Customer Experience & Marketing

Why organisations work with Justin King A first-hand, decade-long account of running a FTSE 100 retailer through competitive attack, recession and the shift to online, with named results: 36 consecutive quarters of like-for-like growth, tripled underlying profit, and an 85 per cent total shareholder return by the time he stepped down. The “Making Sainsbury’s Great Again” playbook talked through by the CEO who wrote it, with concrete decisions on price, fresh food, colleague engagement and the Paralympic sponsorship that reset the brand. An active cross-portfolio operating perspective from the Chair seats at Allwyn Entertainment, Dexters and Itsu Grocery, plus the recent OVO Energy chairmanship through the sector’s difficult patch, so the material is current rather than retrospective. A credible record on purpose-led commercial leadership, evidenced through Sainsbury’s Comic Relief partnership of £1 for every £10 donated, the first dedicated Paralympic sponsorship of London 2012, and Made by Sport, the charity he founded in 2019 that raised over £6m for community organisations before transferring to Sported. A leadership framework, the ten Cs, that has been pressure-tested against a real CEO seat rather than developed in a classroom, and is delivered with the candour of someone who has had to defend results to a board. Biography highlights CEO of J Sainsbury plc, 2004 to 2014, ten years that took the business from third place and falling sales to 36 consecutive quarters of like-for-like growth and an 85 per cent total shareholder return. Chair of Allwyn Entertainment and Dexters; Non-Executive Chair of Itsu Grocery; recent Chair of OVO Energy. Non-Executive Director of Marks and Spencer plc, January 2019 to September 2025; member of the PwC Public Interest Body, 2015 to 2022. Vice Chairman and Senior Adviser at Terra Firma Capital Partners, 2015 to 2021; interim Chairman of the Manor Racing F1 team during its 2014-2015 restructuring. Member of the London Organising Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games and its audit committee, with Sainsbury’s the first dedicated Paralympic sponsor of London 2012. Founder of Made by Sport, 2019 to 2023, raising over £6m for community sport organisations. CBE for services to the retail industry, 2011 Birthday Honours; Honorary DBA, University of Bath, 2009; Most Admired Business Leader, Management Today; Britain’s Most Impressive Businessman, IPSOS-MORI Captains of Industry Report. Biography Sainsbury’s was the third-place supermarket with falling sales when Justin King took the CEO seat in March 2004. The City viewed the appointment as the company’s last chance to remain independent. Within six months he had launched “Making Sainsbury’s Great Again”, a recovery plan built on fresh food, colleague engagement and a re-priced shelf. The plan’s headline target, a £2.5 billion sales uplift, was hit three months early. Over his ten years as CEO, the business delivered 36 consecutive quarters of like-for-like growth, tripled underlying profit from £252m to £756m, and returned 85 per cent to shareholders. The brand was rebuilt around the first dedicated Paralympic sponsorship of London 2012, and the long-standing Comic Relief partnership of £1 for every £10 donated. Sainsbury’s regained second place in UK grocery and he stepped down in 2014 with the longest unbroken growth run of any major UK supermarket CEO of the era. He arrived at Sainsbury’s with three decades in consumer businesses behind him, including senior roles at M&S Food, Asda and Häagen-Dazs UK. After leaving the CEO seat he held the Vice Chairman and Senior Adviser role at Terra Firma Capital Partners from 2015 to 2021, sat on the PwC Public Interest Body from 2015 to 2022, and served as a Non-Executive Director of Marks and Spencer from January 2019 until September 2025. He chaired the Manor Racing F1 team through its 2014-2015 restructuring. He is Chair of Allwyn Entertainment, Chair of Dexters, and Non-Executive Chair of Itsu Grocery, with adviser seats at Snappy Shopper and Rezolve. He chaired OVO Energy through the post-energy-crisis period to August 2025. The purpose thread runs through the record: he founded Made by Sport in 2019, which raised over £6m for community sport organisations before the campaign was handed to Sported in 2023. He was appointed CBE in the 2011 Birthday Honours for services to retail, named Most Admired Business Leader by Management Today, and topped the IPSOS-MORI Captains of Industry Report. The University of Bath conferred an Honorary DBA in 2009, and he served on the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Group from 2010 to 2012. Key speaking topics Retail leadership and the long-cycle turnaround Consumer behaviour and brand reinvention Customer and colleague-led growth Purpose-led commercial leadership and responsible business Boardroom decision-making under competitive pressure Sponsorship and purpose, drawn from London 2012 Cross-portfolio non-executive leadership Ideal for FTSE and large-cap consumer business leadership teams managing a multi-year turnaround Retail, hospitality and consumer goods boards weighing strategy against operational execution Chief executives, COOs and store or operations directors in customer-facing sectors Boards and leadership teams looking to embed purpose into commercial performance rather than treat it as a side function Audience outcomes A working view of how a CEO sequences price, range, colleagues and brand through a decade-long recovery rather than a single reset. Specific lessons from London 2012, the Comic Relief partnership and Made by Sport on how purpose can shift commercial performance. A frank account of what holds boards together when results are slow, competitors aggressive and shareholders impatient. A leadership lens, the ten Cs, applied to the audience’s own operating questions during Q&A.

