SPEAKER

BIOGRAPHY

Duncan Stuart, RANZ Life Member and Director, Kudos Organisational Dynamics (Gold partner Ipsos)



Duncan Stuart is a Life Member of RANZ and has been in the industry for 30 years, mostly running his own Quant consultancy Kudos.  Over this time he has developed a love/hate relationship with technology. Robot vacuum cleaners: yay!  Mobile phone: no way!  The problem, he says, is that the machines are now answering back.

Tim Warren, CEO and Co-Founder, Ambit (Gold partner GiftPay)

SEE TIM'S VIDEO

Tim Warren is CEO and CoFounder of Ambit - a company that automates customer service with smart Digital Employees. 

Prior to starting Ambit, Tim worked as a software developer, and as an analyst at Goldman Sachs and JBWere.

 

Ray Poynter, Co-founder NewMR and Chief Research Officer Potentiate, UK (Gold partner Kantar Insights)

SEE RAY'S VIDEO


Ray has spent the last 40+ years at the intersection of innovation, technology, and market research. During those years Ray has held director level positions with Vision Critical, Join the Dots, The Research Business, Millward Brown, Sandpiper and IntelliQuest.

Over the last ten years Ray has focused on training, learning, speaking, listening, writing, reading, and consulting.

Ray sees his mission as “Have fun, help people, pursue knowledge, and try to make some money along the way.”

Matthew Stansfield, Data Scientist, Harmonic Analytics


Matthew Stansfield is a Senior Data Scientist with a strong statistical background.  He is enthusiastic about programming and problem solving.  He is currently working at Harmonic Analytics.  Harmonic provides advanced analytic and software services for a range of clients in the public and private sector.  Prior to working at Harmonic, Matthew worked at Stats NZ for over 6 years. In his later years at Stats NZ his focus was on the consumer price index (CPI).  Matthew developed methods and systems that contribute to the cyclical production of the CPI as part of the consumer prices delivery team.

Sue York, Co-founder NewMR and Training Manager, The Research Society, Australia (Gold partner Kapiche)


Helping create the future of research and learning @ The Research Society

Sue is deeply interested in helping people develop the research skills they will need for a bright future, and enjoys working at the intersection of research and learning for The Research Society in Australia. She is also a co-founder of NewMR.

Sue has a high profile in the online international research and insights community. Sue is co-author of “The Handbook of Mobile Market Research”, co-editor of the ESOMAR book, “Answers to Contemporary Market Research Questions”, and author of numerous papers, articles, presentations, and webinars.

 

Horst Feldhaeuser, Group Services Director, Infotools

SEE HORST'S VIDEO


He is a Fellow of RANZ, QPR (Qualified Professional Researcher) of TRS Australia (The Research Society) and a mentor at WIRe and TRS. 

Horst won best presentation at the 2015 APRC/RANZ conference and is a multiple Supreme and Platinum winner at the New Zealand Research Effectiveness Awards.  He’s a thought after conference presenter and contributes regularly to industry publications. 

His active involvement in the research and insights industry saw him on the Board of RANZ in 2015-17, as NSW Chair of AMSRS (Australian Market & Social Research Society) in 2013-14, as well as president of the MRSNZ (Market Research Society of New Zealand) in 2007-10.  

Dr Alyona Medelyan, CEO, Thematic

SEE ALYONA'S VIDEO


Alyona Medelyan, Ph.D. is the CEO of Thematic, an AI-driven customer feedback analysis solution. Thematic helps companies improve customer and product experience through insights from feedback. Their customers include companies like LinkedIn and Atlassian, as well as SkyTV and Watercare here locally. Alyona holds a PhD in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Her academic work has been cited by more than 2500 researchers.

Nadine Bower, Global Director – Best Practice, NeedScope, Kantar


Nadine has almost 20 years’ experience bringing insight and understanding to the marketing process. In her global best practice role, she regularly works across disciplines – bringing the best of insights, operations and technology together to ensure the NeedScope solution is world class and future proofed.

Maria Tyrrell, Director, Global Brand Strategy, Kantar

In 1994 Maria helped establish NeedScope and is now a Director, Brand Strategy for Kantar as well as leading the global NeedScope Centre of Excellence.

Key roles include:

Strategic management of the NeedScope Centre of Excellence including development of new technologies and approaches utilising NeedScope
Consulting on global NeedScope projects
Training international NeedScope users
Bachelor of Arts in Human Geography from Auckland University
Life member of the Research Association New Zealand

Kathryn Topp, CEO and Founder, Yabble (Gold partner Mercury)

Kathryn Topp is an award-winning researcher and thought leader with 20 years of experience in data and insights. Renowned for her entrepreneurial thinking, she's an intuitive leader, with an innovative, boundary-pushing style that reflects her approach to business in general.  Kathryn has spent her professional life helping brands drive meaningful change through insight-led decision making, conducting research across 83 countries and numerous industries. In 2017, she embarked on the latest stage of her career when she founded Yabble — a world-leading market research ecosystem that helps businesses enrich their customer understanding and accelerate growth and innovation. Led by disruptive offerings like Hey Yabble — a cutting-edge AI-powered insights generator —Yabble is transforming the research industry, giving businesses instant access to precise, actionable insights that they can use to activate their audiences, improve their offerings, and reach their full potential.

