MRS Council

Chairman: Rowland Lloyd

Rowland is the Managing Director of Ipsos MORI Operations with eight years of experience at Ipsos MORI and 23 years overall experience including Millward Brown (in the UK and Europe).

He has full responsibility for Ipsos MORI Operations which includes the management of all fieldwork, sampling, coding and data processing.

The Operations division employs 270 full time staff and in excess of 3000 interviewers. His other corporate responsibility concerns compliance and quality.

Heavily focused on providing the best quality of delivery for clients, he has substantial experience in bringing together teams, software and management systems. He is committed to progress in international self-regulation and process standards such as ISO 20252.

Rowland is the current MRS chairmain and for the previous five years chaired the Market Research Standards Board. His industry work also involves meeting his international counterparts at Esomar, EFAMRO and CASRO, including work at the World Industry Network.

Rowland is an advocate of the role of the MRS in being a voice for the industry that drives professionalism and ethics with an international focus. MRS qualifications, training and conferences are all part of the fabric of our industry. This drive will ensure the industry remains at the centre of government and commercial decision making.

Honorary Secretary-Treasurer: Raz Khan

Raz is Managing Director of Cobalt Sky, the IT services company specialising in market research operations. He has worked in the industry for over 30 years at PBT, Quantime and AGB. He co-founded Cobalt Sky (formerly ATP) in 1989.

Raz has been on the MRS Council since 2004 and currently holds the post of Honorary Secretary / Treasurer. Raz is also treasurer of the Association for Survey Computing (ASC) and has chaired a number of its technology conferences. He is keen to ensure that the industry continues to value the contribution made by excellent operations staff and supports their development.

Raz is a graduate of University College London where he studied architecture.

Rupert Anderton

Rupert works as a senior member of Monitor Company’s Research, Design and Analytics (RDA) team based in London advising both internal case teams and Monitor’s clients upon best practice research and analysis techniques, primarily across its European business but also globally. Monitor Company is a US headquartered management consulting firm focused on business and marketing strategy.

Rupert joined Monitor in January 2006 having spent almost 14 years in various research and analysis roles, most recently in the Small & Medium Enterprise Research Team at Barclays Bank where he worked closely with marketing and strategy teams developing actionable insights from customer, market and research data. Rupert is familiar with a wide range of research and analytical methods from both the client and supply side of the industry and has worked across many industries both on consumer and business-to-business projects.

Rupert holds a BA in Economics awarded with honours from the Manchester Metropolitan University and an MBA awarded with distinction from Warwick Business School. He also holds the MRS Diploma and first joined the MRS in 1995.

Married with two children, time away from work is largely spent with family although he has still managed to complete the London Marathon for the past two years.

Crispin Beale

Crispin is chief executive at Facts International, having joined from Post Office Ltd in October 2008. In 2005 Crispin was asked to set up and lead an 80 strong group-wide Centre of Excellence for Insight & Intelligence (across Post Office Ltd, Royal Mail & Parcelforce Worldwide) and a Post Office Ltd Marketing Services function (looking after all advertising, trade marketing, media sales and customer databases).

Crispin has previously held senior research positions at both BT and Dixons Stores Group.

Before this Crispin qualified as a Chartered Accountant with Coopers & Lybrand (now PricewaterhouseCoopers), where he also spent time working in Marketing and Management Consultancy.
 
A keen conservationist, Crispin graduated in Biological Sciences from the University of Bristol and is President of a registered charity that seeks to involve young people in environmental protection/awareness.

Nikki Bell

Nikki is serving her second three year term on MRS Council and has the portfolio for Inclusivity.  She is an MRS Full Member and has been involved in research for twenty years, from both agency and client perspectives.  She was involved in the committee of MRS Scotland for a number of years prior to joining Council, holding the roles of Chair, Secretary and general Committee Member within that time.

Nikki co-owns and runs FMR Research, a small social research agency based in Glasgow.  She enjoys both qualitative and quantitative research, using both traditional and more innovative approaches, and she was awarded a postgraduate MSc in Social Research from the University of Strathclyde.  She works primarily with the public and voluntary sectors, but flirts with select private sector organisations on occasion.

Dr Susan Blackall

Susan joined Research International UK in 1990, and has held a range of senior management and client facing positions. She is currently Senior Director and Head of the Research Team, a group of some 50+ research professionals. Her particular areas of expertise are financial services, telecoms, customer service benchmarking and monitoring, employee research and the public sector.

Prior to joining Research International, she gained experience across a wide range of market sectors with PAS, BJM and NOP. Susan is an MRS Fellow, an elected member of MRS Council (since 2006), a member of the Market Research Standards Board and the MRS Professional Development Advisory Board, and Chairman of the MRS Company Partner Service Advisory Board. She is also a member of ESOMAR.

She has dual Canadian and British citizenship and degrees from Queens University, Ontario, Canada (BA and MA in English) and Oxford, UK (D.Phil).

Sue Brooker

Sue heads the Quantitative Research Department at the National Centre for Social Research. She is responsible for around 90 researchers working on surveys in all policy areas.

She started her career in BMRB's 'ad hoc' research department working on a variety of research studies including advertising evaluation, media research, financial research, consumer studies and research for government departments. In the early 1990s, Sue began to specialise in social research, specifically research on sensitive issues. She ran BMRB’s social research division from 1999.