Why organisations work with Julian Treasure He has run an operating consultancy, The Sound Agency, advising global brands on retail, office and public-space sound for two decades. The work has commercial outcomes attached, not theory. His TED catalogue is one of the most viewed of any speaker on any subject, which gives senior audiences a shared starting point before he steps on stage. He treats listening as a leadership capability with a teachable structure, and his book How to Be Heard sets out the model in detail. He covers the rarely combined territory of personal communication craft and the sonic design of physical workplaces, so he is credible with HR, brand and facilities audiences in the same room. Awards from Toastmasters International and the International Listening Association place him inside the formal communication and listening professions, not just the speaker circuit. Biography highlights Founder and chairman of The Sound Agency, audio branding consultancy Five TED talks; combined views above 160 million; “How to Speak So That People Want to Listen” is TED’s sixth most-viewed talk Author of Sound Business (2014), How to Be Heard (2017) and Sound Affects (2025) Toastmasters International Golden Gavel Award; International Listening Association Special Recognition Award Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Marketors Founded and sold UK customer magazine publisher TPD Group; former chairman of the UK Association of Publishing Agencies; PPA Chairman’s Award (2002) Biography Sound is the most underused operating variable in most organisations. Retailers play music chosen by the manager on shift. Offices design for visual brand and acoustic accident. Leaders speak without ever auditing how they are heard. The financial cost is real and the cultural cost is larger. The Sound Agency was built around that gap. Founded by a former publisher and musician with a Cambridge economics degree, the consultancy has spent two decades advising global brands on retail soundscapes, office acoustics and audio identity, with measurable effects on sales, wellbeing and behaviour. The argument is that sound is a commercial system, designed or accidental, and most organisations choose accidental. The communication work is the second half of the same proposition. Three books, Sound Business, How to Be Heard and Sound Affects, set out a structured model for speaking and listening as leadership skills rather than soft attributes. The TED catalogue, five talks above 160 million combined views, has made the speaking talk one of the most watched pieces of business communication content ever recorded. The Toastmasters Golden Gavel and the International Listening Association Special Recognition Award place him inside the formal disciplines, not adjacent to them. For senior teams, he offers something specific: a working theory of how attention, voice and environment shape commercial and cultural outcomes, and the operating experience to back it up. The Royal Society of Arts fellowship and the Worshipful Company of Marketors livery are part of a wider institutional footprint that signals durability rather than novelty. Key speaking topics Conscious listening as a leadership skill Powerful speaking and executive voice Audio branding and sonic identity Sound design in workplaces and retail environments Communication and engagement in distracted organisations Wellbeing effects of sound and noise Trust and credibility in senior communication Ideal for CMOs and brand leadership rethinking customer experience beyond the visual HR, internal communications and culture leads working on listening and engagement Retail, hospitality and property leadership designing customer-facing environments Senior leaders preparing for high-stakes speaking, board, investor or media Audience outcomes A working model for listening as a measurable leadership capability Specific techniques for executive voice, structure and presence in high-stakes settings A new lens on the commercial and cultural cost of accidental sound in workplaces and retail A shared vocabulary for communication quality across HR, brand and facilities functions Concrete next steps that connect personal communication craft to organisational outcomes

Why organisations work with Juan Senor Co-edits the WAN-IFRA Innovation in News Media report and the FIPP Innovation in Magazine Media report, the two annual reference works on what is actually working commercially across global publishing. Has advised hundreds of news organisations on every continent on the parallel work of rebuilding the news product and rebuilding the business model that funds it. Speaks with authority on disinformation, AI slop, and platform dependency from inside the industry, not as an outside commentator. Hosts the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity and the Reinvention Festival, with moderating credits at Money20/20 and the World Economic Forum, which means a senior commercial audience already knows him on stage. Biography highlights President and Principal Partner, INNOVATION Media Consulting Group, London. Co-editor of the annual Innovation in News Media World Report (WAN-IFRA) and the Innovation in Media report (FIPP). Former visiting fellow, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford. Former foreign affairs and defence reporter, PBS’s MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour; team recipient of a DuPont-Columbia Journalism Award and Emmy nomination for interviews with Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin. Former presenter and correspondent for CNBC Europe, EBN/Wall Street Journal TV, and International Herald Tribune Television. Long-running host of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity; moderator at the World Economic Forum, Money20/20, and the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress. Biography Most news organisations are now wrestling with two structural problems at once. Their commercial model has been hollowed out by platform dependency. Their editorial product is competing for attention against AI-generated content produced at industrial scale, much of it designed to mimic real journalism. Juan Senor has spent two decades inside that problem. As President of Innovation Media Consulting Group, he has advised hundreds of news and media organisations across every continent on the parallel work of rebuilding the news product and the business model that funds it. He co-edits the WAN-IFRA Innovation in News Media report and the FIPP Innovation in Magazine Media report, the closest the industry has to a running ledger of what audiences are willing to pay for. His authority on the editorial side comes from the desk. He spent seven years as a war and conflict reporter for PBS NewsHour, where the team’s coverage won a DuPont Award and his own work earned an Emmy nomination. He went on to present