Kristin Luck, Founder, ScaleHouse and ESOMAR President
(Gold partner Infotools)

SEE KRISTIN'S VIDEO


Kristin Luck serves as an advisor and growth strategist to a number of cutting-edge marketing and analytics technology and services firms through her consultancy, ScaleHouse. She is the founder of two marketing analytics companies that she led to successful exits. Kristin co-founded OTX, an online research business that was named the fastest growing research firm in the world in 2002 and 2003 and was subsequently acquired by Pilot Group and again by Ipsos in 2007. She then founded Forefront Consulting Group, a research technology firm that was acquired by Decipher. Decipher was acquired by FocusVision in 2014 after seven consecutive years of double- and triple-digit growth. FocusVision merged with Confirmit in 2021 to become Forsta, where she now sits on the Board of Directors.

Kristin is a licensed investment banker with Oberon Securities and a founder focused on helping fellow founders and executive teams scale and monetize their businesses. Her deal expertise on both sides of transactions comes from participating in both acquisitions and exits from $30 million to $225 million. She is also passionate about supporting founders in international markets execute their entry into the U.S.

Kristin regularly contributes to both the commercial (Fast Company, Forbes) and academic press (Research World, Journal of Brand Strategy) where she explores emerging marketing and research methods. She is consistently ranked as one of the top 100 sales and branding experts to follow on social media.

In addition to her work at ScaleHouse her non-profit work includes Women in Research (Founder), ESOMAR (President) and The Nature Conservancy (Board of Trustees).

Dr Lena Waizenegger, Senior Lecturer, Business Information Systems,  Auckland University of Technology (AUT) and founder of the Early Career Academics Forum at AUT

SEE LENA'S VIDEO


Dr Lena Waizenegger is a Senior Lecturer in Business Information Systems at the Auckland University of Technology (AUT) and the founder of the Early Career Academics Forum at AUT. Lena received her PhD in Information Systems from the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Her main research areas are ubiquitous connectivity, autonomous agents and the impact on the human workforce, AI in healthcare, and digital wellbeing. Lena’s work has been published amongst others in the European Journal of Information Systems, Internet Research, Journal of Travel Research, and the International Journal of Knowledge Management. Her research has been funded, among others, by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research. Lena’s research was featured in outlets like Forbes, Psychology today and the BBC.

Before becoming an academic, she used to compete in international slopestyle snowboarding competitions.

Garreth Chandler, CEO, The Evolved Group
(Gold partner PureSpectrum)

SEE GARRETH'S VIDEO


Garreth is a passionate researcher and technologist with over 25 years in the insights industry. He is the founder of The Evolved Group, the company behind Human Listening, an AI-powered insights platform.

Leading the team that created award-winning Conversational AI technology, EVE™, Garreth has been at the forefront of applying this innovation to the insights industry. He is passionate about understanding humans and creating new ways to explore and apply knowledge of people’s needs and motivations at scale.

Dr Vikash Kumar, Manager, Advanced Analytics & Modelling , Waka Kotahi


Dr. Vikash Kumar has been passionately building leading edge Data & AI products for over 13 years in domains like transport, telecommunications, tourism, wine-trade and fraud-analytics. He currently leads a high performing Data Science team at the New Zealand Transport Agency.

Vikash has published more than 15 research papers in international conferences and journals while working for some of world's leading research centres in Germany, Austria and Italy. He is also passionate about helping responsible practices keep up with the fast pace of change in technology landscape.

 

Dr Paula Ray,Programme Manager-PostGrad, ICL Graduate Business School


Paula has two master’s degrees: Communications (Leeds University, UK) and Political Science (Calcutta University, India), and a PhD in Digital Media (University of Auckland). She worked as a senior journalist in India and the UK. Currently, she is a researcher blending academic knowledge with industry experience, when she isn’t busy running her news portal for migrants in Aotearoa

Tomasz Soluch, Behaviour Prediction & Insights Manager, Fonterra Co-operative Group


Behaviour Prediction & Insight Manager for Fonterra. Head of the methodology for the behavioural hub, 10+ years of experience in implicit research solutions. Expert in the field of eye tracking and neuromarketing techniques used in market and academic research. Member of Neuromarketing Science & Business Association. Editorial board member of the Insights Magazine. Focused on identifying the best-in-class research methodologies and providing comprehensive insights into business-focused and actionable reports.

Murray Campbell, RANZ Life Member and Director, Baseline Consultancy (Gold partner Dynata)


Over the last 35 years I  have eked out a career as a semi-professional musician but was made redundant by the first wave of drum machines. I then went back to university and then became a government social policy analyst and speech writer, market researcher and political pollster, and more recently an owner operator of a charter boat at Z pier Westhaven. I feel very fortunate to have had such an enjoyable, varied life with so many amazing people, especially my wife and my son.

I am so proud to be a life member of the Market Research industry. It's still a very worthwhile and honourable profession to be part of  but we need to strive to maintain our independent point of view on what is going on in our world.  

Powered by PechaKucha presenters:

Kia-Mae Beniston, NeedScope, Kantar
Matahana Karoraina Tikao Calman
,
Kantar Public
Tom Stevenson, Clarity Insight
Cosmiana Brown, Kantar Public 


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