We are very proud to announce the arrival of Tim Kaner as Associate Director focusing on Capabilities and Customer Experience.

After graduating from Cambridge with a degree in Modern & Medieval languages, Tim spent the first part of his career in advertising at BMP and then Leo Burnett on categories ranging from beer to banks, shampoo to cereal and trains to Tropicana.

In 1999 he moved client side to Sony Europe, taking responsibility for the development of regional brand and product advertising and the management of creative and media agency relationships. He also worked with a global team to relaunch Aiwa as a youth-targeted brand. In 2004 Tim was appointed Director of Marketing Communications and from 2006 ran the Marketing Strategy Office with a mission to help Sony Europe build a more customer-centric sales and marketing culture. He led a change programme whose scope covered marketing capability, designing and embedding common processes and developing and implementing tools such as customer segmentation. Amongst all of this he also found time to complete an MBA, act as an adviser to the Young Enterprise scheme, be on judging panels for Account Planning Group and IPA effectiveness awards and speak at various conferences.

Tim is passionate about helping organisations understand how they are seen through their customers’ eyes and about using these insights to identify where value can be created through customer experience improvement. He and his wife have two teenage children to keep them on their toes. He tries to find time to improve his sushi making skills and enjoys skiing and scuba diving!

We are really pleased to announce the arrival of our new 2010 graduate intake of Marketing Analysts – Inese, Liana and Kwamina. They join David Holland who started earlier in the year.

Inese Smidre’s degree in Archaeology and Anthropology at Keble College, Oxford allowed her to spend university holidays doing some fascinating travelling and fieldwork. In the summer of first year she stayed with an indigenous group in Amazonian rainforest to study the social and cultural changes their community is undergoing in the face of globalisation. The following year, she changed focus entirely and spent two months in Berlin doing own ethnographic research on graffiti and street artists and their work. Inese comes from Latvia but has lived in England for the last ten years. Her interests include travelling, studying languages and studying art (appreciating not creating graffiti)!

Liana Gregorians graduated from Trinity College, Oxford this year with a degree in Modern Languages. At Oxford she was involved in music and dance, made some tentative steps into the drama scene as a director, and spent a year abroad in Paris, which satisfied and deepened a love of all things French. Liana’s working background is in fashion press and PR, but a desire to get stuck into the finer details of branding and finding out what makes people tick eventually led her to The Value Engineers. In her free time, Liana enjoys travelling, spending far too much money on clothes, and trying to catch up with all the English books she’s missed out on in the last four years.

Kwamina Korsah graduated with a history degree from Magdalene College, Cambridge in June 2010. During his time at Cambridge, he represented the university at rugby and was a member of the college student union committee. He has previous experience in the world of advertising, having undertaken a three-month internship at Mediacom in the summer of 2009, focusing on consumer insight and working on brands such as Bonne Maman, Green King, Max Factor and Volkswagen. He has also worked as a member of the ‘impact team’ at Abercrombie and Fitch in London – a real brand experience!

Staying in touch with the ever-changing kids market is one of the most difficult challenges facing marketers who have an interest in this audience. That why we’ve created a quarterly report called Kidscan which details what’s currently hot in the kids market, provides highlights of any recent research and summarises any relevant news features in the consumer and marketing media.

Today we have released our latest edition and anyone who is interested in receiving a copy should contact Dave Lawrence or call on +44 (0)1494 680999.

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…