biography Walkers was a regional crisps brand in 1992. By the time Martin Glenn finished with it, it held more than 60 percent of the UK market and the Gary Lineker campaign had become the longest running advertising property in the country. That growth story is the spine of his career and the reason boards still bring him in. He spent fifteen years at PepsiCo, ending as President of PepsiCo UK and Ireland, before moving into private equity as CEO of Birds Eye Iglo and then United Biscuits, which he sold to Yildiz Holdings in December 2014. Each role asked the same question in a different setting: how do you grow a mature consumer business when distribution is solved and the next point of share has to come from the brand. In 2015 he answered a different version of the question at The Football Association. Over four seasons he restructured the organisation, oversaw a 40 percent rise in revenue, put a record investment behind the women’s game, and worked on the culture at St George’s Park that fed England’s run to the 2018 World Cup semi-final. He left at the end of the 2018-19 season into a portfolio of board roles. As Chair of Chapel Down from 2020 to 2025 he refocused the business onto premium sparkling wine and took it through its admission to AIM in December 2023. Since January 2024 he has chaired Professional Game Match Officials Limited, the body responsible for every referee in English professional football, helping the executive modernise an organisation that operates under permanent public scrutiny. He also chairs the Football Foundation, the UK’s largest sports charity. He is a PPE graduate of Merton College, Oxford, a former President of The Marketing Society, and the author of “The Best Job in the World”, which sets out the Walkers playbook in detail. The through-line is unusual: a CEO who came up through marketing and treats brand as the operating system of the business rather than a downstream function. Key speaking topics Brand-led growth in mature consumer markets Marketing as a route to general management Turnarounds and private equity exits Culture change inside national institutions The CEO operating model for FMCG businesses Leading governance reform under public scrutiny Ideal for CMOs, CEOs and boards in FMCG, retail and consumer health weighing brand investment against margin pressure. Chairs and CEOs of sports bodies, federations and member organisations facing structural reform. Private equity portfolio companies preparing for a brand-led value creation plan or exit. Senior marketing leaders being positioned for general management or P&L roles. Audience outcomes A clear view of how brand investment shows up in market share and enterprise value, drawn from the Walkers and United Biscuits numbers. A working model for the marketer-to-CEO transition, including what marketing leaders typically have to unlearn. A candid account of leading culture change inside a national institution under public scrutiny. Specific lessons on turnaround sequencing, from cost discipline through to brand reinvestment and exit.

Why organisations work with Mark Schaefer A connected, multi-book argument about where marketing economics are actually going, from Marketing Rebellion to Belonging to the Brand to Audacious, rather than a single talk track repackaged. A working position at the front of the AI-and-marketing conversation, anchored in his Rutgers “Mini-MBA: Digital Marketing in the Age of AI” and his book Audacious: How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World. A serious thesis on community as a marketing asset, with case work on brands like Sephora, that gives CMOs a defensible alternative to paid-media-only growth plans. Direct consulting and keynote experience with global enterprises including Pfizer, Cisco, P&G, Coca-Cola, McKinsey, Adidas, Johnson & Johnson, and the U.S. Air Force, which means examples land for both regulated and consumer-facing audiences. A teaching habit, three years studying under Peter Drucker and an active Rutgers executive education role, that shows up in how he structures sessions: argument, evidence, frameworks leaders can take into a Monday meeting. Biography highlights Executive Director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, with consulting work for Pfizer, Cisco, P&G, Coca-Cola, McKinsey, Dell, Adidas, Johnson & Johnson, the U.S. Air Force, and the UK Government. RBS Executive Education Lecturer at Rutgers Business School; teaches the Mini-MBA in Digital Marketing in the Age of AI and graduate marketing classes. Author of twelve best-selling marketing books, including Marketing Rebellion, Belonging to the Brand, KNOWN, The Content Code, Cumulative Advantage, Return on Influence, How AI is Changing Your Customers, and Audacious: How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World. Audacious launched with the first AI-driven Augmented Reality book cover and reached #1 in Amazon’s marketing category. Founder and co-host of The Marketing Companion podcast and