The Imperial Leather owner’s head of insights talks to Tim Healey about how behavioural understanding, data and technology are transforming the way brands connect with shoppers and consumers worldwide.
You’ve worked at Asda, Tesco, Car Phone Warehouse, Hallmark Cards and, since October 2024, as head of insights at PZ Cussons. Walk us through your career.
For the first chunk of my career, I was a retailer. After university I joined Asda and I just fell in love with retail because it was about people, the decisions that they make and, ultimately, giving people what they want on a really regular basis.
Weeks after joining Asda, it was bought by Walmart. I worked in various jobs, but at that time, the data revolution had just begun. Walmart had these brilliant new systems: you could see what product was in the same basket for shoppers. I went into Tesco and it had the Club Card – a shopping revolution implemented by Dunnhumby.
My background is behavioural economics and I found this fascinating: putting all of that data together to better understand human behaviour and better understand why people make decisions – something clicked in my mind.
For me, it was the perfect mix of the academic, a strong economic background and the practical – ‘how do you make that work?’ As a retailer, I did buying, marketing… I gained lots of experience. But all the way through all of those roles, we used data to understand the customers and understand the shoppers.
For the second chunk of my career, I took that knowledge and applied it to brands. I did that at Hallmark and really enjoyed that. I ended up being the head of the insight and category management function in the UK, Europe and Australasia.
It was a period of massive transition for Hallmark, all around how it used data and insight to win with its customers – the retailers. Greeting cards is a really interesting category. It’s one of these few categories where the consumer and the shopper are never the same. Typically, the person buying a card is not the person receiving it. So there is a clear distinction.
At Hallmark, we really understood the difference between the consumer profile and the shopper profile – or at least the shopper’s perception of what the consumer wants and needs: what they liked in their cards, what they wanted as their gifts.
That led me into the third chunk of my career: how could you do everything I have just described in a way that is quick and more accurate? People leave so many footprints in the sand in the way that they interact in retail environments: with brands on social media, with brands in store by buying them, with retailers of categories they buy into or don’t mind.
Building on this, I was part of the team that built Morrisons’ first shopper insight platform. Morrisons wanted to build the right products for the right people at the right time at the right price in the right range. I also worked with startups and scale-ups, working with brilliant data engineers and data scientists.
I was just learning from them all day, every day: what happens when I buy that product? How does that data move around and how does it get structured in a way that is useful? I worked for Edwina (Dunn) and Clive (Humby) and they had built Dunnhumby from their kitchen table to being, you know, a multi-million-pound global organization that was impacting a huge number of shoppers and consumers every day. I worked at a business called Data Shed and was part of the management team that sold that business.
I realized that I had been a retailer, I understood shoppers; I had worked in corporate, FMCG and really understood consumers; I had worked in tech and I really understood tech; and I had worked in small-scale and upscale. The opportunity came up at PZ Cussons to take all of those skills and knowledge and help transform the insight capability of a branded consumer goods business.
I still use things today that I learned 25 years ago – how to really simplistically understand behaviors – but I use it with a group of people who are on a really brilliant journey. We’re delivering change: how the business sees insight and how we use it to make decisions about our products, our marketing communications and our innovation pipeline. All of this will greatly benefit the business over the next three to seven years.
PZ Cussons headquarters, Manchester, UK
What’s the offer at PZ Cussons?
First and foremost, we’re a brand-building business for hygiene, baby and beauty products. It’s a really interesting company that has been around for over 140 years and started out as a trading business and has been in rapid transformation in recent years. We employ just under 2,500 people across our businesses in Europe and Asia Pacific, so we’re small enough to be really close to our customers and consumers – more of a multi-local than a multi-national. Our brands are household names and often serve very local needs and underserved consumers in certain categories. So in the UK, think of great brands like Original Source, Sanctuary Spa and Imperial Leather, and also our award-winning Childs Farm range for families wanting a range for sensitive skin. Whereas, for example, in ANZ, everyone knows our Morning Fresh and Radiant brands. Recently, we announced our decision to retain our iconic St Tropez tanning brand with a new strategic direction and partnership and we’re excited about it.
Financial reporting for PZ Cussons showed a considerable uplift in 2025. What does 2026 look like?
From an insight perspective, it is about how we are really delivering the voice of the consumer and the voice of the shopper into our decision-making processes right and into our innovation pipeline.
Gone are the days for us as an organization where talking to our consumers took months and months and months. Now, we move much faster to understand those foundational human behaviors within the categories that we operate.
How do people behave around washing and bathing? It is easy to dismiss washing as a boring category. But actually, when you start to think about how people wash and bathe, there’s a world of difference between the five-minute shower you might have had this morning to get out the door or your hour in the bath on a Sunday afternoon where you’re trying to destress or considering the week ahead.
