Customer Experience & Marketing

Why organisations work with Anthony Thomson He is one of the very few operators in the world who has launched three licensed banks on three different models: a physical high-street challenger, a UK app-only bank, and an Australian smart bank. His Metro Bank launch ended a century-long drought of new UK high-street banks and set the reference point for what a customer-centred retail banking proposition looks like. He speaks from the chair’s seat, not the analyst’s gallery. Every argument he makes about challenger strategy, brand, and regulation has been tested against a real balance sheet and a real regulator. With Lucian Camp he wrote No Small Change (Wiley), a direct manifesto on why financial services marketing is broken and what has to replace it. He can brief a boardroom on what it actually takes to turn a strategy deck about “customer obsession” into a licensed, funded, operating business. Biography highlights Co-founder and founding chairman, Metro Bank, the first new UK high-street bank for over a century. Founder and former chairman, Atom Bank, the UK’s first app-only bank, licensed in 2015. Co-founder and former chairman, 86 400, Australia’s first smart bank, later acquired by NAB. Chair of Zip UK, the UK arm of the Australian buy-now-pay-later group. Co-author, No Small Change: Why Financial Services Needs A New Kind of Marketing, Wiley, 2018, with Lucian Camp. Co-founder and former chairman, The Financial Services Forum; Visiting Professor at London Metropolitan University and David Goldman Visiting Professor at Newcastle University Business School. Biography Metro Bank opened its first branch in Holborn in July 2010, the first new high-street bank to enter the UK market in more than a hundred years. Anthony Thomson co-founded the bank and served as its founding chairman, steering it from concept to licensed, trading retail institution. He did not stop there. A few years after leaving Metro, Thomson founded Atom Bank, the UK’s first app-only bank, which secured its banking licence in 2015. He then co-founded 86 400, Australia’s first smart bank, which was later acquired by National Australia Bank. Three licensed banks, three distinct models, one consistent thesis: the industry is overdue a redesign around the customer. That thesis is argued at length in No Small Change (Wiley, 2018), co-written with Lucian Camp, which treats financial services marketing as a discipline in need of serious reconstruction rather than a cosmetic refresh. Earlier in his career, Thomson co-founded City Financial Marketing, later acquired by Publicis, and The Financial Services Forum, giving him a practitioner’s view of brand and proposition design across the sector before he ever chaired a bank. Today he chairs Zip UK and speaks to boards, executive teams, and regulators about what it actually takes to launch and scale a new financial business. His work holds a precise answer to a question many incumbents struggle with: where does customer-led transformation stop being a slogan and start being a balance sheet. Key speaking topics Challenger banking and fintech strategy Customer-led retail banking models Launching regulated businesses from scratch Brand and marketing in financial services Digital and mobile-first banking Entrepreneurship inside regulated industries Ideal for Boards and executive teams of banks, insurers, and asset managers reviewing customer strategy. CMOs and brand leaders in financial services rethinking proposition and marketing investment. Founders, investors, and transformation leads building or funding fintech and regulated ventures. Audience outcomes A clearer view of what separates a challenger proposition that scales from one that stalls at launch. A concrete account of how a licensed bank gets designed, funded, and brought to market. Sharper questions to take back to their own customer, brand, and distribution strategy. A realistic sense of where regulation helps and where it quietly kills good ideas.

Why organisations work with Andrew McMillan He ran customer experience for the John Lewis department store division across 26 UK shops, so he speaks from inside one of the most studied service cultures in British retail, not from a framework bought off a shelf. His central argument is operational, not motivational: customer experience is an output of employee engagement and leadership behaviour, and any programme that treats it as a frontline training problem will fail. He has tested the thesis outside retail, with Shell, Air France, United Airlines, Toyota, Barclays, Mercedes-Benz, RBS and NHS foundation trusts among the organisations he has advised through Engaging Service. He chaired Revo’s Customer Experience Committee for seven years, which gives him a sector-wide view of what separates shopping centres, high streets and service organisations that keep customers from those that do not. He is useful in the room with senior leaders because the conversation turns quickly to values, hiring, internal communication and manager behaviour, which is where service actually breaks. Biography highlights 28 years with the John Lewis Partnership, culminating in responsibility for customer experience across the department store division and its 26 UK shops. Founder of Engaging Service, a consultancy on employee engagement, customer experience and the leadership that links the two. Chair of the Customer Experience Committee at Revo from 2010 to 2017, overseeing the growth of the ACE Awards to more than 100 shopping centre entrants. Judge and adviser for the Customer Focus Award at the Lloyds Bank National Business Awards from 2015. Advised named organisations including Shell, Air France, United Airlines, Toyota, Barclays, Mercedes-Benz, RBS, Rightmove, MoneySuperMarket and the Law Society. During his tenure, John Lewis department stores were recognised for customer experience by Which?, Verdict and Retail Week. Biography Service cultures that customers notice are not built on the shop floor. They are built in hiring decisions, in what managers are promoted for, in what the organisation tolerates on a difficult Tuesday. Andrew McMillan spent nearly three decades inside a business that understood this, and now spends his time explaining to other organisations why their service programmes are not working. He joined the John Lewis Partnership as a management trainee at Brent Cross, led selling teams across several branches, headed a department at the Oxford Street flagship, and ran the department stores’ internal intelligence team before taking responsibility, from 2000, for customer experience across the entire department store division. That meant 26 shops and tens of thousands of customer-facing partners. During his tenure, the business was recognised for customer experience by Which?, Verdict