publisher of the {grow} marketing blog. Featured commentator and contributor across The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNN, CBS News, BBC, NPR, Wired, and Harvard Business Review. Keynote speaker at South by Southwest, the Institute for International and European Affairs, Marketing Summit Tokyo, and Social Media Week London; has lectured at Oxford, Carnegie Mellon, and Princeton. Named the third-most influential digital marketing authority by Brand24 in 2025. Biography The cost of reaching a customer keeps rising while the trust those impressions buy keeps falling. Marketing Rebellion: The Most Human Company Wins set out the argument that built much of Mark Schaefer’s reputation, that businesses are no longer built on advertising impressions but on human impressions that help customers believe, belong, and find meaning. It is used as assigned reading at more than 70 universities and has been translated into 20 languages. That argument has continued through Belonging to the Brand, which makes the case for community as the next durable marketing strategy, and Audacious: How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World, which examines brands like e.l.f. Beauty, HBO, and Giant Spoon to show how creative nerve, not algorithmic optimisation, captures attention in saturated markets. Audacious reached number one in Amazon’s marketing category and launched with what the publisher described as the first AI-driven Augmented Reality book cover. His authority is grounded in operating credentials, not commentary alone. Schaefer runs Schaefer Marketing Solutions and has consulted for Pfizer, Cisco, P&G, Coca-Cola, McKinsey, Adidas, Johnson & Johnson, and the U.S. Air Force. At Rutgers Business School, he is the Executive Education lecturer behind the Mini-MBA in Digital Marketing in the Age of AI, and he has lectured at Oxford, Carnegie Mellon, and Princeton. He studied under Peter Drucker for three years, and the structural rigour of that lineage is visible in the way his frameworks are built. He also runs the infrastructure most marketing thinkers only write about. The Marketing Companion is one of the longer-running marketing podcasts in the field, and the {grow} blog has been a fixture in the discipline for over a decade. The result, for senior commercial audiences, is a speaker who treats marketing as a system and tests his arguments in public, every week, against an audience that includes practitioners and competitors. Key speaking topics Human-centred marketing strategy Brand community as a growth strategy AI in marketing and creative work Personal branding for executives and professionals Customer trust, loyalty, and the post-advertising buyer Content strategy and influence Cumulative advantage and competitive momentum Ideal for CMOs, brand directors, and heads of marketing rebuilding strategy around community and human connection. CEOs and commercial leaders questioning the ROI of paid-media-led growth plans. Heads of customer experience and digital who need to integrate AI without losing brand distinctiveness. Communications, PR, and corporate marketing leaders in regulated industries facing trust and credibility challenges. Audience outcomes A reframed view of where marketing value now sits: human impressions, community, and creative nerve over paid reach. Concrete case examples, including Sephora, e.l.f. Beauty, HBO, and Giant Spoon, that audiences can map against their own categories. A working position on how to use AI in marketing without becoming indistinguishable from competitors using the same tools. A clearer set of questions to bring back to brand, content, and customer experience teams about what they should stop funding. A vocabulary for talking to boards about brand and community as commercial assets, not soft costs.

Why organisations work with Marcel Corstjens His research in MIT Sloan Management Review demonstrated that the largest FMCG companies (i.e. those spending over a billion dollars annually on R&D) see no appreciable sales return from that investment; only marketing spend correlates with revenue. This directly challenges how most consumer goods leadership teams allocate their growth budgets. The Mindspace and Shelfspace framework from Store Wars gives manufacturers and retailers a shared, precise language for the power dynamics that determine who controls the end consumer: still the most widely adopted conceptual map of that relationship, translated into five languages. His Harvard Business Review research showed that retail internationalisation does not reliably improve revenue or profit margins, and that home market strength is the primary driver of commercial performance: a finding that reshapes how boards evaluate international expansion decisions. His “Newtonian versus Lorenzian” innovation typology distinguishing companies that invest heavily in broad R&D from those that make small, targeted bets, gives commercial leaders a practical diagnostic for where innovation spending