consumer-insights
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Michele Salomon Has a Stack of Index Cards and a Question for the Room
The market researcher built a career by asking who needs to be heard, what a decision really requires, and whether the useful finding can survive a walk around the block.
Daniel Stradtman Wants Companies to Stop Losing What They Know
After more than 25 years turning consumer research into corporate decisions, Bloomfire's CMO has a blunt diagnosis for the AI era: the cleverest system in the room is still only as useful as the knowledge people can trust.
Donna Perlstein Wants Marketing to Hear the Product, Not Just Applaud the Ad
After more than two decades in go-to-market work, Donna Perlstein has learned to distrust applause without understanding. Her answer is simple to say and difficult to practice: let the customer write the brief.
Stephanie Fried Spent 20 Years Studying Attention. Now She Has to Earn Trust.
The marketer who learned to read audiences at NBCUniversal, Vevo, Discovery, Condé Nast and Fandom has taken on a trickier subject: what makes people feel safe online.
Kumar Doshi Keeps Finding the Story Inside the Data
From an invented rotation at Intel to Microsoft experiments, startup detours and a New York consumer-data company, Kumar Doshi has built a career around one stubborn question: how do you turn information into action?
Nataly Kelly Learned to Read the World Before She Learned to Market It
From an Illinois farm town to Ecuador, HubSpot and Zappi, Kelly built a career around one durable idea: understanding people is the work before the work.
Christie Raymond Made the Department Store Listen
An industrial engineer turned retail marketer, Christie Raymond built her career by treating attention as data and loyalty as a promise. Her final chapter at Kohl's reveals what modern brand leadership looks like when the spreadsheet and the shopping cart have to agree.
Alix Coucardon Learned to Market Without Silos
After 14 years in consumer brands, Alix Coucardon arrived at Adore Me with a full marketing playbook. Four years later, her sharper lesson is that customers never see the org chart.
Mallika Monteiro Turned a Reporter’s Instinct Into a Beer Brand Playbook
She once planned to become a political correspondent. Instead, she brought a reporter’s eye for people and narrative to Corona, Modelo and a $100 million bet on women founders.
Gary Ellis Is Betting That AI Still Needs Someone to Ask the Room
The Remesh CEO came to software through scientific research and political campaigns. Now he is arguing for a more useful bargain with AI: let machines organize the conversation, but keep real people in the room.
Christopher South Built a Three-Hour Answer to Advertising’s Expensive Question
An engineer, an abandoned startup and a rush of sales calls became Spot Trender. Christopher South’s career is a study in how to turn a failed first draft into a faster way of listening.
Tim Lawton Built SightX to Ask Better Questions - Then Took It Into a Bigger System
A West Point graduate moved from infantry missions to Wall Street models, then spent a decade making consumer research less fragmented. The latest chapter puts SightX inside Rep Data - and turns speed versus trust into the problem he wants to retire.
Matt Hixson Has Spent 15 Years Teaching AI to Read the Room
The former CPA behind Tellagence made a career out of a deceptively human question: what does online conversation actually mean? Fifteen years in, context is finally having its moment.
Donna Finelli and the Local Advantage
After building brands Canadians encounter every day, Donna Finelli took on a harder brief: make a national sporting-goods network feel unmistakably local. Her answer begins with the people who sharpen the skates, fit the gear and know the town.
Erin Condon Goes One Click Deeper
CVS Pharmacy’s marketing chief built her career where numbers meet judgment. Her operating rule is simple: listen closely, move quickly, and reserve a little room for the big swing.
Deb Hannah Keeps Changing the Aisle
From Kotex packaging and Starbucks snack shelves to Shoe Carnival’s customer data and K12’s virtual classrooms, Deb Hannah has spent a career studying how a choice gets made - then rebuilding the path around it.
Stephan Czypionka Is Measuring Dumplings and Cataloging Palm Trees
The Austrian marketer has spent a career translating taste across borders. At CJ Foods, his playbook pairs hard measurement with cultural curiosity - the same instinct behind a side project cataloging hundreds of palm species.
Gail Horwood
From hand-built recipe pages to highly regulated brand storytelling, Gail Horwood has spent three decades asking the same useful question: what does the audience need next?
Jennifer Bentz
Jennifer Bentz spent three decades learning how shoppers reveal what they want. Now Utz Brands’ chief marketing officer is turning that habit of attention into a playbook for a century-old snack company: sharpen the portfolio, test early, and let evidence earn the next bet.
Lauren Beckstedt
Lauren Beckstedt turned an unusual detour through talent strategy into a playbook for unifying more than 60 marine brands - while keeping her eye on the people who actually climb aboard.
Lava Kumar
Lava Kumar is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Entropik, a Bengaluru-based Emotion AI company that reads human reactions across facial expression, voice, gaze and attention. After nearly two decades building products at Yahoo, Motorola, Wipro, Operative and Integral Ad Science, he returned from the US in 2016 to co-found Entropik and turn affective computing into a working business tool. He leads Decode, the company's integrated human insights platform, and has become a recognizable voice arguing that market research should measure how people actually feel, not just what they say.
