Simon Ford

Director, Real World Marketing Australia

Partner, The Partnering Group

Simon recently joined the team and is the leader of the Insight Application and Retail Strategy across FMCG as well as retail companies in the region.

He began his career at Millward Brown research agency in the UK, after graduating from Cambridge with a Masters in Economics.  At Millward Brown he drove the Insight strategy for large blue chips such as Guinness and Reckitt & Colman, through brand and advertising consumer research. He designed the 4As Guinness consumer loyalty model and 9 box Reckitt & Colman advertising pre-testing model, both adopted globally.  Simon also developed the Guinness account into sub-Saharan Africa – a first for the agency.

Simon joins us from Tesco in the UK, where he was Head of Market Research for the last 6 years.  He was responsible for developing and implementing their shopper based corporate strategy and consulting internally through the organization to ensure its application.  In particular, he ensured the Shopper Plan formally led all other business plans and informally ensured non shopper-savvy operational teams stayed focused.

Highlights from his time at Tesco include refocusing the business on their availability strategy, driving operational and staffing change around processes and budget requirements.  Simon developed a new corporate ranging strategy across the business and led the shopper based business case for the Convenience (Express) store growth explosion in recent years.  More recently, he built the 5th segment to Tesco corporate strategy, based on Corporate Social Responsibility.  Again based on shopper needs and directly linking these to actual sales, Simon built a strategy to ensure Tesco pre-empts potential CSR disasters (think MacDonalds and health, or Marks and Spencer and shopper irrelevance).

Simon’s expertise therefore lies in putting consumer needs at the heart of a business plan through the application of consumer and shopper insight into tangible business action.  Having worked at the heart of retail strategy and their application to category, he provides the retailer perspective on relationships with manufacturers and can assist towards successful collaborative relationships. 
.