and Retail Week. In 2012 he founded Engaging Service and has since worked with more than 40 organisations, among them Shell, Air France, United Airlines, Toyota, Barclays, Mercedes-Benz, RBS, Rightmove, MoneySuperMarket, the Law Society and several NHS foundation trusts. The work is consistent across sectors: diagnose the gap between the experience leaders say they want and the culture they are actually running, and rebuild the link between the two. He chaired Revo’s Customer Experience Committee from 2010 to 2017, growing its ACE Awards to over 100 shopping centre entrants, and has judged the Customer Focus Award at the Lloyds Bank National Business Awards since 2015. The through-line is practical: in an economy where product parity is the norm, the companies customers stay with are the ones whose people want to be there. Key speaking topics Customer experience as an output of culture Employee engagement and service performance Leadership behaviour and organisational values Building and sustaining a service culture at scale Retail and shopping centre customer experience Purpose, values and frontline behaviour Translating the John Lewis Partnership model to other sectors Ideal for CEOs, COOs and boards reviewing why customer experience investment is not producing the promised lift CHROs and heads of employee engagement connecting people strategy to commercial outcomes Customer experience, service and operations leaders in retail, financial services, hospitality, transport and healthcare Shopping centre and retail property leadership working on tenant mix, placemaking and visitor experience Audience outcomes A sharper view of why customer experience programmes fail when they are run as training rather than as culture change Specific, named examples from inside John Lewis of how engagement, leadership behaviour and service performance reinforce each other Practical questions to take back to their own organisation about hiring, manager behaviour and internal communication A clearer sense of where service sits in the operating model, and which leadership decisions actually move the needle

Why organisations work with Alex Osterwalder The Business Model Canvas is used by millions of practitioners across industries. When Osterwalder presents it, he brings the doctoral research that produced it – giving leadership teams not just a tool but the underlying architecture for why it works and how to apply it to their specific strategic situation. The Value Proposition Canvas addresses a precise and expensive commercial failure: the gap between what organisations build and what customers actually need. For B2B marketing and product teams, this is the difference between offerings that generate revenue and those that absorb it. Strategyzer’s live programmes span three distinct commercial challenges – business model strategy, value proposition design, and innovation governance – through a single interconnected system. Leadership, marketing, strategy, and product functions can work with the same shared language rather than operating on separate frameworks. The Invincible Company framework gives executive teams a structural answer to the portfolio question: how to manage existing revenue-generating business models while simultaneously building new growth engines, with separate governance and metrics for each. Consistent top-10 placement across five consecutive Thinkers50 global rankings (2015-2025), with two Thinkers50 Strategy Awards, provides independent verification of Osterwalder’s standing – outside bureau self-attribution. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Strategyzer; co-founded 2010 following the publication of Business Model Generation Co-creator, with Yves Pigneur and Alan Smith, of the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and Business Portfolio Map Business Model Generation (2010): international bestseller, more than 5 million copies sold, translated into nearly 40 languages Consistently ranked in the Thinkers50 global top 10 across five biennial rankings (2015-2025); two-time Thinkers50 Strategy Award recipient Visiting Professor, IMD; co-directs the Driving Strategic Innovation programme with MIT Sloan Contributor to Harvard Business Review; PhD, HEC Lausanne – doctoral thesis on business model ontology; recipient of the EU’s inaugural Innovation Luminary Award (2013) Biography Alex Osterwalder’s doctoral thesis at HEC Lausanne, completed in 2004, proposed a formal architecture for how value is created, delivered, and captured in any business. That thesis became the Business Model Canvas. Co-developed with Yves Pigneur, it is now in use across millions of teams at organisations including Microsoft, Nestlé, Mastercard, and Merck. The Value Proposition Canvas extended that system into one of the most consistently expensive failures in commercial strategy: building products and propositions without a clear picture of what customers actually need. For B2B marketing and product leaders, this is an operational problem. Strategyzer’s programmes on value proposition design, sales and marketing alignment, and customer understanding apply the same structured, testable approach to go-to-market challenges that the Canvas brought to strategy. The Invincible Company, co-authored with Pigneur, Smith, and Frederic Etiemble, addressed the portfolio dimension. Large organisations fail not from lack of innovation intent but from having no structural mechanism to run exploration and exploitation in parallel. The book provides that mechanism: separate governance, separate metrics, and a distinct decision logic for the existing business and the growth bets being built alongside it. Osterwalder is founder and CEO of Strategyzer, a Visiting Professor at IMD, and a Thinkers50 top-10 thinker across five consecutive rankings from 2015 to 2025. Whether the challenge is growth strategy, value proposition design, or innovation governance, a leadership team, a marketing function, and an innovation unit in the same organisation can each engage with the same interconnected system. Key speaking topics Business model design and competitive strategy Value proposition design and customer fit Go-to-market strategy and offering management Sales, marketing, and product alignment Innovation portfolio management Customer discovery and assumption testing Competing on business model advantage Ideal for CEOs and executive leadership teams working on growth strategy and business model resilience Chief Marketing Officers and commercial leaders in B2B organisations designing and testing value propositions Chief Strategy Officers and heads of corporate development managing business model portfolios Innovation leaders and transformation directors responsible for testing and scaling new growth engines Audience outcomes A working understanding of the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and Portfolio Map, and how to apply each to live strategic and commercial challenges A shared language across leadership, marketing, strategy, and product functions for discussing business model design and value proposition fit Practical methods for testing assumptions about customer needs and market demand before committing significant resource A structural framework for running exploration and exploitation in parallel, with the governance logic each requires Clearer diagnostic tools for identifying where value propositions are failing to match real customer needs, and what to do about it