for EBN-Wall Street Journal TV and CNBC Europe and served as London correspondent for International Herald Tribune Television. He is a former Visiting Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, and is quoted regularly in The Economist and The Financial Times. He has also hosted the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity for fourteen years and the Reinvention Festival for a decade, with moderating credits at Money20/20 and the World Economic Forum. That hosting work places him in front of the same senior commercial audience whose business problem he is now advising on. Key speaking topics Business model innovation in news and magazine media Paid content, subscription, and reader-revenue strategy Newsroom transformation and product strategy Digital disruption and the platform economy The future of journalism and trust in media Media leadership and editorial commercial alignment Ideal for Publisher CEOs, editors-in-chief, and chief product officers in news and magazine media CMOs and brand leaders rethinking owned-content and editorial strategy Industry associations, media congresses, and creative festivals needing a credible main-stage host or keynote Boards of content-driven businesses navigating subscription, advertising, and platform shifts Audience outcomes A current read on which paid-content models are working, with named publishers and live revenue figures A clearer view of what editorial leaders should stop doing, not only what to start Frameworks for aligning newsroom, product, and commercial teams around a single paid-content thesis A working language for board-level conversations about media disruption, drawn from the WAN-IFRA report

Why organisations work with Jonathan Reynolds His research framework on omnichannel retail – built over four decades at Oxford through direct partnerships with Tesco, the British Retail Consortium, Eurocommerce, and retail associations in eight countries, gives leadership teams a structural diagnosis of competitive change, rather than a trend description. Navigating the New Retail Landscape (Oxford University Press, 3rd edition 2025) draws on over 40 international case studies to make a specific argument: the retailers that win redesign the enterprise, not just the channel mix. Audiences leave with a reference framework, not just a perspective. Reynolds leads OXIRM, the UK’s only dedicated university research institute for retail management, giving him an institutional vantage point that neither management consultants nor industry analysts can replicate. His research consistently interrogates the “death of the high street” narrative and offers a more rigorous counter-argument: physical retail is not dying, but its strategic logic has changed fundamentally. That distinction matters to boards making long-term investment decisions. As a regular contributor to the BBC, Financial Times, The Economist, and Wall Street Journal, he translates peer-reviewed research into language that executive teams and boards can act on directly. Biography highlights Associate Professor in Retail Marketing and Deputy Dean (External Relations), Saïd Business School, University of Oxford Founding member and Academic Director, Oxford Institute of Retail Management (OXIRM), since 1999 Co-author, Navigating the New Retail Landscape: A Guide for Business Leaders (Oxford University Press; 3rd edition, 2025) Deputy Director, ESRC Smart Data Research geographic data service (GeoDS) – joint initiative of Oxford, Liverpool, Edinburgh and UCL Vice-Principal and Governing Body Fellow, Green Templeton College, Oxford Keynote speaker, World Retail Congress Regular media contributor: BBC, Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal Visiting Professor, Amos Tuck School of Business Administration, Dartmouth College Biography In 1985, a research commission from Tesco brought Jonathan Reynolds to Oxford to examine how new technology would reshape retail operations. Four decades later, Reynolds is Associate Professor in Retail Marketing and Deputy Dean at Saïd Business School. The structural question that commission raised of how a retail enterprise stays competitive when its environment is being redrawn, has never been more pressing. Reynolds is the founding Academic Director of the Oxford Institute of Retail Management, a role he has held since 1999. OXIRM is the UK’s only dedicated university research centre for retail management. Reynolds uses it to run sustained research partnerships with practitioners and policymakers including the British Retail Consortium, Eurocommerce, and retail associations in Estonia, Finland, Greece, Malaysia, New Zealand and the UK, giving his analysis a data foundation that industry commentary rarely achieves. His central argument, developed across three editions of Navigating the New Retail Landscape (OUP, 3rd edition 2025), is that the retailers who survive the current period of disruption are not those who add channels most quickly. Drawing on over 40 international case studies, Reynolds and co-author Alan Treadgold show that success requires redesigning the enterprise: its capabilities, its leadership model, and its understanding of what physical stores are strategically for. The book is now a standard reference for senior retail executives and strategy teams internationally. Reynolds is a keynote speaker at the World Retail Congress and a regular analytical voice for the BBC, Financial Times, The Economist, and The Wall Street Journal. His research sits inside peer-reviewed journals and inside boardroom conversations simultaneously: a combination that is less common than it should be, and that gives his arguments their particular authority. Key speaking topics Omnichannel and e-commerce strategy Retail business model innovation Technology adoption and digital transformation in retail The strategic role of physical stores Retail entrepreneurship and innovation Retail productivity and workforce capability Retail development, planning and location strategy Consumer data and retail intelligence Ideal for Chief Executive Officers and strategy directors of retail and consumer-facing enterprises Chief Commercial Officers and Chief Marketing Officers navigating channel complexity Real estate and property investors with significant retail exposure Policy teams and government bodies working on town centres, high streets, and retail planning Audience outcomes A clearer framework for distinguishing between channel complexity and genuine competitive strategy An evidence-based analysis of where physical retail creates value and where it no longer does, drawn from 40+ international case studies A more precise understanding of the organisational capabilities and leadership behaviours that separate retail winners from those adding digital layers without structural change Exposure to current Oxford research on consumer data, retail geography, and market evolution that does not typically reach practitioner audiences Language and reference points for board-level conversations about long-term retail investment and transformation

