Our Speakers

Meije Bello is a global insights and strategy leader who transforms data, intelligence, and human understanding into actionable strategies that drive meaningful engagement and impact. Currently Head of Global Insights and Strategy at UNICEF, she leads the development of audience-centered insight plans that help shape how one of the world’s largest organizations engages its audiences with greater clarity, relevance, and effectiveness. Meije is particularly passionate about building practical, insight-driven ecosystems that help organizations not only generate intelligence but truly operationalize it—embedding evidence into decision-making and enabling positive, lasting change. Prior to UNICEF, she spent over a decade at Edelman advising Fortune 100 companies and global organizations on customer engagement, reputation, communications, and decision-making in complex environments. Known for bridging strategy, analytics, technology, and human behavior, Meije brings a thoughtful, people-centered approach to helping organizations navigate complexity and act with confidence and purpose. Meije holds a Master’s degree in Sustainability (Human & Environmental Sciences) from University College London.

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.

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).

Andy is an experienced Global Consumer Insights & Analytics leader with 17+ years experience in consumer insights and analytics both agency and clientside. His experience spans multiple geographies (Japan, North Asia, US, Europe and UK) in roles ranging from human insights and analytics, innovation, behavioral science and AI. Andy is a trained Psychologist and Applied Behavioural Data Scientist with a passion for human behaviour, AI and data analytics and an incredibly successful record in data driven insights-to-action across developed and developing markets for global multi-nationals. Currently leading the reinvention of human insights and strategy front-to-end at JTI, with a global remit to create a new fit-for-purpose human insights function, leveraging best-in-class traditional and novel consumer research methodologies, behavioral science and new AI solutions across the insights-to-launch process.

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.

Dinush is an accomplished Statistics and Data Science professional with 15+ years of experience applying machine learning, data science, and AI across the CPG sector. With a strong academic foundation in quantitative methods, he brings deep analytical rigor to complex business challenges and a consistent track record of translating data into practical, scalable outcomes.

Passionate about AI and innovation, Dinush has extensive experience building, designing, and leading end-to-end solutions—from problem framing and methodology selection through to deployment, adoption, and value realization. He is particularly skilled at shaping solution architectures, guiding cross-functional teams, and bridging the gap between advanced analytics and real-world decision-making, helping organizations embed AI-driven capabilities that improve performance and accelerate transformation.

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.

Niels Schillewaert, PhD, is Head of Research & Methods at Conveo.ai – an end-to-end AI-led insights platform. Niels combined entrepreneurship and commercial research with academic research throughout his career. He was a co-founder at Human8 (formerly InSites Consulting) and has a strong academic background as a Professor of Marketing at the Vlerick Business School. His research was published in leading scientific journals such as Journal of Marketing, The International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Services Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and others. Niels is a frequent speaker at international conferences and has guest lectured at several academic institutions e.g. Columbia, NYU, University of Georgia. He is the Former President of ESOMAR – the association of the global insights and analytics community.

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.