Why organisations work with Alex Hunter He ran Virgin Group’s global digital strategy and Sir Richard Branson’s personal digital presence. That is rare operator experience at the intersection of corporate brand and personal brand at global scale. As a founding-team member at Virgin America, he built the marketing campaign that won the airline public support during its certification process. His work was covered by Time, CNN and CNBC. His travel series Attaché has been named Travel Vlogger of the Year at the Travel Media Awards four separate times. He has had to build and keep a digital audience himself, which sharpens how he thinks about customer loyalty for the brands he advises. His client work spans Volkswagen, IKEA, Adobe, Shell, Salesforce, L’Oréal, Pepsi and McDonald’s. The pattern recognition he brings to a brand question comes from operating across categories where customer expectations look nothing alike. Biography highlights Former Global Head of Online for the Virgin Group, including oversight of Sir Richard Branson’s personal digital strategy. Founding-team member at Virgin America as Manager of Interactive Marketing. Work honoured with ad:tech and Webby Award recognition and covered by Time, CNN and CNBC. Creator and host of Attaché. Named Travel Vlogger of the Year at the Travel Media Awards in 2016, 2017, 2023 and 2024. Co-host of Layovers, an air travel and aviation podcast that has charted at number one in more than fifty countries. Venture Partner at Ignite Accelerator. Former trustee of UK alcohol education charity Drinkaware and advisor to the Prince of Wales’ Rainforest Trust on social media engagement. Speaker and advisor to organisations including Volkswagen, IKEA, Adobe, Shell, Salesforce, Twitter, L’Oréal, Pepsi, McDonald’s and the BBC. Biography Virgin runs across airlines, telecoms, music, trains, space travel and wellness, and the brand reads as a single personality in each. Getting that kind of consistency out of a global portfolio is a specific operational discipline. Alex Hunter spent years running it. As Global Head of Online for the Virgin Group, Hunter oversaw digital strategy across the entire brand portfolio and ran Sir Richard Branson’s personal digital presence. Before that he was a founding-team member at Virgin America, where his marketing campaign won the airline public support during certification and was covered by Time, CNN and CNBC. He has also worked the other side of the table, as a creator. His travel series Attaché has been named Travel Vlogger of the Year at the Travel Media Awards four times since 2016. His aviation podcast Layovers has charted at number one in over fifty countries. Both have required him to build and hold an audience himself, which is what the brands he advises are trying to do at scale. His client list runs through Volkswagen, IKEA, Adobe, Shell, Salesforce, L’Oréal, Pepsi and McDonald’s. What he gives each is a view shaped by running Virgin’s digital brand at portfolio scale and then earning his own audiences from zero. The first taught him that brand consistency is a daily editorial discipline. The second taught him that customer loyalty is won episode by episode and can be lost in one. Key speaking topics Brand strategy in a digital-first market Customer experience and loyalty Digital marketing and audience engagement Content, storytelling and brand voice Building brands at corporate scale and startup pace Customer expectations across industries Ideal for Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Brand Officers and Chief Customer Officers setting brand and loyalty agendas Digital, e-commerce and customer experience leadership teams Agency leadership and in-house creative teams briefing against enterprise clients Board and executive forums where brand reputation sits alongside revenue and risk Audience outcomes A sharper view of where their brand actually lives in a customer’s day, and where it does not The specific places digital investment earns loyalty and the specific places it wastes it A working definition of customer experience that separates noise from the decisions that move repeat business Examples from inside Virgin, Virgin America and his own Attaché audience of what consistency costs and what it earns

Why organisations work with Simon Moore He runs a working behavioural science consultancy, IB (formerly Innovationbubble), with documented commercial case results including a 51% conversion uplift for a fashion brand and an 11% churn reduction in a banking client. He is a chartered psychologist with a PhD in psychobiological psychology, not a populariser of other people’s research, which is rare in the behavioural-economics speaker market. He won the Gold Retail Nudge Award in 2015 for retail behavioural work, a credential that maps directly to commercial decision-makers. His client list spans BBC, HSBC, Aviva, Virgin Atlantic, Pfizer, Sony, FedEx, Microsoft and the Financial Times, so the work has been pressure-tested in regulated, high-stakes commercial environments. He moves between consumer-facing strategy and internal employee behaviour, which lets the same engagement speak to a CMO and a CHRO without breaking apart. Biography highlights CEO and Partner of IB (Innovationbubble), an award-winning behavioural science consultancy applying psychology to commercial strategy. PhD in psychobiological psychology and Chartered Psychologist with the British Psychological Society. Former Academic Leader in Psychology at London Metropolitan University. Co-author of the undergraduate textbook “Complete Psychology” (first edition 2008). Winner of the Gold Retail Nudge Award (2015) for behavioural work with retail clients. Has advised commercial clients including BBC, HSBC, Aviva, Virgin Atlantic, Pfizer, Sony, FedEx, Microsoft and the Financial Times, and is a regular UK media commentator on consumer psychology. Biography Most commercial strategies are built on what people say they will do. Surveys, focus groups, stated-preference research, customer panels. The data is clean, the models are tidy, and the behaviour at the till, the renewal point, or the checkout button still surprises everyone. That