Research & Insight
Fourteen years on both sides of the brief
Most people in consumer insight have worked either at an agency or inside a brand. I have done eleven years of one and three of the other, and the combination is the thing I actually trade on. The agency side teaches you how to build a research framework from a badly worded business question. The client side teaches you that a correct answer nobody acts on is a failed project.
Agency and consultancy, 2009-2017
I started at Akademetre (2009-2011) running research operations and large-scale retail and shopper field studies, then moved to Kantar TNS (2011-2012) on research design and quality oversight for FMCG and retail clients.
At Nielsen (2012-2016) I led Philip Morris International, the highest-budget client in the Turkish business. The work was syndicated retail audit and consumer tracking turned into brand and trade recommendations: shelf, pricing and communication strategy, brand health tracking, ad effectiveness. I also sold insight solutions consultatively and won several major tenders over the engagement.
At Ipsos (2016-2017) I ran British American Tobacco and PepsiCo as key accounts and headed the shopper team. Segmentation, path to purchase and price elasticity, presented to C-level stakeholders. Over that period I tripled the research budget allocated on those accounts, not by selling harder but by integrating data sources the clients were treating separately and introducing shopper techniques they had not used.
Client side, 2017-2020
At Anadolu Efes, Türkiye's largest brewer, I owned the consumer and market insight function for Efes Pilsen as Marketing Strategy & Insights Manager. That meant a multi-year brand tracking study, Nielsen retail audit data, Ipsos household panel, and a qualitative programme I ran through agency partners including Future Bright and Grass Roots while moderating focus groups myself.
The output was decisions, not reports. A broad consumer segmentation fed positioning, a new product line launch and the rebranding of existing lines. Point-of-sale optimisation work covered cooler placement and shelf planogram, which took shopper research into in-store execution. And the insight-led revitalisation held Efes Pilsen at 50% share through a sustained competitive decline, which was the number the senior team watched every week.
Methods
Brand and category tracking. Retail audit and syndicated data. Household panel. Consumer segmentation. Shopper research, path to purchase and in-store execution. Price elasticity. Qualitative design and moderation. Agency briefing and partner management. Research framework design, from an ambiguous business question to a study that answers it. And the part that decides whether any of it matters: turning findings into a recommendation a commercial team will act on.
What changed since
Since 2020 I have been on the commercial and building side: scaling PadSplit from 5 to 20 US metropolitan markets with a team I grew to thirty across three continents, and since August 2024 designing and building AI-native commercial systems at Mynd Labs.
That is relevant here for one reason. I now build the measurement layer rather than only consuming it, so when an answer requires new instrumentation I can specify it instead of waiting for it. The discipline is the same one research teaches: the hard part was never the data, it was deciding which question was worth answering precisely.
I'm based in Türkiye. Full career history is on LinkedIn, and there is more on the about page.