Sue is an MRS Fellow and sits on the MRS Council. She is a long standing member of the Social Research Association.

Geoff Gosling

Geoff is a Senior Research Director at Synovate.  Born and raised as a qualitative researcher, he has in recent years spent time on the client-side and moved into key client account management.  A passionate exponent of qualitative research, Geoff has extensive experience in many areas, but specialises in communications research, service development, product evaluation and customer satisfaction.

Geoff has served on MRS Council for the last four years and has recently taken over as Chair of the Market Research Standards Board.  He is also a regular convenor of MRS training courses. 

Vanella Jackson

Vanella took up the role of Chief Executive of Hall & Partners Europe in September 2004. Before this she spent 20 years in some of the best UK advertising agencies in the UK, including BBH, AMV and JWT.

She has always been passionate about brands and communications: how they are created, what influences them and how they work. She constantly strives for outstanding creativity in anything she is involved in.

Her highlights whilst at Hall & Partners have been to help the company grow successfully to become the highest performing agency in the DAS Maister survey (measuring financial performances and employee satisfaction). Hall & Partners won a place in the Sunday Times Top 100 Best Companies to work for.

She herself won a UK Woman of the Year award last year.

Tara Lyons

Tara Lyons is the Managing Director of Indiefield and her area of expertise is fieldwork and recruitment. She started her career at Pegram Walters Associates (now Synovate) before heading up fieldwork operations at the specialist media research firm Simons Priest and Associates.

Tara has worked in the fieldwork industry for nearly 20 years and has been involved in all aspects of fieldwork operations including defining project processes, field system development and problem solving through to quality control and all related fieldwork administration. Her wealth of experience includes face to face interviewing, telephone surveys, car clinics, qualitative recruitment and more recently online surveys and streamed audio recording of CATI interviews.

Rob Sheldon

Rob has over 30 years experience in the industry. He set up Accent 20 years ago after working with two leading strategic transport planning agencies in economic consultancy.

He is credited with having introduced stated preference approaches into Europe in the late 1970s using the technique to advise the then British Railways Board on the business potential of a leisure-based product range based on launch of Saver tickets.

For the past 10 years, as Board Chair of the Association for European Transport, he spearheaded the move of a ten stream transportation conference to locations outside of the UK.

He is currently leading the company’s development into new insight approaches.

Richard Sheldrake

Richard is Managing Director of Perspective and has worked in the research industry for over 20 years.  He started as a telephone interviewer for BMSL, now Harris Interactive.  During his five years with the company, he was trained in all aspects of the business to business research process, including client liaison, questionnaire design, project management, data analysis, report writing and presentation of findings.  This experience is invaluable as MD of a data collection agency as it provides an essential link between client, executive and interviewing team.  He formed Perspective with his wife, Jemma Evans, in 1996 and has grown the organisation into one of the UK’s largest telephone data collection operations.

Richard is also a board director of BDRC and the award-winning full service agency Spring Research.  He is a full member of the MRS and a former Deputy Chairman of the BMRA.  He believes strongly that business needs strong representation on the MRS Council.

Leslie Sopp

Leslie is Head of Research at Age Concern Research Services (ACRS). His previous client research roles include ICAEW, Which? and ONS.

ACRS is a hybrid client insight / research supplier business unit within the Development Directorate of Age Concern England. It specializes in the older marketplace and its issues and opportunities, working for and within Age Concern England and Age Concern Enterprises Ltd, as well as with and for other funders and commissioners of research.

Longer term Leslie is seeking to develop the strategic research, data management and insight capability for Age Concern as a group, and to provide insight and data services to support local Age Concerns.

Leslie is an MRS Fellow and Council Member; Chairman of the MRS Management Board, and currently Vice Chairman (2008-9, formerly Chairman 2000-2004, and again 2006-7) and a Director of AURA (the client insight, research and knowledge network). He is also a committee member of the Institute of Fundraising Insight Special Interest Group.

Professor Alan Wilson

Alan is Head of the Department of Marketing at the University of Strathclyde Business School. He is Chair of the MRS Professional Development Advisory Board and is also the Senior Examiner for the joint CIM / MRS module on Marketing Research and Information. Prior to joining the University of Strathclyde, he held high level positions within leading London-based marketing research agencies and in a management consultancy practice. He has written numerous articles on marketing research and has received a number of awards for his publications. He has also authored a leading textbook: “Marketing Research: An Integrated Approach” .

Alan is a member of the Executive Editorial Board of the International Journal of Market Research and is the journal's book review editor. He also acts as a marketing and marketing research advisor and trainer for a number of Scottish and UK based organisations.

Alex Wright

Alex is Head of Research at Winmark, a professional services consultancy focusing on business-to-business research as well as executive networking and development. At Winmark Alex is responsible for external client research and management research for senior business executives. Areas of specific importance for the research team include high-level client management research, competitor intelligence and branding research with a focus on the legal sector.

Previously Alex worked at TNS where he went through the graduate training programme and worked for three years in the Financial & Professional Services team covering accounts such as RBS and the Bank of New York. He has a joint honours degree from the University of St Andrews in Economics and Management and enjoys golf, tennis and skiing in his spare time.

Alex became an MRS Council Member in April 2008.