Why organisations work with Jonathan Gabay He writes the textbooks the field uses. Brand Psychology (Kogan Page) and Practical Digital Marketing and AI Psychology (Routledge) are professional references, not bureau-circuit titles. He reads brand crises in real time on BBC, CNN, Bloomberg and Sky, which means his commercial diagnosis comes from sustained exposure to live reputational damage, not case-study retrospectives. He treats AI in marketing as a trust problem, not an automation problem, and connects ethics, prompt engineering and consumer psychology in one argument senior marketers can act on. His Saatchi & Saatchi Direct origin is creative, not academic, so the strategic frame stays tied to what actually moves a customer. Biography highlights Author of Brand Psychology (Kogan Page) and Practical Digital Marketing and AI Psychology (Routledge, 2024), professional textbooks used by marketing students and practitioners. Former Group Creative Head, Saatchi & Saatchi Direct. Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and accredited brand journalist. Senior lecturer in crisis management and prompt engineering; teaching record at the London School of Economics, Management Centre Europe and Newport University. Course leader on digital psychology programmes for the Chartered Institute of Marketing and the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California. Regular media commentator on branding, political PR and AI for BBC (including Newsnight), CNN, Bloomberg, Sky, Channel 5 and ABC. Biography Most brands now compete on a question they have not faced before. Not how to reach an audience, but whether anyone still believes the message when they get it. Generative AI has industrialised marketing output and consumers have responded with a sharper, quieter scepticism that no media spend can buy past. Jonathan Gabay has spent three decades on the inside of that question. He started in creative work at Saatchi & Saatchi Direct, where he became Group Creative Head, then moved into the analytical side of the same problem. Brand Psychology (Kogan Page) sets out how social psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience explain why consumers trust some brands and abandon others, and what CEO reputation does to both. His 2024 Routledge textbook Practical Digital Marketing and AI Psychology extends the argument into the AI era. The book is used as a professional reference by marketing students and practitioners, and treats AI not as a productivity tool but as a force that changes the psychological contract between brand and buyer. He teaches the same material as a senior lecturer in crisis management and prompt engineering, with course work at the London School of Economics, the Chartered Institute of Marketing and the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California. The commentary record matters because it is unusually current. BBC Newsnight, CNN, Bloomberg, Sky and Channel 5 use him to read live brand and political PR crises as they unfold, which is why the keynote material is closer to a working diagnostic than a finished case study. Key speaking topics Brand psychology and consumer trust AI ethics in marketing communications Digital trust and online consumer behaviour Crisis communications and brand reputation Political PR, propaganda and persuasion Prompt engineering for marketers CEO reputation and brand storytelling Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and marketing leadership teams rebuilding trust under AI Communications, PR and corporate affairs leaders facing reputational risk Boards and executive teams of consumer-facing brands Marketing and brand functions integrating AI into customer-facing work Audience outcomes A working model of how consumers form trust in brands and what AI changes about it A clearer view of where AI use crosses the ethical line that customers actually punish Sharper diagnosis of brand and reputation crises drawn from live media cases A practical reading of where prompt engineering and marketing psychology meet Confidence to make defensible commercial calls on AI in marketing communications

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 Jay Baer He has built first-party research, not opinion, into the link between speed and revenue, including the finding that customers will pay up to 50% more to avoid waiting. He treats complaints as a growth channel, with a working method (Hug Your Haters) used by service and CX teams inside large consumer and B2B brands. He gives marketing and CX leaders a named framework for engineering word of mouth on purpose, drawn from Talk Triggers and case studies including DoubleTree, Five Guys, and The Cheesecake Factory. He has advised more than 700 companies through Convince & Convert, including roughly 30 of the FORTUNE 500, so the boardroom examples are first hand, not borrowed. He is one of a small group of speakers in this category to hold both CSP and CPAE Hall of Fame recognition from the National Speakers Association, which is a useful signal for buyers booking high-stakes general sessions. Biography highlights Founder of Convince & Convert, a customer experience and marketing strategy firm advising 700+ brands since 2008. Author of seven business books, including the New York Times bestseller Youtility, Hug Your Haters, Talk Triggers, and The Time to Win. Inducted into the CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame by the National Speakers Association, holds CSP designation. Clients cited across his consulting and advisory work include Nike, Oracle, Salesforce, Caterpillar, Allstate, and the United Nations. Author of the proprietary Time to Win research on customer responsiveness, including the finding that customers will pay up to 50% more to avoid waiting. Co-founder and editor of The Tequila Report, with a subscriber base above 50,000 and a substantial second-career media presence. Biography Most companies still treat customer service as a cost centre and word of mouth as a happy accident. Both assumptions are wrong, and both are expensive. The work that defines Jay Baer’s career has been to convert each of them into something a leadership team can actually manage. Through Convince & Convert, the strategy firm he founded in 2008, Baer has advised more than 700 companies on customer experience and marketing, including around 30 of the FORTUNE 500. Named clients include Nike, Oracle, Salesforce, Caterpillar, and the United Nations. The books carry the same operating logic into a wider audience: Youtility on help-as-marketing reached number three on the New York Times business list, Hug Your Haters reframed complaints as a retention asset, and Talk Triggers, written with