We are trying to really understand those moments and what those differences are. What is behind those behavioral changes, those emotional or functional needs? How do they vary? How did they change?
In 2026, we will also be exploring new solutions to those particular challenges, from products to marketing communications. How well do they resonate with those potential consumers? And then how can we feed that back to the organization quickly, accurately and efficiently to give the business an understanding of that concept that has been created by a marketeer or a formulation that has been created by a research and development colleague.
I get really excited about human behavior for two reasons: I’m fortunate to have the head of an economist, so I get excited about that stuff anyway. One of my favorite books is Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein, because it unpacks a fundamental understanding of how you influence and change people’s behaviors.
The other reason is that my role is a group role, so I get to see this core, foundational behavior, not just in the UK but through projects in North America and Indonesia. There’s huge variety. In Indonesia, for example, the vast majority of people don’t have a bath or a shower. They have a thing called a Mandi. It’s a tiled bathroom, with a tiled floor, there’s a drain in the middle and there’s a big tub of heated water from which people scoop water to wash with. Indonesia is almost always 34°C with 80% humidity. So there is a desire to wash and bathe more times a day because you get hot and sweaty more frequently.
Not only that, but the cultural norms we take for granted are different. For example, the way mums and dads wash and bathe children: in the UK, ‘bath time’ for children is fun – bubbles, splashing etc. But in Indonesia, there is no bath. But it is still an occasion where families come together and bond, with human behavior similar between the two.
We then help the organization work out how to execute and optimize for consumers in both markets. Understanding both the similarities and the differences allows you to identify core human behaviors and those behaviors allow you to focus on how you will solve these needs for your customers.
New for 2025, PZ Cussons’ St Tropez Sunlit sets the bar for an effortless sunless glow
How is your insight team structured?
I sit in the group part of the business. So, we have an insight team in the UK and in our other markets as well. The roles are structured around that split between foundational human understanding and the validation of the concepts that we’re performing. Part of the team is set up to really dive into behavior and really understand our customers’ needs and wants.
We just brought a new role into the business in the UK, which is an insight analyst, whose role is to look at the future and to tell us what will happen in two years’ time and to observe cultural trends.
Consumers want to see brands innovating: brands that don’t innovate don’t get very far.
For example, what’s happening with weight-loss jabs? How do people change their behavior when they lose weight? What impact does that have on their bodies? How does that change their routine? At its most base level, do people change their washing and bathing habits as they lose weight and change their body shape and maybe do more exercise?
We are also across the new trends in fragrances as new trends and flavors come through. It’s really important to understand where cherry or pistachio sit. At the same time, we need to be consistent on our methodology as we stress test new concepts and ensure that those products meet the needs of consumers,
How do you manage to surf the tidal wave of marketing technology?
I love tech solutions. Giving my view from the world of insight, I know what I need. I can see through hubris quickly. I’ve worked in the tech industry, built AI platforms and built shopper insight platforms. It’s fairly easy to spot the ones that can truly add value.
The ones that have got something about them are usually the ones where, when you meet, you have a good conversation about the problems, challenges and how their platform is going to deliver change – but not revolutionary change.
In my opinion, technology works really well when it makes incremental changes: how it sits in with your day-to-day; with your delivery; how it allows you to do things more effectively and efficiently. Crucially, will this new technology or platform allow you to shape it to your needs?
There’s a brilliant and industry-disrupting platform that we’re working with at the moment, Motives, which delivers AI-powered qualitative research in 48 hours. The guys were really open and honest about how it works. They also shared their 10-year plan for the business. And when I met them, the people I met were the people who had built the product, rather than a business development representative. As a result, we could go deep with the tech quickly.
I love working with tech people who are uber-smart. The difference between talking to Motives’ Sean and Sam about what they are trying to do and, in contrast, then talking to a sales rep saying, “We’ve got this platform and it will solve all your problems,” is like night and day.
Give me an example of a customer research discovery you’ve made that you found really surprising.
I can give you two. One is a data-driven one and one is an observational one. The observational one is when I go back to time and time again. And it happened on my third day working for Asda. I started in the graduate scheme and then we did a couple of days at Asda House and then I went out to the store where I was working, in Manchester.
That morning, I walked along the shop floor and nearly got run over by a woman pushing a massive trolley. She said, ‘Oh, I’m really, really sorry.’ And at that moment, I looked at the contents of her shopping trolley. Every single item in the trolley was from the Asda Smart Price range – the value range. There was one exception: across the top of her full trolley were 24 cans of Pedigree Chum dog food.
