Confirmed Speakers
Vito Francone is a global consumer insights leader with more than a decade of experience driving brand growth, category transformation, and innovation strategy across some of the world’s largest CPG companies. He is currently the Head of Consumer Insights for Europe and Pacific Developing Markets at Kraft Heinz, where he leads insight‑driven strategy across a diverse regional portfolio and fuels long‑term growth through deep consumer understanding.
Before his current role, Vito led Consumer Insights for Canada and North America Coffee at Kraft Heinz and spent over ten years at Unilever in a series of senior insights and strategy roles. His work has spanned North America Skin Cleansing, Global Men’s Grooming, Dollar Shave Club, and Beauty & Personal Care—delivering multiple breakthrough brand transformations, omnichannel expansion initiatives, and multimillion‑dollar growth outcomes.
Iva Kralj-Taylor is Director of Global Corporate Insights at Warner Bros. Discovery, where she leads global initiatives that shape strategic decision-making across markets and platforms. With over 20 years of experience in the media industry, Iva brings a deep understanding of audience behavior, creative ecosystems, and organizational dynamics.
She has played a pivotal role in the launch and evolution of major digital products—including BBC iPlayer, DisneyLife, Disney+, and HBO Max—driving strategies across acquisition, retention, pricing, user experience, and marketing. Known for her passion for innovation, Iva has pioneered the use of advanced research methodologies to unlock insights across diverse global markets.
Iva holds a BS from the University of Rijeka, Croatia, and an MBA from CASS Business School in London.
Tanya Ozuns is the Consumer Insights Lead for Germany at eBay, bringing over a decade of experience in market research and consulting (e.g. Kantar, GfK, Bain) and having worked with businesses across FMCG, Tech, Finance and Retail. Tanya is passionate about understanding people’s needs, embedding consumer-centric thinking in strategic initiatives and helping stakeholders by de-risking decision making.
Ammar is a strategic Insights and Marketing leader with 10+ years of experience across local and global roles in FTSE 100 organisations, including Haleon, Reckitt, and BAT, spanning the UK, Russia, South Africa, and Turkey. They specialise in turning complex data into clear, actionable insights that drive commercial growth and inform category, brand, and media strategy.
Known for structured storytelling, advanced analysis, and influencing senior stakeholders across functions and markets, Ammar also brings strong agency and budget leadership. They have led cross-functional, multi-market transformation programmes, solved ambiguous business problems in fast-paced environments, and built trusted relationships.
Stefania is a marketing innovation and analytics leader with 15+ years of experience transforming insights into business impact across international markets and industries. She specializes in marketing intelligence, data-driven strategy, martech/adtech, and advanced analytics, helping global brands and agencies unlock growth through smarter decision-making. Known for bridging consumer psychology, data, and technology, she has led high-performing, award-winning teams and built global Centres of Excellence that drive measurable outcomes.
Guido is Senior Market Intelligence & Consumer Insights Manager at Adidas, with 10+ years of experience in the Market and UX research industry — bridging consumer stories and quantitative rigor to turn insights into decisions that shape products, experiences and business strategy.
In this roundtable, he draws on that journey to tackle a challenge most insights professionals know well: how do you move from delivering findings to being the person stakeholders call before they've even framed the question?
If you're looking to expand your influence beyond reporting — shaping product roadmaps, steering stakeholder agendas, and earning a seat where strategy gets made — this conversation is for you.
Laura Höing is Director of Customer Strategy, Insights & Data at AXA Germany, where she leads customer segment strategies, data management & analytics, and customer and sales agent satisfaction insights. With over 13 years at AXA, she has built deep expertise at the intersection of customer intelligence, marketing strategy, and data-driven decision-making.
In her current role, Laura integrates NPS, customer satisfaction, advanced analytics, and market research into a unified insight framework — driving measurable impact across acquisition, retention, and cross-selling. She is also responsible for AXA Germany’s inclusive insurance initiative AXA EssentiALL, reflecting her commitment to accessible and human-centred insurance solutions.
Prior to this role, Laura served as Head of Marketing, leading a team of experts and overseeing strategic marketing initiatives across the mid and lower funnel. Earlier in her career, she worked as Executive Assistant to the CEO, where she spearheaded AXA's first pan-European Mental Health Report across eight country branches.
Laura holds a Master of Arts in International Marketing and Media Management from Rheinische Hochschule Köln and a Bachelor of Commerce in International Business and Languages from Hogeschool Saxion, complemented by a semester abroad at the Institute of Technology Tallaght, Dublin. Most recently, she completed a Program Certificate in Strategic Leadership in Inclusive Finance at Harvard Business School Executive Education (2026).
I have been working in the insights field for many years, starting in an agency and then moving on to the in house roles. Passionate about unlocking insights, understanding and feeling consumers, being curious about people around. Working in the insights function gives me incredible opportunities to learn how people think and feel about things, how they behave and why, and use these to drive business. I love challenging ourselves about the activities we are developing and think how consumers might react to our ideas. Finding out how we can be useful to people and make their lives better feels almost magical.
