Another new joiner this week – Steve Reeves is a new Senior Consultant here.

Steve has over 10 years experience agency-side, and has previously worked for Added Value and Clear. He has a real passion for innovation and great track record of helping clients develop ideas that make it on-shelf (and which make money) – from sharing confectionery to mobile tariffs to insurance policies…  He has worked on Innovation projects across a wide range of sectors including FMCG, Services, Telecommunications and Media. He has been responsible for developing industry-leading approaches to innovation strategy, idea generation, crafting and activation, across a wide range of blue-chip companies.

Steve is married with a 1 year old daughter, so outside of work he spends most of his time with his family – going to parks, swimming pools, ball pools, Starbucks and Pizza Express! He is a sports fanatic who loves watching rugby (especially Wales), football, cricket, tennis and playing golf.

We look forward to seeing his thoughts on the blog soon!

We are pleased to announce the arrival of Anjul Sharma as Senior Consultant and Head of Qualitative Research.

Anjul is a First Class Honours graduate in Sociology with an MA in Communications Studies (from Brunel University and the University of Leeds respectively).  She has been working in research for 14 years and has spent the last 10 years at The Research Business International and latterly Synovate in the UK. Her most recent role (also for Synovate) led her to be based in Dubai but overseeing qualitative research across Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

Anjul has worked across a wide range of sector landscapes for multinational brand owners including: FMCG, transport, media, business-to-business and financial services.  She has worked on a wide variety of projects including brand positioning and communications development, motivational marketing / segmentation, customer experience, NPD, loyalty, portfolio optimisation and employee research.

Anjul loves the thrill of applying innovative, creative and engaging approaches to the business of her clients in order to motivate them towards effective action.  She has a reputation for promoting expertise in the research industry both nationally and internationally through papers, speaking at conferences, training and spearheading initiatives. But perhaps Anjul is best known for her work in helping clients to understand different cultures and ethnic groups in new and enlightening ways. 

When she is not working, Anjul loves travelling and is particularly excited about how brands and products adapt in different markets and cultures – illustrated by her interest in building Islam-centric brands.  When stationary (!), she enjoys yoga and aerobics as well as singing in a local choir.  Anjul also visits a local senior citizen to offer conversation, housework and learn about the world from the perspective of someone who has ‘seen it all’ at the wonderful age of 88 years…

Back in July The Value Engineers entered the MRS 5-a-side football tournament for the second time in the tournament’s history at Hanwell Town Football Club. Buoyed by the fact we were no longer new-comers to the competition & recognising some familiar faces from the previous year’s battles there was an air of confidence over our six players stirred up by our enthusiastic hat-wearing manager/tactician/physiotherapist Gavin Galloway.

Despite some tear-jerking half time team talks twinned with a great work ethic and medium skills, for the second year running our team of misfits failed to progress beyond the group stages after recording a loss and two draws. As with any tournament our exit was shrouded in controversy after a disallowed goal in our second match would have stood had we been allowed to refer to the use of goal line technology. With England having already been sent packing from the World Cup in similar circumstances dreams of football greatness were firmly over for another year so it was to the bar for a cold lager or two to watch the rest of the tournament unfold.

Many thanks to Cid Brandon at HPI for organising a really enjoyable day.