gap is where Dr Simon Moore works. Moore is a Chartered Psychologist with a PhD in psychobiological psychology and CEO of IB, the behavioural science consultancy he founded as Innovationbubble. The firm uses psychological methods, not opinion, to investigate why customers and employees actually behave as they do, then translates those findings into pricing decisions, brand communications, retention design and internal change programmes. Clients have included BBC, HSBC, Aviva, Virgin Atlantic, Pfizer, Sony, FedEx, Microsoft and the Financial Times. Before founding the consultancy, he was Academic Leader in Psychology at London Metropolitan University and is co-author of the textbook “Complete Psychology”, used on undergraduate degree programmes. The academic foundation matters because most of the behavioural-economics speaker market is built on a few thin layers of summary. Moore is one of a small group of practitioners who built the underlying science before commercialising it, and the difference shows up in the specificity of what he recommends. In 2015, Innovationbubble won the Gold Retail Nudge Award for retail behavioural work. The case studies that travel with him are unusually concrete for the field: a 51% conversion uplift through reworked product descriptions in fashion, an 11% churn reduction in a banking client. He is a regular UK media voice on consumer psychology and behavioural intervention, but the booking case is operational, not editorial: he is hired by commercial leaders who have run out of conventional explanations for the numbers in front of them. Key speaking topics Behavioural science in commercial strategy Consumer decision-making and the say-do gap Psychology of brand communication and storytelling Customer loyalty, trust and retention Pricing, value perception and choice architecture Psychology of organisational change and employee behaviour The psychology of AI and human response to automated systems Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and customer experience leads are facing flat returns on conventional campaigns and CX investments Commercial directors and pricing leads working on retention, subscription and value-perception problems CHROs and change leads running internal behaviour-change programmes alongside the consumer-side work Boards and executive teams in regulated sectors (financial services, healthcare, telecoms) where customer trust drives commercial outcomes Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for the psychological drivers behind specific commercial problems they own Concrete examples of behavioural interventions that have moved retention, conversion and trust metrics in named sectors A clear distinction between what behavioural science can credibly do and the marketing claims made on its behalf Direct prompts for re-examining pricing, messaging or CX assumptions that test well in research but underperform in market A more accurate read on how customers and employees will respond to AI-driven products, services and internal tools

Why organisations work with Dr Darren Coleman He treats brand as an investment asset with measurable commercial return, giving CMOs and CFOs a shared language for defending budget when growth tightens. His Brand Experience Blueprint maps the path from strategy to frontline delivery, closing the gap between what marketing promises and what operations execute. Twenty-five years of B2B and services brand work across Europe, the Middle East, South East Asia and Japan, with named delivery for Johnson & Johnson, Singapore Airlines, Goldman Sachs, FUJIFILM, Nikon and Maybank. A doctoral grounding in B2B services brand performance, peer-reviewed publication in Industrial Marketing Management and the European Journal of Marketing, and a Kogan Page book in three languages. Visiting lecturer at the University of Warwick, with a teaching practice that keeps the frameworks tested against current MBA cohorts and corporate clients in parallel. Biography highlights Founder and Managing Consultant, Wavelength Marketing. Author, Building Brand Experiences: A Practical Guide to Retaining Brand Relevance (Kogan Page); translated into Korean, Turkish and Mandarin. PhD in B2B services brand performance; MA in marketing. Visiting Lecturer in Corporate Brand Management, University of Warwick. Peer-reviewed publication in Industrial Marketing Management and European Journal of Marketing. Keynote speaker at Electronic World Marketing Summit (Kotler Impact), Brand Week Istanbul, B2B Marketing Ignite and Fifteen Seconds Graz. Biography Service brands sell something customers cannot pick up, weigh or return. What they buy is an experience, and the gap between what marketing promises and what operations actually delivers is where loyalty, pricing power and referral are won or lost. Closing that gap is the work Dr Darren Coleman has spent twenty-five years on. His Brand Experience Blueprint is built around three operating layers: the environment shaping customer perception, the strategic essentials that anchor the brand, and the enablers that translate strategy into frontline delivery. Clients including Johnson & Johnson, Singapore Airlines, Goldman Sachs, FUJIFILM, Nikon, Maybank and Orange have used it to rebuild positioning, justify brand investment to finance, and make service consistent across markets. The intellectual foundation is academic. Coleman holds a PhD in B2B services brand performance, has published in Industrial Marketing Management and the European Journal of Marketing, and teaches Corporate Brand Management at the University of Warwick. The applied output is Building Brand Experiences, published by Kogan Page and now in Korean, Turkish and Mandarin editions, used by marketing teams and MBA programmes as a working operating manual rather than a theory text. What CMOs and CEOs take from him is a way to argue for brand investment in commercial terms. He reframes brand from a cost centre defended on faith into a measurable asset that protects margin when competitors discount and acquisition costs rise. Key speaking topics Brand experience strategy and execution Brand-driven growth for service organisations B2B services branding Brand as a commercial investment asset Customer experience and brand relevance Employer brand and internal alignment Sustainable brand differentiation Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and marketing leadership teams in B2B and service businesses C-suites in financial services, professional services, technology and healthcare evaluating brand investment Customer experience and operations leaders responsible for closing the strategy-to-delivery gap Executive education and senior leadership programmes covering brand, growth and customer strategy Audience outcomes A commercial argument for brand investment that holds up in a finance conversation A working model for translating brand strategy into operational customer experience Diagnostic clarity on where the brand promise and the customer reality currently diverge Practical reference points from Johnson & Johnson, Singapore Airlines, Goldman Sachs and other named service brands