It was a moment of insight – one I go back to time and time again: consumers and shoppers behave in a way that is based on emotion. There’s a sense of compromise – it’s not just the functionality of the product. Shoppers and consumers compromise when they make purchase decisions based on emotional links and emotional needs, as this lady had shown in her trolley.
For the data-driven insight, I can recall working at Hallmark, where we had some fascinating data. Multiple data sources (data from stores, sales patterns, shopper insight and qualitative results) came together to tell stories. And in this case, I believe what the data showed us told you everything you need to know about the difference between men and women.
We knew at the time that between 4pm and 6pm on February 14, the average dwell time of a man at a greeting card fixture is less than 20 seconds. We also knew that 80% of their baskets contained a card, flowers and a gift.
In contrast, women buy Valentine’s Day cards predominantly in the three to eight days before February 14. Their dwell time at fixture is several minutes and they spend several more minutes picking up a number of individual products. We also knew that the likelihood of women buying a card and gift in the same place was significantly lower.
Great insight is based around human behavior. The data will help you to understand and articulate it. Every single person that I tell that story to relates to it. We’ve seen that behavior before. We’ve seen it in our friends. You see it in your family and you see it in your partners.
When should you not listen to the data?
I think it depends on your definition of data. With most people, their definition of data is something that they receive in a table. That doesn’t make sense to me. Insight covers a mix of consumer, shopper and market insight.
Our data goes from that point of the consumer need (their design, desire, decision, either consciously or subconsciously) to activate and act on that need (their conscious or subconscious decision to go and purchase something to solve that need) and then a decision about who’s going to buy it. Are they going to buy it and be the shopper, or is someone going to buy it on their behalf? Is the consumer the shopper or not?
And then, what mission are they going to go on? And where are they going to make the purchase – is it online, offline, a supermarket? If you have data right the way across all of those touch-points, you can start to understand all of that interconnected human behavior.
An isolated piece of data might need something more observational or behavioral to help explain it. The question shouldn’t be, ‘Can I believe this piece of data?’ The question should be, ‘Am I seeing the whole breadth of the customer behavior to make the best decision?’
PZ Cussons reported sales increases in 2025, including products such as its Original Source shower gels
What myth about marketing would you most like to bust?
I have a deep suspicion, based on 25 years in this industry, that the word shopper and consumer are used interchangeably and this is not correct. The mindset is most often different and, in some cases, they are a different person altogether.
What question would you like me to ask the next senior marketer I interview?
Can you explain the difference between a consumer and a shopper in the categories you work in?
Your question from the last senior marketer I spoke to is, ‘How are you leveraging AI right now in your work?’
In the world of insight, AI allows you to improve the speed to insight. That’s not about replacing the human when collecting data to inform the insight; it’s about improving the speed to deliver it.
In years gone by, qualitative insight was either performed internally or in partnership with an agency. We would say we want to talk to these types of people and put them into a focus group environment. We might need to do three or four different focus groups and they would be done in a viewing facility. This would all need to be arranged. Each one of those sessions might be two hours and the time to organize those would probably be a couple of weeks.
You would need a team of people to observe in a two-way mirror scenario and they would assemble their observations. The event moderator would then pull together a big PowerPoint presentation and then come back to the client and show their findings. After that, someone like me would need to review and extract the salient points for the business.
In summary, that is a lot of work with some heavy lifting and quite mundane jobs. It is also very inefficient and would take a considerable amount of time, especially coordinating with the different people to participate in the various stages. AI can make this a two-stage operation, removing most of the working parts, while keeping you connected to the consumers you are interviewing.
We can use AI in the audience selection process. AI can craft the questionnaire, recruit the consumers, video record each interview and allow the participant to choose a time that suits them and do the interview in the comfort of their own home. I’m overseeing a big project like this in the US right now and AI has shortened the process by at least three months.
At PZ Cussons, product innovation is key: acute awareness of trends in washing, ingredients and scents
What was the last cultural experience you had that stopped you in your tracks?
I was in Indonesia in April and May and three things in Indonesia really blew me away. One is the commonality of human behavior delivered through different formats in washing. The second piece is the impact of the daily routine: living in Indonesia, the heat, the commuting, being out on the mopeds fundamentally changed my perception of what washing and bathing is to people who live there.
The third one is around how cultural influences may be different, but the rationale is the same around trends. So in Indonesia, 90% of the population is Muslim. It is a very South Asian, industrialized, production-led, manufacturing, labor-led country. And yet, just as one example, every single music interaction I had there was Korean. Putting K-pop and Indonesian culture together is a really, really interesting melting pot of culture.
If there’s one thing you know about marketing, it is…?
It is that ‘shopper’ and ‘consumer’ are two different mind states – and often two different types of people.
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