Daniel Lemin, set out a structured method for engineering word of mouth using case studies from DoubleTree, Five Guys, and The Cheesecake Factory. His most recent book, The Time to Win, is the sharpest expression of the argument. It is built on proprietary research showing that two thirds of customers now rate speed as important as price, that more than half hire the first company to respond, and that customers will pay up to 50% more to avoid waiting. For CX and commercial leaders, the implication is direct: response time is a pricing variable. Recognition tracks the substance. Baer was inducted into the CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame by the National Speakers Association in 2018 and holds the CSP designation, two credentials held simultaneously by a small minority of working speakers. The practical consequence for buyers is reliability under pressure: he is one of the relatively few keynote choices in this category that large general sessions and senior leadership audiences both tend to find credible. Key speaking topics Customer experience strategy Customer responsiveness and speed to revenue Word of mouth as a managed marketing discipline Complaint handling and customer retention Practical AI for customer-facing teams Marketing as customer help, not interruption Ideal for Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Customer Officers, and Chief Experience Officers setting CX or growth agendas Sales, service, and contact-centre leaders being asked to convert responsiveness into commercial outcomes Franchise, hospitality, retail, and B2B brands where word of mouth is a material growth lever Annual conferences and leadership offsites that need a senior keynote with general-session range Audience outcomes A defensible position on why response time should be treated as a commercial metric, not a service KPI A working method for converting customer complaints into a retention and acquisition channel A repeatable approach to engineering word of mouth, with named operational examples to adapt A clearer view of where AI plausibly belongs inside customer-facing workflows, and where it does not Specific, named case studies the audience can quote in their own internal conversations the next week

Why organisations work with Jamie Anderson He brings a working academic’s command of strategy and innovation research, not a recycled consultancy deck. His articles sit in California Management Review, MIT Sloan Management Review and Business Strategy Review, and he teaches the material at Antwerp Management School. His Lady Gaga and contemporary-art case work is the rare strategy content that lands with mixed senior audiences. It is taken seriously by London Business School’s journal yet readable for a leadership team without an MBA. He has built and taught executive programmes at London Business School, IMD, INSEAD, ESMT Berlin and Indian School of Business, which means his frame of reference is global executive practice, not one country or one sector. He is a Case Centre top-50 bestselling author, with a Nespresso case among the global prize winners. Buyers get a speaker whose teaching cases are actually used by other faculty. Financial Times named him a “management guru”; Business Strategy Review placed him among the world’s top 25 management thinkers. The credentialling is from named bodies, not bureau description. Biography highlights Professor of Strategy and Innovation, Antwerp Management School. Faculty and visiting positions at London Business School, IMD, INSEAD, ESMT Berlin, and Indian School of Business. Co-author, The Fine Art of Success (Wiley), and author of the Gaganomics / Strategy Gaga case work. Articles in California Management Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal. The Case Centre Top 50 Bestselling Case Authors (No. 33 in 2021/22; No. 28 in 2020/21); winner of a global case prize for his Nespresso case. Named “management guru” by the Financial Times; listed among the world’s top 25 management thinkers by Business Strategy Review. Biography The classic strategy textbook assumed advantage was something a firm could build and defend. The leaders running large organisations now treat that assumption as a liability. The question is no longer how to protect a position, but how to keep generating new ones at the cadence the market demands. Anderson’s work sits inside that question. As Professor of Strategy and Innovation at Antwerp Management School, with faculty experience at London Business School, IMD, INSEAD, ESMT Berlin and Indian School of Business, he has spent two decades translating innovation research into language operating leaders can use. His articles in California Management Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Financial Times and Wall Street Journal are the same material he teaches in executive programmes, written for practitioners. The signature of his work is its source material. Where most strategy speakers reach for the same handful of case studies, Anderson has built much of his teaching from artists and pop-culture figures, most famously his Lady Gaga case (Strategy Gaga / Gaganomics) and the book The Fine Art of Success. Business Strategy Review named the Lady Gaga article one of the top pieces of its year. The cases work because the underlying strategy is rigorous, and the surface is readable for a non-specialist audience. The recognition is from named bodies. The Financial Times has called him a management guru. Business Strategy Review put him among the top 25 management thinkers. The Case Centre lists him as a top-50 bestselling case author across multiple years, which is the closest the academic strategy world gets to a market test of whether other faculty actually use your work. Key speaking topics Strategic innovation and business model design Sustaining competitive advantage in mature industries Creativity and the strategy of contemporary brands Digital transformation and customer experience Leadership for innovation Personal strategy and career reinvention Ideal for Boards and executive committees rebuilding the innovation pipeline behind a mature core business CSOs, heads of strategy and corporate development teams in large incumbents CMOs and CXOs working on brand and customer-experience reinvention Senior leadership offsites where strategy content needs to land with a mixed, non-specialist audience Audience outcomes A clearer read on why traditional sources of competitive advantage are eroding, and what is replacing them Concrete cases of organisations and brands that have engineered new advantage in mature markets A working vocabulary for strategic innovation drawn from current management research, not consultancy framing A perspective on creativity and brand strategy that connects to operating decisions, not just marketing Energy. The Lady Gaga, Madonna and contemporary-art material is the rare strategy content senior audiences actually quote afterwards