Why organisations work with Alexis Abramson A PhD in Gerontology from USC’s Leonard Davis School combined with 25 years consulting the product and marketing teams of L’Oréal Paris, Marriott, Walmart, and Procter & Gamble. The academic credential and the commercial track record rarely come together in the same person. Direct product build experience, not commentary. She helped launch the AARP Innovation Lab as Entrepreneur-in-Residence, built BMO Private Bank’s enCircle caregiving programme, and developed Century 21’s MatureMoves programme for agents selling into the boomer market. Two decades of quoted commentary in TIME, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Financial Times, and Entrepreneur, and hundreds of appearances on NBC’s Today, CNN, and MSNBC as the on-air expert on ageing and generational trends. The Emmy and Gracie Awards confirm she can explain a demographic shift in plain English. Ten years as a primary caregiver for her grandmother inform her work on caregiving as a workforce productivity issue. The material lands because she has lived it. Biography highlights PhD in Gerontology, University of Southern California’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology Former AARP Entrepreneur-in-Residence; led the launch of the AARP Innovation Lab Developed BMO Private Bank’s enCircle caregiving programme, Century 21’s MatureMoves programme, and Delta Airlines’ mature-adult frequent flyer programme Consulted for L’Oréal Paris, Walmart, Marriott, Comcast, Northwestern Mutual, Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark, Philips, Humana, Ameriprise, and Harvard University Featured in TIME, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, Financial Times, and People; on-air expert for NBC’s Today, CNN, CBS, FOX, and MSNBC Emmy and Gracie Award-winning broadcast journalist Author of The Ultimate Longevity Guide, The Ultimate Caregiver, The 55+ Fact Book, STOP FRAUD, and Home Safety for Seniors Biography The 50+ consumer market is now the largest block of discretionary spending in most developed economies, and brands still misread it. Marketing teams design for a demographic that has not existed since the early 2000s. Product teams assume needs that never land. This is the territory Alexis Abramson has worked inside for 25 years. She trained first as a gerontologist at the University of Southern California’s Leonard Davis School, then moved into commercial consulting. Her client list includes L’Oréal Paris, Walmart, Marriott, Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark, Comcast, and Northwestern Mutual. Her work is concrete. As AARP’s Entrepreneur-in-Residence she played a leading role in the launch of the AARP Innovation Lab. She built BMO Private Bank’s enCircle caregiving programme and developed Century 21’s MatureMoves programme for agents selling into the boomer market. She also shaped Delta Airlines’ frequent flyer programme for mature adults. Each required translating demographic research into a product a real customer would use. She is also the author of The Ultimate Longevity Guide, The Ultimate Caregiver, and STOP FRAUD, and an Emmy and Gracie Award-winning broadcast journalist. Hundreds of appearances on NBC’s Today, CNN, and MSNBC have built a skill most academics never develop. She can explain a demographic shift in two sentences an executive team actually remembers. Key speaking topics The longevity economy and 50+ consumer behaviour Multigenerational workforce dynamics Generational marketing strategy Product and service design for ageing populations Caregiving as a workforce productivity issue Demographic change as commercial opportunity Ideal for Marketing and brand leaders responsible for growth in mature or multigenerational consumer segments Chief Product Officers and product strategy teams designing for the 50+ market CHROs and people leaders running workforces with four or five generations in the room Board and C-suite teams setting strategy against long-horizon demographic change Audience outcomes A sharper read on where the 50+ consumer is actually spending, and where brands are consistently losing the sale Concrete examples of age-inclusive product and marketing design, drawn from her work with named brands A realistic view of caregiving as a workforce productivity issue with direct cost implications A framework for making the five-generation workforce a source of commercial advantage

Why organisations work with Molly Bloom A first-hand account of how pressure and money distort judgement among hedge fund managers, studio heads, and high-net-worth players. The observation comes from inside the room. A real case study in rebuilding after professional and legal collapse. Bloom pleaded guilty to running an illegal gambling operation, then re-emerged as a published author whose memoir was adapted into the Oscar-nominated Molly’s Game, Aaron Sorkin’s directorial debut, starring Jessica Chastain. Lived experience of decision-making at the edges of legality and ethics. She knows how the wrong choice looks before it is made, and why intelligent people make it anyway. A practitioner’s view of how exclusivity and discretion build a customer base wealthy clients fight to join. Bloom designed and ran the operation herself, with rooms at venues like the Peninsula Beverly Hills hosting individual hands worth millions. Biography highlights Author of the memoir Molly’s Game (HarperCollins, 2014), adapted into Aaron Sorkin’s directorial debut, which earned a 2018 Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Former member of the U.S. Ski Team in freestyle moguls, ranked third in the Nor-Am Cup season standings. Built and ran one of the largest high-stakes private poker operations in the United States, with regular players including Tobey Maguire, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck, and Alex Rodriguez. Host of Torched, an investigative sports podcast produced by FilmNation Entertainment in association with Gilded Audio. Corporate speaking clients include BlackRock, Blackstone, Adobe, Cisco, Dell, SiriusXM, Uber, Comcast, and US Bank. Biography The hands at the Peninsula Beverly Hills sometimes ran past $4 million. Bloom designed the operation and ran the room before she turned 26. Her clients were Hollywood actors and Wall Street financiers. The FBI eventually took the business apart. Before any of that, she was a competitive skier. She made the U.S. Ski Team in freestyle moguls and ranked third in the Nor-Am