Dana Kim
Dana Kim is the co-founder and CEO of Highlight, a New York-based product intelligence platform that modernizes in-home product testing for consumer brands. A former qualitative market researcher who spent years collecting insights the slow way - standing in stores with paper surveys for brands like Coca-Cola and Nike - she went to Wharton for an MBA, met co-founder Ethan Kellough, and built a technology-driven alternative that pairs a proprietary consumer community with logistics automation and AI analytics. Founded in 2020, Highlight has raised more than $30 million and works with brands including Nestle, Procter & Gamble and Mondelez. Kim has been named to GreenBook's 2022 Future List and Inc.'s 2024 Female Founders 250 list.
Rodolphe Barrere
Rodolphe Barrere is the co-founder and CEO of Potloc, a Montreal-headquartered consumer research platform that pioneered survey sampling through social networks. Born in France, he moved to Quebec at 17 to study at HEC Montreal, worked briefly at LVMH in Paris and New York, and founded Potloc in 2014 with classmate Louis Delaoustre. He was named to the 2021 Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe (Technology) list and has raised more than $90M for the company, which now serves consulting firms and private equity clients across offices in Montreal, New York, Paris, London and Dubai.
Dan Leahy
Dan Leahy is the co-founder and CEO of MakerSights, a San Francisco consumer-insights platform that helps apparel, footwear, and accessories brands decide what to make before they make it. His pitch is blunt: the fashion industry still builds product the way it did in the 1980s, guessing at what shoppers want and burning through unsold inventory in the process. MakerSights collects consumer feedback at scale and ties it to real sales data so brands like Ralph Lauren, New Balance, Everlane, and Madewell can produce less waste and more of what people actually buy. Before MakerSights, Leahy founded Savored, a restaurant yield-management startup acquired by Groupon, and cut his teeth in finance at Silver Lake and Brown Brothers Harriman. A Maine kid who once mailed handwritten letters to NBA stars begging for autographs, he built a career on the same stubborn premise: ask enough people for what you want, and enough of them say yes.
Jonathan Gardner
Jonathan Gardner is the founding CEO of Harris Quest, the AI-powered research and brand-management platform built by The Harris Poll and Stagwell's The Marketing Cloud. Appointed in December 2025, he brings more than 30 years in market research and polling, including nearly a decade as Chief Operating Officer of The Harris Poll and senior operating roles at Penn Schoen Berland, Subject Matter, and The Marketing Cloud. He began his career writing in the Clinton White House speechwriting office, and now translates decades of client-side research craft into software.
Nihal Advani
Nihal Advani is the founder and CEO of QualSights, a Chicago-based insights technology platform that helps global brands decode real-world human behavior through live video, mobile ethnography, sensors and AI. A former internationally ranked junior tennis player from India who came to the US on a full scholarship, he cut his teeth at Google and Microsoft before founding the travel startup Georama in 2012, then pivoting it into QualSights in 2018. On roughly $3.5M raised over a decade, he built one of America's fastest growing market research companies, ranked by Inc. as the fastest growing company in Illinois.
Alexandra Frankel
Alexandra Frankel is the CEO of Getwizer, a New York-based hybrid consumer insights platform that fuses AI automation with human research expertise to run fast, custom, modular studies for brands like Mars, Coca-Cola, Paramount and Puma. A McGill-trained psychologist with a master's in quantitative methods from Columbia, she rose through roles at Nielsen, Ipsos, NBCUniversal, Simulmedia and Hotspex before spending five years at Getwizer as head of insights and strategy, then taking the top job in February 2025. She has two prior research-startup exits (to Nielsen and Ipsos), two industry innovation awards, a notable streak of NFT consumer studies, and a nonprofit children's book venture, Rainbow Zebra Co., built around teaching kids kindness.
Frank Pica
Frank Pica is the CEO and co-founder of Native AI, a New York market-intelligence platform that builds AI-powered digital twins - synthetic consumer personas drawn from billions of real data points - so brands can interrogate their customers in real time instead of waiting weeks for surveys and panels. A repeat operator who helped scale Decide from three people to over a hundred and launched Adyoulike in North America, Pica is betting that consumer research is going through a renaissance, and that generative AI is leading it.
Trevor Sumner
Trevor Sumner is the CEO of i-Genie.ai, an AI platform that mines hundreds of billions of Google searches, reviews, and social posts to feed consumer insights and product R&D for brands like Unilever, Coca-Cola, Kenvue and Clorox. A NYC-based serial entrepreneur with multiple exits, he previously ran Perch (acquired by Raydiant) and co-founded LocalVox (acquired by Blackstone). He runs the early-stage advisory and investment firm Summoner, mentors at the ERA accelerator, and has been a Rethink Retail Top Retail Expert six years running. Off the clock he is a scuba diver on every continent, a 600-pound-marlin angler, and a Princeton computer scientist who treats pressure as a privilege.
Matt Britton
Matt Britton is the founder and CEO of Suzy, an AI-powered consumer intelligence platform used by enterprise brands to get real-time answers from real people. A two-time #1 Amazon business bestselling author (YouthNation, Generation AI) and one of the most in-demand keynote speakers on AI and generational change, he has spent 25+ years decoding how the next generation buys, works, and lives. Before Suzy he built youth-marketing agency Mr Youth into MRY, a 500-person global shop sold to Publicis, and spun out Crowdtap, which became Suzy in 2017.