Why organisations work with Hunter Tura His “22nd Century Brand” framework, developed publicly through DesignSingapore Council, gives leadership teams a precise vocabulary for what brand investment is actually supposed to deliver, reframing brand from a static identity asset to a dynamic participation platform that drives commercial affiliation. He has built and run design businesses at CEO level, which means his counsel on brand strategy is not advisory abstraction. Rather, it is the same kind of operational decision-making he is asking leadership teams to make. His client portfolio spans luxury (Prada, Chanel, Tiffany), cultural institutions (Victoria & Albert Museum, Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts), aviation (Changi Airport), and technology (Netflix, GE, Samsung) providing a level of cross-sector pattern recognition that a single-sector brand consultant cannot offer. His formation in architecture under Rem Koolhaas at Harvard GSD gives him a systems-thinking approach to brand that most strategists, who are trained in marketing or communications, lack. It shows in how he diagnoses problems others misread. His work at Entro on experiential branding and the built environment addresses a dimension of brand strategy – how physical spaces communicate and shape participation – that is almost entirely absent from the mainstream brand conversation, but increasingly urgent for property, hospitality, aviation, and cultural sectors. Biography highlights Chief Creative Officer, Entro Communications (appointed November 2025); previously President & CEO, Bruce Mau Design (2010–2019) and CEO, The Creative Organization Client work spanning Netflix, Samsung, GE, Unilever, Audi, Lululemon, Changi Airport Group, Lucid Motors, and the Victoria & Albert Museum Curator, Canada Pavilion, 2018 London Design Biennale; juror, Presidential Design Awards Singapore (2017) and Florence Design Biennale (2019) Commentator, “Design Canada” (2017 documentary) Creator of “The 22nd Century Brand” – a conceptual series produced with DesignSingapore Council and the National Design Centre, reframing brand evolution as a strategic and societal imperative March, Harvard University Graduate School of Design (thesis directed by Rem Koolhaas); Supermentor, Harvard Business School Field X/Y programme; Alumni Council, Harvard GSD Biography The organisations that use brand to create durable competitive advantage treat it as a design discipline, not a marketing function. Hunter Tura has spent 25 years at that boundary, running Bruce Mau Design as President & CEO for nine years, founding SYNDICATE X and The Creative Organization, and now serving as Chief Creative Officer at Entro Communications, where he leads creative strategy across experiential branding, wayfinding, and built-environment design at an international scale. His client work crosses sectors that rarely share a diagnostic framework: luxury goods (Prada, Chanel, Tiffany), cultural institutions (the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts), aviation and hospitality (Changi Airport, Marina Bay Sands), and technology (Netflix, GE, Samsung). The common strategic problem is consistent: how does an organisation make its brand do genuine commercial work rather than simply look credible? That question has a specific intellectual architecture in Tura’s hands. His “22nd Century Brand” framework traces how brand has evolved from static trademark to dynamic participation platform. The organisations ahead of their competitors have designed brand as a system. The ones falling behind have commissioned a refresh. Tura holds an MArch from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where his thesis was supervised by Rem Koolhaas, and a BA from Haverford College in the Growth and Structure of Cities. He has served on the Harvard GSD Alumni Council, is a Supermentor at Harvard Business School, and was curator of the Canada Pavilion at the 2018 London Design Biennale. He also appeared as a commentator in the 2017 documentary Design Canada. Key speaking topics Brand strategy as a driver of competitive growth Design-led business transformation Experiential branding and the built environment The evolution of brand from identity to participation platform Building and leading creative organisations at scale Cross-sector brand innovation The commercial case for design thinking Ideal for CMOs and senior marketing leadership managing significant brand investment with unclear ROI CEOs and boards navigating brand repositioning, post-merger integration, or market repositioning Senior leaders in property, hospitality, aviation, and cultural sectors where physical environment is central to brand experience Executive education cohorts in innovation, design strategy, or competitive differentiation Audience outcomes A diagnostic framework for identifying why brand investment is not producing competitive returns – with named examples from luxury, tech, and cultural sectors A clear distinction between communications-led and design-led brand strategy, and what each produces Practical language for commissioning, evaluating, and challenging brand strategy work at leadership level An understanding of how experiential and environmental design is reshaping brand expectations across sectors Exposure to cross-sector patterns from a practitioner who has made CEO-level brand decisions across more than twenty years and four distinct industry categories

Why organisations work with Hamish Taylor Operator authority across three unrelated industries at CEO level: aviation brand at British Airways, cross-border rail at Eurostar, and retail banking at Sainsbury’s Bank, all reached before he turned 40. A specific innovation method, not a generic call to think differently. The “Masterthief” approach pairs a defined business problem with an unrelated sector that has already solved a structurally similar problem, then translates the mechanism back. Concrete cross-sector transfers he can talk through end to end: yacht interior designers brought into British Airways cabin design, Disney queue management applied to airport experience, rugby refereeing brought into banking risk and compliance. Senior advisory standing that matches the room. Chairs the EMEA advisory board for Emory University, Non-Executive Director of Chartered Brands, Trustee of the Robert T Jones scholarship, and recipient of Emory’s Sheth Distinguished International Alumnus Award. Works the full audience range, from board and CEO level to frontline operating staff, with the same material translated for each layer rather than a single fixed deck. Biography highlights Former CEO of Eurostar Group, having joined as Managing Director of Eurostar (UK) Ltd in 1997 with a remit to reverse heavy losses. Former CEO of Sainsbury’s Bank, the joint venture between J Sainsbury plc and the Bank of Scotland. Former Head of Brand Management at British Airways, responsible for First, Club World, Club Europe, Concorde and Shuttle, including the introduction of flat beds. Rail Professional Business Manager of the Year, 1998, for results at Eurostar. Sheth Distinguished International Alumnus Award, Emory University; Chair of Emory’s EMEA advisory board. Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Bankers and Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Transport. Biography Eurostar was three years old and losing money heavily when Hamish Taylor took over as Managing Director of the UK business in 1997. Within two years he was running the Eurostar Group across the UK, France and Belgium, and had been named Rail Professional Business Manager of the Year. At 36, he had already been Head of Brand Management at British Airways, where the relaunch of Club World, Club Europe and First Class included the introduction of flat beds. By the end of 1999 he had moved again, this time to run Sainsbury’s Bank as CEO, the joint venture between J Sainsbury and the Bank of Scotland. Three industries, three CEO-level remits, all before he turned 40. The pattern across them was the same: an organisation that had stopped looking outside its own sector for answers, and a customer proposition that had drifted from what the customer actually valued. That pattern is the basis of his current work. The Inspired Leaders Network titled him “Masterthief” for the way he runs innovation as a translation exercise. Yacht interior designers helped redesign aircraft cabins. Disney’s queue management informed airport experience. Rugby refereeing logic was applied to banking risk and compliance. Each transfer was a structural match between a problem and a sector that had already solved something equivalent. Today he advises corporations and governments on innovation, customer focus and people leadership, chairs the EMEA advisory board for Emory University, sits as a Non-Executive Director of Chartered Brands, and is a Trustee of the Robert T Jones memorial scholarship. Emory has recognised the work with its Sheth Distinguished International Alumnus Award. Key speaking topics Cross-sector innovation and idea transfer Customer-led business transformation Brand strategy and customer proposition design Leadership of organisational change Service innovation in regulated industries Growth strategy after a turnaround Ideal for CEOs and executive committees rebuilding a customer proposition after a structural shift in their market CMOs, brand and customer experience leaders translating strategy into operating reality Innovation, transformation and strategy leads who need a working method, not a culture talk Boards in regulated sectors looking for an external operator’s view on customer and growth Audience outcomes A specific technique for sourcing innovation from outside the sector, with worked examples from aviation, rail and banking. A clearer view of where their organisation’s customer proposition has drifted from the customer’s actual definition of value. Concrete language to describe the difference between sector benchmarking and structural problem matching. Reference cases from BA, Eurostar and Sainsbury’s Bank that translate into their own context rather than sit as anecdotes.

Why organisations work with Goutam Challagalla His book “Clean Winners” (Harvard Business School Publishing, 2026) gives leadership teams a named framework – the Resonator model – for redesigning sustainability around customer value rather than compliance, using cases from Michelin, Schneider Electric, Nespresso, and John Deere. His HBR argument for “deep and narrow” AI adoption – published November-December 2025 and developed with the former global CMO of Reckitt – gives executive teams a direct counter to the scattered pilot approach that has produced cost without strategic return. He holds the dentsu Group Chair in Sustainable Strategy and Marketing at IMD – an endowed position created specifically to research the commercial impact of sustainability strategy. His case study on Nespresso’s strategic reset won the Overall Award at The Case Centre Awards and Competitions 2025, the most rigorous global recognition for real-world business teaching material, judged across the full range of business school cases worldwide. He directs IMD’s Advanced Management Program and the Strategy Governance for Boards programme, which means his frameworks are tested with C-suite executives and board directors, not MBA students. Biography highlights dentsu Group Professor of Strategy and Marketing and holder of the dentsu Group Chair in Sustainable Strategy and Marketing, IMD Business School, Lausanne Director, IMD Advanced Management Program and Strategy Governance for Boards programme; co-director, Integrating Sustainability into Strategy programme Author, “Clean Winners: Sustainability Strategy That Puts Customers First” (Harvard Business School Publishing, 2026, with Frederic Dalsace) HBR contributor: “Stop running so many AI pilots” (November-December 2025); “How to Market Sustainable Products” selected for HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2025 Maynard Award (2015), American Marketing Association; Overall Award, The Case Centre Awards and Competitions 2025 Former Principal, The Monitor Group; former Associate Dean for Executive Education and marketing department head, Georgia Institute of Technology Biography Most organisations have committed to sustainability and launched AI experiments. Few have connected either to commercial growth. Goutam Challagalla, dentsu Group Professor of Strategy and Marketing at IMD Business School, has built his research programme around exactly that gap. His book “Clean Winners” (Harvard Business School Publishing, 2026), co-authored with IMD colleague Frederic Dalsace, makes a specific and counterintuitive argument. Companies that succeed with sustainability do not ask “how do we make our products greener?” They ask “how can sustainability make our products perform better or cost less?” The book names companies that have figured this out – Michelin, Schneider Electric, Nespresso, John Deere – as Resonators. An earlier HBR article developing the same thesis was selected for HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2025. His HBR article “Stop running so many AI pilots” (November-December 2025) draws the same logic into AI strategy. Organisations that spread AI experiments across departments generate marginal efficiencies. Those that concentrate investment in a single strategic domain – going deep and narrow – generate competitive advantage. The piece was developed in part from direct work with Reckitt’s former global chief marketing officer. At IMD, Challagalla directs the Advanced Management Program and the Strategy Governance for Boards programme. His research appears in the Journal