Ann’s area of specialism is qualitative research, with particular expertise in brand development, stakeholder engagement, and customer and employee experience. She spearheaded the introduction of customer experience throughout Asia-Pacific and has led many clients through the transition from transactional to customer-centric thinking through her expertise in customer journey mapping, insight dissemination and in-market activation. Her formative years were spent with UK agency stalwarts Advertising Principles and Gatterpalm (now Creative Race) where she headed the agencies’ market research function, before joining UK industry stalwart Nunwood (currently KPMG Nunwood). Ann progressed to be a joint Managing Director of Nunwood APAC. In this later role, she led the expansion of Nunwood across the Asia-Pacific region before leaving to setup consultancy, OrcaBlue, advising clients at senior executive and Board level in applying insights research to achieve business growth.Always focusing on how consumer and stakeholder insight can build loyalty, attract new advocates and build sustainable businesses, Ann’s innovative thinking and ability to unpack what lies behind the data has supported the commercial success of many clients. Ann is currently Research Director at Research First, where she leads the research team in delivering decision-oriented and evidence based insights to private and public organisations throughout New Zealand.

OrcaBlue is an Insights Consultancy dedicated to informing business decisions that ultimately result in revenue growth. We seamlessly weave qualitative insights with hard quantitative data to provide joined up insights and commercial recommendations. We are proud of the broad experience that we call upon to positively contribute to every project. Whether you are looking at stakeholder or customer connections, category development, concept testing, proposition, advertising or brand development, customer experience management or an efficient and dynamic way of managing your data assets, we have the resources at hand to deliver excellent solutions.

Leading the expansion of Nunwood across the Asia Pacific region - spearheading development in the region of Branded Customer Experience, Shopper Insight methodologies and insight activation.

Retail focussed Marketing and Advertising Agency

Business ManagementNew Business DevelopmentClient Services Director