is being wasted at scale. He has consulted directly for Unilever, Heineken, Novartis, Roche, PepsiCo, and Cadbury Schweppes, giving him practical fluency across both FMCG and pharmaceutical commercial strategy that few academics can match. Biography highlights Emeritus Professor of Marketing and the Unilever Chaired Professor of Marketing, Emeritus, at INSEAD; visiting professor at Cornell and Stanford universities PhD, University of California, Berkeley; doctoral dissertation awarded first prize by the American Marketing Association Author of Store Wars: The Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace (J. Wiley & Sons, 1995; second edition 1999; translated into French, Japanese, Russian, Portuguese, and Spanish) Co-author of “Retail Doesn’t Cross Borders” (Harvard Business Review, 2012) and “The Promise of Targeted Innovation” (MIT Sloan Management Review, 2019) Research published in Marketing Science, Management Science, Journal of Marketing, and Journal of Marketing Research; featured in The Economist Creator and director of the INSEAD Storewars senior executive programme for the consumer goods industries Biography The commercial relationship between consumer goods manufacturers and retailers is contested, high-stakes, and widely misread. Marcel Corstjens, Unilever Chaired Professor of Marketing Emeritus at INSEAD, has spent four decades researching where that contest is actually won and lost, and his findings consistently challenge what companies believe about their own growth strategies. His book Store Wars: The Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, co-authored with Judith Corstjens and published by J. Wiley & Sons, introduced the Mindspace and Shelfspace framework: the idea that the strategic contest between manufacturers and retailers is a battle for control of two distinct assets, these being the consumer’s mental availability and the product’s physical presence in store. Translated into five languages and taught through the INSEAD Storewars senior executive programme he created and directed, the framework became the most widely adopted analytical tool for understanding manufacturer-retailer power dynamics in FMCG. His research has repeatedly overturned the conventional logic of large consumer goods companies. Work published in MIT Sloan Management Review with Gregory Carpenter of Kellogg and Tushmit Hasan of UT Austin showed that the biggest FMCG brands (i.e. those investing more than a billion dollars annually in R&D) see no measurable sales return from that outlay. Research published in Harvard Business Review with Rajiv Lal of Harvard Business School demonstrated that retail internationalisation does not reliably improve revenue or profit margins; home market performance is the primary driver. Both findings run counter to assumptions embedded in how most FMCG leadership teams set strategy. Corstjens holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, where his doctoral dissertation received first prize from the American Marketing Association. He has been a visiting professor at Cornell and Stanford, and has consulted for Unilever, Heineken, Novartis, Roche, PepsiCo, and Cadbury Schweppes, among others. His research has appeared in Marketing Science, Management Science, Journal of Marketing, and Journal of Marketing Research, and has been featured in The Economist. Key speaking topics Manufacturer-Retailer Power Dynamics Marketing Strategy in FMCG Innovation Investment and Commercial Return Brand Strategy and Private Label Competition Retail Internationalisation and Global Growth Marketing Resource Allocation Marketing Strategy in the Pharmaceutical Industry Ideal for Chief Marketing Officers and commercial strategy leaders in consumer goods companies Senior executive teams in FMCG and pharmaceutical businesses facing stalled revenue growth Retail leadership teams navigating the competitive dynamics of private label and supplier relationships Executive education programmes for senior FMCG, retail, or pharmaceutical audiences Audience outcomes A clear analytical framework under both Mindspace and Shelfspace for diagnosing where control of the manufacturer-retailer relationship is being lost and what to do about it Evidence-based reappraisal of whether current R&D and innovation investment is actually driving revenue, or consuming capital without commercial return Practical criteria for assessing whether a retail internationalisation strategy is likely to deliver or destroy shareholder value Sharper understanding of how private label competition is reshaping the power balance between retailers and brand manufacturers, and what manufacturers can do to respond A working distinction between “Newtonian” and “Lorenzian” approaches to innovation investment, and which is appropriate at which scale

