Consumer Insights Consultant
Applying market insights to marketing
campaigns for a competitive advantage.
Bringing your customer closer to your campaigns.
What I do
As a Freelance Market Insights Consultant, I help businesses place their customers at the heart of strategic marketing decisions, creating more effective campaigns and stronger competitive advantage.
I bring customer and market insights into the planning, development and delivery of marketing strategies, ensuring decisions are informed by real audience needs, behaviours, and motivations. By combining expertise across marketing channels with proven insight-gathering methodologies, I help organisations improve campaign performance and maximise return on investment.
"Before partnering with you, we were operating largely on assumptions. We had a strong vision for our new commercial venture, but we lacked the empirical data to validate our target demographics and pricing strategy. We were concerned about entering a competitive market without a clear understanding of the existing gaps or whether our value proposition would actually resonate with real-world users. Essentially, we were trying to move from 'educated guessing' to a concrete, data-backed strategy - which we did with your help."
- Event Brentwood
In today's fast-paced business environment, marketing teams are often under pressure to deliver more with fewer resources. As a result, customer insight can be overlooked, underutilised, or gathered in ways that fail to generate meaningful action. This is where I can help.
Working alongside in-house marketing teams and agencies, I provide the expertise needed to uncover valuable market intelligence and translate it into practical strategic recommendations. Whether through customer interviews, market research, journey mapping, audience segmentation, or ongoing optimisation initiatives, I help organisations make smarter, evidence-based decisions.
Sometimes the biggest gains come from simple improvements—such as A/B testing campaigns and refining customer communications. Other times, direct conversations with customers reveal opportunities, challenges, and insights that transform an entire marketing strategy.
Having worked globally with start-ups, scale-ups, and multinational organisations, I have seen first-hand how a deep understanding of customers and markets drives business growth. Companies that make decisions without sufficient market insight often miss opportunities, limit their potential, and risk costly mistakes.
Understanding your market is no longer a luxury—it's essential for sustainable growth and competitiveness. Even small insight-led improvements can create significant long-term impact. If you're looking to better understand your customers, strengthen your marketing strategy, and make more informed business decisions, I'd be delighted to discuss how I can help.
"We wanted to find out more about what other Chambers of Commerce in the UK offer to their members, so asked Gillian to carry out research of Chambers of Commerce across the country.
She analysed the various sites and produced a comprehensive report detailing in an easy to read format what the various Chambers offer.
As a result of this, we are planning to introduce a variety of new services for our members."
- Brentwood Chamber of Commerce
How I can support you
Understand brand perception
- Before assuming your target audience has a perception of your brand, I can assess the real level of brand awareness, loyalty and qualities people associate with your brand which can inform your marketing plan.
Improve campaign effectiveness
- I can evaluate your plans and show you how they’re resonating with your target audience. These insights can be used to inform future campaigns making them more effective both in customer-acquisition and in cost, making them easier to brief in the longer term.
Understand your unique proposition in the market
- Competitor activities will impact your target audience’s purchasing behaviours. It is imperative to know how they are impacting them so you can differentiate yourself in your strategic campaigns/plans.
More effectively target your audience
- I can break your target audience up into groups with similarities so you can devise strategic plans to target each group with greater effectiveness.
Grow brand loyalty
- I can help you to increase customer retention by researching your existing customer buying behaviour and motivations.
Market Research Society Membership
I am a member of the Market Research Society (membership ID 2284876)