Cup season standings. A back injury ended her Olympic ambitions before she finished her degree at the University of Colorado Boulder. Los Angeles was meant to be a gap year. Within a few years she was hosting weekly poker games for some of the most recognisable people in entertainment. Tobey Maguire, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck, and Alex Rodriguez were among the regulars. In 2013 she was indicted in a federal money-laundering case in New York and pleaded guilty the following year. The second act began on the page. The memoir Molly’s Game (2014) became the basis for Aaron Sorkin’s directorial debut, starring Jessica Chastain and earning a 2018 Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. She hosts Torched, an investigative podcast on the costs of elite competition, and her corporate audiences include BlackRock, Blackstone, Adobe, Cisco, Dell, SiriusXM, Uber, Comcast, and US Bank. In those rooms she examines how high performers misjudge risk under pressure, and what serious recovery looks like once they have. Key speaking topics Decision-making under pressure Risk and judgement in high-stakes environments Resilience and reinvention after professional setback Ethics and integrity in competitive markets Customer experience and exclusivity Behavioural dynamics of high performers Entrepreneurship from a standing start Ideal for Boards and senior executives facing decisions where the costs of judgement errors are large and public Financial services, investment, and trading audiences working under live time pressure Sales and customer experience leaders building premium or exclusive propositions Conferences on resilience and second-act leadership Audience outcomes A first-hand view of how ego and short-term incentives erode judgement among senior players A specific account of how to read the early signals of risk before public consequences arrive An honest reckoning of what professional and legal failure costs, and what real recovery demands A working sense of how exclusivity and discretion build premium customer bases that competitors cannot easily copy

Why organisations work with Matthew Luhn He spent more than 20 years inside Pixar’s story room, working on Toy Story, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, Up and Ratatouille, so the principles he teaches are the ones that actually shipped some of the most commercially successful films ever made. His book The Best Story Wins (Morgan James, 2018) gives buyers a named, documented methodology, not a generic storytelling pitch. Teams leave with a structure they can apply to a keynote, a sales call, or a brand campaign. He is one of very few speakers who has been inside a working creative culture at scale, and can speak credibly to how Pixar’s Braintrust process produces honest creative feedback without breaking trust. His client list on this material includes Apple, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Capital One, Procter and Gamble, Sony and Target, which signals that senior brand, marketing and innovation leaders are the audience he is built for. He treats storytelling as a commercial competency, not a soft skill. The work is aimed at sharper messaging, stronger brand recall, and better internal communication of strategy. Biography highlights Story artist and story supervisor at Pixar Animation Studios across more than two decades, with credits on Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, Cars, Ratatouille, Up, Toy Story 3 and Monsters University. One of the original 12 animators hired on the first Toy Story film in 1995. Youngest animator hired on The Simpsons at age 19, with credits on six 1992 episodes including Kamp Krusty and Lisa’s Pony. Author of The Best Story Wins: How to Leverage Hollywood Storytelling in Business and Beyond, Morgan James Publishing, 2018. TEDx speaker (TEDxUCSB), and corporate keynote speaker for Apple, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Capital One, Procter and Gamble, Sony, Target, Vrbo, Adidas and Lego. Trained at the California Institute of the Arts character animation program; BFA from the Academy of Art University. Biography Pixar built one of the most reliable creative engines in modern business by treating story as a discipline, not a talent. Inside that engine sat a small group of story artists whose job was to find, in every film, the emotional truth a global audience would respond to. Matthew Luhn was one of them, across more than 20 years and films including Toy Story, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, Up and Ratatouille. That work began early. He was the youngest animator hired on The Simpsons at 19, then joined Pixar in 1995 as one of the first 12 animators on Toy Story. He moved into the story room for Toy Story 2 and stayed there, eventually as story supervisor, through some of the most commercially successful animated films ever made. The carry-over to business is direct. The same questions a story artist asks about a film, what does the audience need to feel, what is the change, what is the one thing they should remember, are the questions a leader should be asking about a strategy launch, a sales pitch or a brand campaign. His book, The Best Story Wins (Morgan James, 2018), turns those questions into a working methodology. Buyers tend to find him through a specific tension. Their messages are accurate but not memorable. Their brand is recognised but not loved. Their internal communications inform but do not move people. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Capital One, Procter and Gamble, Sony and Target have used his work to address those gaps. Key speaking topics Business storytelling Brand narrative and customer engagement Creative culture and the Pixar Braintrust process Innovation and creative differentiation Leadership communication Sales and pitch storytelling Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and content leaders rebuilding how the company shows up to customers. Innovation leads and product organisations that need to make new ideas land internally and externally. Sales leadership and revenue teams sharpening pitch craft and customer-facing narrative. Internal communications and HR leaders running large town halls, change programmes or culture launches. Audience outcomes A working structure for building a story around any business message, drawn from the Pixar story process. Sharper sense of what makes a brand or product narrative memorable rather than merely accurate. Tools for giving and receiving honest creative feedback, modelled on the Pixar Braintrust. A clearer separation between information delivery and persuasion, applied to keynotes, pitches and internal comms. Specific, repeatable techniques the team can apply to the next campaign, all-hands or customer presentation.