of Marketing, the Strategic Management Journal, and the Journal of Applied Psychology. His Nespresso case study won the Overall Award at The Case Centre Awards and Competitions 2025; the Journal of Marketing’s Maynard Award recognised his best paper in 2015. Before IMD, he spent twenty years at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he served as Associate Dean for Executive Education, and was a Principal at The Monitor Group. Key speaking topics AI implementation strategy for executives and boards Sustainability as commercial growth strategy Go-to-market design in digital environments Strategy governance for boards Pricing and commercial performance Business model adaptation under digital and sustainability pressure Customer value creation through technology and sustainability Ideal for Chief marketing officers and commercial leaders responsible for growth strategy and go-to-market performance Board directors and chairs governing AI investments and sustainability commitments Executive leadership teams navigating digital transformation alongside sustainability pressure Chief strategy officers and heads of corporate development evaluating competitive positioning Audience outcomes A reframing of sustainability strategy from compliance cost to customer value driver, with named company examples and a tested framework for redesigning product and market approach A specific, evidence-based framework for AI adoption that counters the scattered pilot approach and identifies where deep investment generates strategic return Structured criteria for evaluating whether a current strategy is genuinely defensible rather than merely coherent on paper Practical guidance on what boards should be asking about AI governance – including the accountability gaps and blind spots that conventional oversight structures miss A sharper language for connecting sustainability, marketing, and AI investments to commercial outcomes in board and executive team conversations

Why organisations work with Erik Saelens The Triple-A Brand Index (Authenticity, Accountability, Activation) gives leadership teams a structured diagnostic – not a creative brief – for understanding why brand trust is gained or lost, and what to do about it. His research base of 300+ rebranding and renaming operations worldwide is one of the largest of its kind; most brand consultants draw on case studies, Saelens draws on a proprietary empirical database. He operates at board level rather than at agency level – having served as senior brand advisor to the board of Royal Dutch Telecom KPN and as a current board director at multiple companies – which means his framing of brand problems maps directly onto the decisions executives actually face. His work on brand and M&A strategy addresses a gap that most marketing speakers ignore: the specific identity and equity challenges that arise when companies merge, acquire, or prepare for IPO. The Brandhome Method® gives marketing and strategy teams a replicable operating system for brand building, not a set of principles to interpret. Biography highlights Founder and executive strategic director of Brandhome Group, established 1995; active across strategy, design, and brand consultancy Creator of the Triple-A Brand Index – a proprietary brand measurement framework built around Authenticity, Accountability, and Activation Researched and executed more than 300 rebranding and renaming operations worldwide Former senior brand advisor to the board of Royal Dutch Telecom KPN; earlier career at Sodexo’s international brand management team Board director at Unbox (Belgium), CQ (US), and Stackin (US) Author of 15+ books on brand marketing, including The Brandhome Method®, The Story Wars, In Triple-A® We Trust, and Branded Columnist for The Drum; regularly profiled by the London Speaker Bureau and other international platforms Biography Brand equity is consistently listed as one of the most valuable intangible assets on a company’s balance sheet – and consistently treated as one of the least manageable. The gap between what organisations believe their brand is worth and their ability to actively steer it is where most brand strategy fails. Erik Saelens has spent 25 years closing that gap. As founder and executive strategic director of Brandhome Group, he has built one of the more unusual intellectual positions in brand strategy: a proprietary empirical base of more than 300 rebranding and renaming operations that allows him to speak about brand transformation not as a philosophy but as a pattern-recognition exercise. His Triple-A Brand Index – built around Authenticity, Accountability, and Activation – gives organisations a diagnostic framework for auditing brand trust, not just measuring brand awareness. His credibility at the executive level is grounded in practice rather than proximity. Before founding Brandhome, Saelens served as senior brand advisor to the board of Royal Dutch Telecom KPN, and he currently sits on the boards of companies including Unbox, CQ, and Stackin. His work on brand strategy in M&A and IPO contexts gives him a specific fluency in the decisions that matter most when brand equity is genuinely at stake – acquisition integration, identity rationalisation, and the reputational dimensions of market entry. Across 15 books – including The Brandhome Method®, The Story Wars, and In Triple-A® We Trust – and as a regular columnist for The Drum, Saelens has developed a body of work that is practical in architecture and commercially framed in argument. His audiences leave with a structured vocabulary for brand decisions, not a renewed conviction that branding matters. Key speaking topics Brand strategy and commercial brand architecture Rebranding and renaming operations Brand trust measurement and the Triple-A framework Brand management in M&A and IPO contexts Storytelling as a strategic brand instrument Internal branding and identity-driven organisations The future of marketing and consumer attention Ideal for CMOs and marketing leadership teams navigating brand transformation or post-acquisition integration Boards and C-suite executives making decisions on brand equity in M&A, IPO, or market expansion contexts Strategy and transformation leads in organisations undergoing identity change Senior marketers and brand managers seeking a structured, evidence-based approach to brand building Audience outcomes A clearer understanding of brand as a commercial asset with measurable dimensions, not a creative output Practical familiarity with the Triple-A framework as a diagnostic tool for brand trust A structured way to think about what changes – and what must be protected – in a rebranding operation Sharper criteria for brand investment decisions, particularly in M&A, IPO, and market entry scenarios An accessible methodology (the Brandhome Method®) for building or rebuilding brand from a strategic starting point