Maryann Slama is a Senior Design Researcher at IBM with eight years in design research and research program leadership. She has done award-winning work recognized by Red Dot and the German Design Awards, and brings a rigorous, human-centered approach rooted in Industrial-Organizational Psychology.
Susanne started her career as Brand Manager at SC Johnson. Later she was appointed as Director & Partner at MRC - Managing research for Companies GmbH, - Acting as global, regional or national Head of Consumer & Market Insight of major MRC clients like Novartis OTC, SCA/essity, Hartmann or Weleda. Until Oct 2025 she was Head of Consumer Centricity & Insights of the Management Unit Consumer & Craftspeople at tesa SE. Since Nov. 1st 2025 she is Global Strategic Insight Manager at WD-40 Company.
Accomplished, senior insights and marketing professional with broad FMCG marketing experience, encompassing consumer, shopper and customer research and strategic planning, with the ability and skill set to provide creative, innovative, enthusiastic and forward-thinking leadership in a team environment. Focused on consumer & shopper strategy development for achieving continuous, improved business performance.
Emilia Torres is a consumer insights leader at eBay, focused on helping global teams stay closely connected to consumers and their evolving needs. Working across international markets, she translates customer understanding into strategic business impact through research, innovation, and data-driven decision-making. Her work explores how organizations can build stronger consumer closeness at scale while navigating the rapidly evolving landscape of e-commerce.
Charles Allison is Research Lead at Conveo, where he designs research methodologies that capture consumer behaviour in the moment it happens — rather than hours after, in a survey, when the emotional response has already faded. Before Conveo, Charles ran the customer experience programme for Starbucks across the US and Canada, where the team gathered twelve million surveys a year at its peak. Prior to that, he led market research at Instacart, where he developed his own three-phase Barriers Research methodology. At Conveo, his recent works include creating a new version of MaxDiff with AI probing, in-the-moment QSR research, and large-scale ethnographic studies for global brands including Unilever.
Louise Leitsch is Global Director of Research at Appinio and leads a team of over 90 Researchers. Together, they support companies from a wide range of industries in the development and implementation and analysis of their market research projects. She is an expert in Psychographic Target Group Analyses as well as all-thing "How Brands Grow" / Ehrenberg-Bass, such as Mental Availability tracking
Nico is passionate about the intersection of data, research and technology. With a background in economics and statistics, he set himself the mission to make brand marketing more effective and less wasteful. To do that, he founded Latana in 2019 with the goal of leveraging the latest technologies in mobile sampling, data analysis and insights visualisation to develop new ways to measure and understand how people perceive brands and how that changes over time. His vision for Latana is to make brand marketing just as measurable as performance marketing.
Martina is Managing Director of Oxford's Macro and Investor Services team. She also leads Oxford Economics' corporate advisory team, which supports C-suite executives in using economic insights to inform business strategies.
Martina has 15 years of experience working with C-suite executives, VPs of region, and global strategy leads to support international expansion and growth strategies and to help inform how the external economic and political environment affects their plans. She was previously Chief Research Officer at corporate advisory and research firm FrontierView, where she supported senior executives with a global remit and oversaw all research and syndicated content at the company. Martina holds BA and MA degrees from Georgetown University in Washington, DC, with a focus on international politics and geopolitics.
20 years in qualitative market research. Expertise in various offline and online methods, from standard focus groups and in-depth interviews to online communities and AI-powered conversational research.
Dr. Katia Passari is Head of Business Insights – Retail Intelligence at REWE Group. She brings more than 20 years of experience across retail, strategy, research and data-driven decision-making, including more than 15 years at REWE Group. Before leading Retail Intelligence, she held senior roles spanning strategic projects, corporate responsibility strategy, and sales and marketing. Katia holds a doctorate in Marketing and Retailing from the University of Cologne, where she graduated summa cum laude.
Marc Röhder is Project Lead, Business Insights – Retail Intelligence at REWE Group. He has more than 20 years of experience at REWE Group across strategy, analytics, market research and business insights. In his current role, he works on making market and consumer intelligence more accessible across the organization, including the adoption of AI-supported insights solutions. His work has included rigorous testing, quality assurance and developing practical use cases that bring trusted insights into everyday decision-making.
Olaf Lenzmann is Co-Founder and Chief Innovation & Product Officer at Market Logic Software, where he leads product strategy and innovation. Since co-founding the company, he has helped grow Market Logic from a small development team into a global insights technology company supporting leading organizations including Bayer, Colgate-Palmolive, eBay, Mars, Philips, REWE Group, SBB, Tesco, and Vodafone, among many others.
In 2023, Market Logic launched DeepSights™, its generative-AI solution for consumer insights and market research. Olaf leads the continued evolution of DeepSights, helping organizations make trusted knowledge more accessible and actionable while combining the speed and scale of generative AI with source transparency, quality controls, and human expertise.
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