Why organisations work with Amar Latif He has spent twenty years running an inclusion business that makes commercial sense. Traveleyes pairs blind and sighted travellers worldwide and has twice been voted Best Accessible Holiday Company at the British Travel Awards, in 2019 and 2020. His corporate CV gives him credibility with a board. Before founding Traveleyes he was Head of Commercial Finance at BT, and he makes the commercial case for inclusion in the language a board expects to hear it in. The lived experience is specific and substantial. Amar has retinitis pigmentosa and lost 95% of his sight by 18, and has spent his career building and running an organisation inside that constraint. Mainstream media recognition earns audience attention before he speaks. Regular BBC presenter, first blind contestant on Celebrity MasterChef UK, and appointed OBE in the 2023 King’s Birthday Honours for services to the visually impaired and entrepreneurship. Biography highlights Founder and Chief Executive of Traveleyes, the world’s first commercial tour operator pairing blind and sighted travellers on group holidays worldwide; established 2004. Appointed OBE in the 2023 King’s Birthday Honours for services to the visually impaired and entrepreneurship. President of The Ramblers, Britain’s largest walking charity, since April 2023; patron of SeeAbility and of the Rafiki Thabo Foundation. Inaugural recipient of the Stelios Disabled Entrepreneur Award (2007), presented by Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou in partnership with Leonard Cheshire Disability. Presenter across BBC and Channel 4, including Beyond Boundaries, River Walks (Royal Television Society Yorkshire Best Single Documentary, 2019), Travelling Blind, Pilgrimage: The Road to Istanbul, How to Get Fit Fast; first blind contestant on Celebrity MasterChef UK (2020). BSc (Hons) Mathematics, Statistics and Finance, University of Strathclyde; former Head of Commercial Finance at BT. Biography Traveleyes was founded in 2004 on a single commercial insight: that blind and sighted travellers could be paired on the same group holiday, with sighted guests receiving discounted travel in exchange for describing what they see. Twenty years later, the company has twice been voted Best Accessible Holiday Company at the British Travel Awards, and the insight has held up. Amar Latif built the business after leaving a role as Head of Commercial Finance at BT. The route from commercial finance into inclusive travel is unusual, and it gives him the language to make the commercial case for inclusion to a board. The authority on resilience comes from a specific set of circumstances. Amar has retinitis pigmentosa and had lost 95% of his sight by 18. After a BSc in Mathematics, Statistics and Finance at the University of Strathclyde, he trained as an accountant and worked his way up to Head of Commercial Finance at BT before founding Traveleyes. A parallel broadcasting career runs across BBC One, BBC Two and Channel 4, including Beyond Boundaries, Travelling Blind, Pilgrimage: The Road to Istanbul, How to Get Fit Fast, and his appearance as the first blind contestant on Celebrity MasterChef UK. He was appointed OBE in the 2023 King’s Birthday Honours for services to the visually impaired and entrepreneurship, and serves as President of The Ramblers, Britain’s largest walking charity. Key speaking topics Inclusive leadership Disability inclusion as commercial strategy Entrepreneurial resilience Risk and decision-making under constraint Customer experience in underserved markets Purpose-driven organisations Ideal for Chief People Officers, CHROs and heads of diversity, equity and inclusion Boards and executive teams building the commercial case for inclusion Entrepreneurship and innovation forums Customer experience and service design leaders Audience outcomes A commercial case for inclusion built to hold up in a board or CFO conversation Specific examples of how inclusion shapes service design and customer experience in underserved markets A reset on how to think about risk when there is no stable precedent A narrative that changes how senior audiences talk about inclusion back in the business

Why organisations work with Duncan Wardle His Theory of Creativity™ is a named, commercially tested framework – not a philosophy but a practical toolkit developed and stress-tested across Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Disney Parks before being applied with post-Disney clients including Apple, the NBA, Coca-Cola, and NBCUniversal. He treats creativity as a repeatable operational habit rather than a talent or a culture programme – giving leadership teams a concrete, tool-based answer to the question of how to make innovation everyone’s job, not a department’s. Specific tools within the framework – the “What If” method and the “Rivers of Thinking” model – address the cognitive and structural barriers that prevent established organisations from generating genuinely new ideas. These are actionable instruments audiences can use immediately, not post-event reading lists. He is one of the few speakers in this space who built an innovation function from the inside of a major global brand, rather than studying one from outside – a distinction that matters to senior audiences who have heard the Disney case study told at second hand. Author of The Imagination Emporium: Creative Recipes for Innovation (2024), a practitioner resource designed to be used independently by organisations after an engagement, extending the shelf life of the session beyond the room. Biography highlights VP of Innovation and Creativity at The Walt Disney Company; previous VP roles include VP Global Public Relations and VP International Marketing and Sales, with postings across London, Paris, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Mumbai, and Shanghai Founded Disney’s Creative Catalyst Team, responsible for embedding innovation across Imagineering, Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Disney Parks Founder and CEO of iD8 & innov8, a design thinking consultancy; clients include Apple, Coca-Cola, NBA, PepsiCo, IBM, NBCUniversal, and Spotify Author of The Imagination Emporium: Creative Recipes for Innovation (Benbella Books, 2024) Contributor to Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Fast Company; member of the Fast Company Executive Board Multiple TEDx speaker, including “The Theory of Creativity” (TEDxAUK) and “Creating Relationship Magic” (TEDxBocaRaton) Honorary Doctorate in Business Administration, Edinburgh Napier University (2014); White House American Citizen Award (2008); Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award; 2022 Nordic Business Forum Speaker Contest Winner Teaches Innovation Masterclasses at Yale and Harvard Biography Duncan Wardle joined The Walt Disney Company as an intern in the London office in 1987. Over the following 30 years he progressed through VP roles in global public relations, international marketing and sales, and ultimately VP of Innovation and Creativity – the function he built from scratch, founding Disney’s Creative Catalyst Team and deploying it across Imagineering, Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Disney