Why organisations work with Luke Johnson He has built, bought and sold more well-known British consumer brands than almost any other operator of his generation, including PizzaExpress, Strada, The Ivy, Giraffe, Patisserie Valerie and Gail’s, which gives any commercial audience an unusually direct reference point. He runs his own private equity firm, Risk Capital Partners, and continues to chair operating businesses, so the perspective is current investor and chairman, not retired founder. He has written a weekly national-press column on entrepreneurship for more than twenty years across the Financial Times, The Sunday Times and the Sunday Telegraph, which means audiences get arguments that have been tested in print, not improvised on stage. He is willing to talk publicly about the collapse of Patisserie Valerie, the fraud that triggered it, and what a chairman missed, which is rare candour from a figure still active in private equity. His chairmanship of Channel 4, the Royal Society of Arts and the Institute of Cancer Research gives him a board-level vocabulary that translates well for non-executives, charity trustees and public sector audiences. Biography highlights Chairman of PizzaExpress from 1993 to 1999, growing the chain from 12 to over 150 restaurants and the share price from 40p to over 900p. Founder and chairman of Risk Capital Partners, a London private equity firm operating since 2001. Chairman of Channel 4 Television Corporation, 2004 to 2010. Founder of Signature Restaurants (The Ivy, Le Caprice, J. Sheekey, Belgo) and the Strada chain; investor in Giraffe, Gail’s, Brighton Pier Group and Patisserie Holdings. Author of “Start It Up: Why Running Your Own Business Is Easier Than You Think” (Penguin, 2011) and weekly columnist for the Financial Times (2007 to 2015) and The Sunday Times (2015 to 2021). Co-founder and chairman of the Centre for Entrepreneurs; former chairman of the Royal Society of Arts, StartUp Britain and the Institute of Cancer Research; honorary degrees from Heriot-Watt, Bath, UWE and the University of West London. Biography PizzaExpress had twelve restaurants and a 40p share price when Luke Johnson and Hugh Osmond took control in 1993. By the time Johnson left as chairman in 1999, the chain had passed 150 sites and the share price had cleared 900p. That single deal still anchors his commercial reputation, but it sits inside a longer pattern. He founded Signature Restaurants, which owned The Ivy, J. Sheekey, Le Caprice and Belgo. He built Strada from scratch to thirty sites. Risk Capital Partners, the private equity firm he has run since 2001, has backed Giraffe, Gail’s, Brighton Pier Group, Patisserie Holdings and a long list of mid-market operators. The picture is not uniformly positive, and that is part of why senior audiences listen. Patisserie Holdings, where he was chairman and largest shareholder, collapsed in October 2018 after the discovery of significant accounting fraud. He has written and spoken about the experience in detail, including what a non-executive chair can and cannot see from the board. Alongside the deals, Johnson has built an unusually durable second career as a writer. He wrote weekly for the Sunday Telegraph from 1998, for the Financial Times from 2007, and for The Sunday Times until 2021. The work covers founders, capital, markets, management and failure, and it is consistently specific. His 2011 book “Start It Up”, published by Penguin, sets out the operator’s view of starting and running a small business without the usual founder mythology. Public roles round out the picture. He chaired Channel 4 Television for six years, the Royal Society of Arts for three, the Institute of Cancer Research for eight, and co-founded the Centre for Entrepreneurs to make the case for British founders in public policy. Four British universities, Heriot-Watt, Bath, the University of the West of England and the University of West London, have awarded him honorary degrees on the strength of that combined record. Key speaking topics Entrepreneurship and the realities of starting a business Private equity and growth-stage investment Consumer, hospitality and retail strategy Scale-up leadership and board governance Lessons from corporate failure and fraud The economics of small and medium-sized business Chairmanship of listed and charitable organisations Ideal for Founders, CEOs and senior teams in consumer, hospitality, retail and service businesses Private equity, venture and growth-stage investor audiences Boards and non-executive directors of listed and private companies Industry conferences and member organisations focused on entrepreneurship and SME growth Audience outcomes A franker view of why scale-ups stall than most growth literature offers, drawn from named deals on both sides of the outcome. A working understanding of how private equity actually evaluates and backs consumer businesses, from a practitioner who still writes the cheques. A clearer sense of what a board chair owes a company under stress, informed by the Patisserie Valerie collapse and other live cases. Concrete prompts for founders on capital, hiring, controls and exit, anchored in three decades of operator experience.

Why organisations work with Luis Maria Huete He brings a named, structured methodology, Clienting, that gives a management team a shared language for customer segmentation, business model alignment, and service mix economics. It is the rare customer-strategy framework with both an academic anchor and four decades of board-room application. He has facilitated senior offsites in more than 800 companies across 70 countries, including Banco Santander, BBVA, Telefonica, Coca-Cola, Repsol, and ISS. The work is execution-focused: redesigning structure, coordination mechanisms, and the operating model behind a strategy. His doctoral work on commercial banking service strategy was named best dissertation of 1988 by the Decision Sciences Institute. The same analytical discipline shows up in the way he treats customer profitability as an operating problem, not a marketing one. He has taught inside Harvard Business School’s Achieving Breakthrough Service and Advanced Management programmes, alongside his chair at IESE. The combined platform gives senior audiences confidence that the frameworks have been pressure-tested in serious academic and corporate settings. He works fluently in English and Spanish, with board-level experience across Europe, Latin America, and Asia. For multinational teams that need a single voice on customer strategy across regions, that range is genuinely scarce. Biography highlights Professor of Operations, Information and Technology at IESE Business School, on faculty since 1982. DBA, Boston University. Fulbright Scholar. Doctoral thesis on commercial banking service strategy awarded best dissertation of 1988 by the Decision Sciences Institute. Author of thirteen management books, including Clienting, Service Management, Leading for the Common Good (2015), 50 Leaders Who Made History (2017), and Leadership and Governance (2025). Faculty contributor to Harvard Business School’s Achieving Breakthrough Service and Advanced Management executive programmes. Regular contributor to Harvard Deusto Business Review and Expansion. Chairs the Advisory Board of Makro and the Instituto de Capital Humano. Board member of Altia, the Instituto Gobernanza y Sociedad, and the International Academy of Management. Biography Customer profitability is an operating problem before it is a marketing one. Most companies cannot say, with any precision, which of their customers earn the margin that funds the rest of the business, or how the service model would need to change if they could. That is the question Huete has spent four decades putting in front of senior teams. His framework, Clienting, gives a management committee a structured way to work that question. It moves through segmentation, business model alignment, service mix, implementation, and performance measurement, treating customer strategy as a coordinated set of operating decisions rather than a brand exercise. The methodology is documented across thirteen books and tested inside the executive programmes of IESE Business School and Harvard Business School, where Huete has taught Achieving Breakthrough Service and Advanced Management. The academic anchor is serious. His doctoral thesis on commercial banking service strategy was named best dissertation of 1988 by the Decision Sciences Institute, and he holds a chair at IESE he has occupied since 1982. Alongside that, he has facilitated senior offsites in more than 800 companies across 70 countries, including Banco Santander, BBVA, Telefonica, Coca-Cola, Repsol, and ISS. He chairs the Advisory Board of Makro and the Instituto de Capital Humano, and writes regularly for Harvard Deusto Business Review and Expansion. What a senior team gets is a working vocabulary for customer strategy and a facilitator who has watched several hundred management committees try to install it. The conversation he runs is rarely about ideas. It is about what to stop doing, which customers to organise around, and how to align the operating model to the answer. Key speaking topics Clienting and customer strategy Service management and service economics Strategy execution and operating model design Corporate culture and senior-team alignment Leadership and governance Family business transitions Customer loyalty and profitability Ideal for CEOs, CCOs and CMOs reviewing customer segmentation and the underlying service economics. Boards and ExCos running a strategy refresh or post-merger operating model redesign. Senior leadership offsites that need a structured outside facilitator on customer strategy and execution. Family business owners and boards navigating governance and succession alongside commercial repositioning. Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for Clienting, segmentation, service mix, and the link from customer loyalty to operating margin. A sharper read on which customer segments the organisation is actually built to serve profitably, and which it is not. A structured view of the gap between stated strategy and operating execution, and where coordination mechanisms break down. Specific examples drawn from senior offsites with European and Latin American multinationals on how the management committee owns customer strategy. A reference set of books and frameworks the team can use after the session to continue the work internally.

Why organisations work with Konstantinos Karypidis He holds a room the way a stage performer does, then converts that attention into mindset work, drawing on years performing in theatres and on national television before moving into corporate training. His method is built on clinical ground, not platform clichés: as a licensed psychotherapist he targets the beliefs that keep behaviour stuck, which is where most change initiatives quietly fail. Every workshop is built from scratch against the client’s specific problem rather than delivered from a fixed deck, so the content matches the actual tension in the organisation. He has run sessions for the people-facing functions of demanding multinationals, including Sanofi, Roche, KPMG, L’Oréal and AstraZeneca, across sales, HR and customer-service briefs. Biography highlights Licensed psychotherapist, business consultant and executive coach to senior leaders internationally. Began his career as a performance artist, writing and directing his own shows for theatres and national television. Has delivered keynotes and bespoke workshops for Sanofi, Roche, Johnson & Johnson, KPMG, Philips, AstraZeneca, L’Oréal, DHL, AXA and JTI. TEDx speaker. Listed in the Thinkers360 Top 50 Global Thinkers & Influencers in Change Management, 2022. Hosts a podcast and a YouTube channel devoted to books worth reading. Biography Most behaviour-change efforts inside organisations stall in the same place. The strategy is sound and the training is delivered, but the people expected to change carry the same assumptions out of the room that they brought into it. Konstantinos Karypidis works on that gap. He came to corporate work by an unusual route. Before the boardroom he was a performer, writing and directing his own shows for theatres and national television. That background gives him a working performer’s command of attention, which he treats as the precondition for any real change rather than the point of it. The substance underneath the stagecraft is clinical. As a licensed psychotherapist, he focuses on the beliefs and mental patterns that govern how people act, the layer most training programmes skip. His sessions are built individually for each client, shaped around the specific friction a team is facing in sales, HR or customer service. That approach has been tested across demanding environments, from Sanofi and Roche to KPMG, L’Oréal and AstraZeneca. He was listed among the Thinkers360 Top 50 Global Thinkers and Influencers in Change Management in 2022, and speaks regularly on the same TEDx and conference platforms where he first built his reputation for getting an audience to question how they think. Key speaking topics Mindset change and behavioural adoption Peak performance and productivity Employee motivation and engagement Non-verbal communication and influence Sales and customer service Embracing organisational change Ideal for Heads of HR and L&D commissioning a keynote that needs to land emotionally and stick afterwards Sales and customer-service leaders running kick-offs or summits where energy and engagement matter Conference organisers who need an opening or closing speaker who can hold a large room After-dinner audiences at corporate events Audience outcomes A clearer view of the mental patterns that hold back individual performance, and practical techniques to interrupt them Specific tools for reading and using non-verbal communication Renewed motivation tied to concrete take-away methods rather than a temporary lift A shared, energised reference point that teams can carry back into day-to-day work

Why organisations work with Kevin Roberts He led Saatchi and Saatchi globally for seventeen years, so brand and creative conversations land with the authority of someone who ran the network, not observed it. Lovemarks is one of the few brand frameworks from the 2000s still cited in marketing rooms; Advertising Age named it an Idea of the Decade in 2009. His operator track record covers Mary Quant, Gillette, Procter and Gamble, Pepsi-Cola and Lion Nathan, which gives commercial teams a counterpart who has run P&Ls, not only advised on them. 64 Shots gives leadership audiences a structured, opinionated playbook for operating in volatile markets, written from inside a creative business rather than a business school. Biography highlights CEO Worldwide of Saatchi and Saatchi from 1997 to 2014; Chairman until 2016. CEO of Pepsi-Cola Middle East at 32, then President and CEO of Pepsi-Cola Canada. Chief Operating Officer and Director at Lion Nathan, the Australasian brewer, from 1989 to 1996. Author of Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands, published in 18 languages, and 64 Shots: Leadership in a Crazy World. Honorary Professor of Creative Leadership at Lancaster University, with parallel honorary chairs at the University of Auckland Business School and the University of Victoria in Canada. Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to business and the community. Biography Lovemarks reframed a question marketers had been answering badly for years. Instead of measuring respect and recognition, Kevin Roberts argued that the brands that survive are the ones customers actively love, and that emotion, not rational benefit, is the real driver of long-term commercial value. The book travelled into 18 languages and became one of the few brand frameworks from the period still in active use. The argument carries weight because of where it came from. Roberts spent seventeen years as CEO Worldwide of Saatchi and Saatchi, after running Pepsi-Cola in the Middle East and Canada, and serving as Chief Operating Officer at Lion Nathan. He has sat on the operator side of brand decisions at scale, including categories where price is brutal and differentiation is mostly emotional. 64 Shots: Leadership in a Crazy World extended the work into leadership. The book is a set of sixty-four short, opinionated entries on running creative businesses in volatile conditions, drawn from his own career and the leaders he has worked with. It gives commercial audiences a way to talk about culture, decision-making and creative risk without the abstraction that usually surrounds those topics. Roberts now runs Red Rose Consulting and chairs My Food Bag and The Herdy Company. He holds honorary chairs in creative leadership and innovation at Lancaster University, the University of Auckland Business School and the University of Victoria in Canada, and is a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to business. Key speaking topics Brand strategy and emotional brand equity Creative leadership in commercial organisations Marketing transformation and customer loyalty High-performance culture Leadership in volatile markets Innovation inside legacy businesses Ideal for CMOs and brand leaders rebuilding loyalty in commoditised categories CEOs and boards of consumer-facing businesses where brand is the main commercial moat Marketing, creative and customer experience leadership teams Sales and growth conferences in retail, FMCG, media and advertising Audience outcomes A working definition of what separates a brand customers respect from one they actively love, and why the second is worth more Language for talking about emotion as a commercial asset rather than a soft variable A clearer view of how creative organisations make decisions under pressure, drawn from inside one of the world’s largest networks Practical positions on culture, risk and leadership taken from 64 Shots that audiences can argue with rather than nod at