Parks. His central argument is that creativity is not a talent distributed unevenly across the workforce. It is a capability that corporate structures systematically suppress – and one that can be restored with the right tools. The framework he developed inside Disney, the Theory of Creativity™, includes specific instruments: the “What If” method, used by Walt Disney himself to pivot the company from an animation studio to an entertainment and theme park pioneer, and the “Rivers of Thinking” model, which identifies the expertise-driven habits that stop large organisations from generating genuinely new ideas. Since founding iD8 & innov8, Wardle has applied these methods with clients including Apple, Coca-Cola, the NBA, PepsiCo, and NBCUniversal – demonstrating that a toolkit built for an entertainment brand translates across sectors where creative problem-solving is structurally harder. His 2024 book, The Imagination Emporium: Creative Recipes for Innovation, packages the methodology as a practical resource organisations can use independently. He also contributes to Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Fast Company, and teaches Innovation Masterclasses at Yale and Harvard. His formal recognition includes a White House American Citizen Award (2008), an Honorary Doctorate in Business Administration from Edinburgh Napier University (2014), a Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award, and the 2022 Nordic Business Forum Speaker Contest. He is a multiple TEDx speaker, with talks including “The Theory of Creativity” and “Creating Relationship Magic.” Key speaking topics Innovation strategy and the Theory of Creativity™ Design thinking and creative problem-solving Organisational barriers to creative thinking Customer experience innovation Human creativity and competitive advantage in the age of AI Building innovation culture at scale Creative leadership and entrepreneurial thinking Ideal for C-suite and senior leadership teams responsible for growth and competitive strategy Chief Innovation Officers, Chief Strategy Officers, and transformation leads Large organisations seeking to embed innovation beyond a dedicated function Conference audiences in technology, consumer, media, and professional services sectors Audience outcomes A named set of practical innovation tools – including the “What If” method and the “Rivers of Thinking” model – that teams can apply immediately A framework for identifying and removing the cognitive and structural barriers that block creative thinking in established organisations Clarity on how to separate the creative process from the operational process, and why the two must be managed differently An understanding of why human creativity is not threatened by AI – and how to build it as a source of commercial competitive advantage Concrete methods for making innovation a daily habit rather than a quarterly initiative

Why organisations work with Peter Cross He has held the customer experience seat at one of the UK’s most service-known retailers. As Customer Experience Director at the John Lewis Partnership, he was responsible for the customer agenda across both John Lewis and Waitrose at a moment of acute pressure on British retail. His thinking is now codified in book form. Start with the Customer, published by Pearson in 2025 and called “the essential text on customer experience” by The Grocer, gives audiences a usable framework, including a “lexicon of customer needs” that distinguishes transactional, interactional, core and higher-level requirements. As Vice President of the Institute of Customer Service, he sits at the centre of the national conversation about service standards, with sight of how the issue plays out across sectors rather than inside a single company. His career holds two seats most operators never combine: ten years inside the Mary Portas consultancy that worked on the 2011 Portas Review, and eight years inside the John Lewis Partnership. He has built the strategy and lived with the consequences. Biography highlights Former Customer Experience Director at the John Lewis Partnership, with the brief extended to cover Waitrose Co-author of Start with the Customer (Pearson, 2025), called “the essential text on customer experience” by The Grocer Vice President of the Institute of Customer Service Ambassador for the Retail Trust and Leader in Residence at Leeds University Business School Ten-year business partnership with Mary Portas at her retail agency Earlier senior roles at L’Oréal, Burberry and Alfred Dunhill Biography Between 2017 and 2021, two of Britain’s most service-known retailers, John Lewis and Waitrose, were pressured by pure-play online players and a public mood shifting hard toward speed. Holding their character through that period was the customer experience brief, and it sat with Peter Cross. Before John Lewis, he spent ten years as business partner to Mary Portas at her retail agency. Their work together included charity-shop reinvention and the 2011 Portas Review of the British high street, commissioned by government. Earlier still came senior marketing roles at L’Oréal, Burberry and Alfred Dunhill. He has occupied both the operator’s chair and the advisor’s chair. Start with the Customer, his 2025 Pearson book co-written with Institute of Customer Service CEO Jo Causon, was called “the essential text on customer experience” by The Grocer. The book argues that service has been quietly reduced to process, and that technology cannot substitute for the cultural work of building a service organisation from the CEO’s desk down. He now serves as Vice President of the Institute of Customer Service, Ambassador for the Retail Trust, and Leader in Residence at Leeds University Business School. The thinking he brings to senior teams centres on a framework from his book: the “lexicon of customer needs,” which separates requirements into transactional, interactional, core and higher-level categories. The standards he asks organisations to meet are ones he held himself, for eight years, on the customer agenda at the John Lewis Partnership. Key speaking topics Customer experience strategy Service culture The lexicon of customer needs Customer behaviour and expectation Leadership in customer-facing organisations Employee engagement and frontline empowerment The future of retail Ideal for Boards and CEOs setting the customer agenda for the next strategic cycle CMOs, Chief Customer Officers and Customer Experience Directors making the case for cultural investment alongside technology spend Retail and consumer-facing leadership teams under pressure from online competitors HR and people leaders responsible for service culture and frontline engagement Audience outcomes A vocabulary for the different types of customer need (transactional, interactional, core, higher-level) and where each one surfaces across the customer journey The case, evidenced through John Lewis and Mary Portas-era examples, for treating service culture as a board-level discipline A way to test whether technology investment is enabling service or quietly substituting for it The “golden rules and cardinal sins” of service that separate brands customers stay with from brands they leave