Join Our team – Instinct and Reason

Didi Dimitriadis

Didi is our specialist lead recruiter for various types of research such as focus groups, in depth interviews, phone surveys, online interviews and more. Her exceptional skills in this area ensure we speak to the right people in the right way, creating trustworthiness in the work we do and enhancing project success for our clients. Didi has been with instinct and reason for 13 years, where she also worked as thematic survey coder of verbatim responses which has given her a rich understanding of how people respond to surveys.

As lead recruiter, Didi has experience in many government projects, tourism, consumer goods, agriculture, and even the more sensitive area of recruiting for funeral services research. A recent project Didi is especially proud of is having worked as lead recruiter on a large scale national project around the effects on communities of decarbonisation and mining plant shutdowns in the move to Net Zero.

Currently, Didi is the main point of contact for another large-scale project on energy performance of homes across NSW. instinct and reason is undertaking this Home Energy study in collaboration with the NSW Government, and it aims to help develop policies and programs to support households to save money on their energy bills, improve the comfort and health of their home, and reduce their carbon emissions.

Didi has had a diverse career, graduating with a Bachelor of Commerce with a major in Economics and Business Organisation and Policy.

Did You Know… Didi lived in Greece for 25 years, and while there she was involved in an innovative German staircase design, started a jewellery making business, opened a shop, and continues to provide hotels in Greece with her handmade jewellery whilst living in Australia! Didi enjoys meeting and talking to people, listening to their opinions and views.

Approach to Work… Talk to as many people you can in a day!

Emily Xu

Research Executive

Emily joined the Instinct and Reason team as a Research Executive early 2023 and is based in our Sydney office. Emily has a degree in Data Science and Decisions and a deep interest in understanding human behaviour and needs. Concurrent with her degree Emily worked in several roles that gave her relevant experience in collecting, analysing and translating data to identify market trends.

Emily is proficient in various statistical software and is always eager to learn new programs to stay ahead of the game. Emily’s hybrid skills are a welcome addition to the team. Her attention to detail and desire to sift through large amounts of data to find the information needed equips her well.

Emily is fluent in Mandarin and English.

Did you know… Emily loves dogs and trying new things, whilst floating in a swimming pool is where she’s at her most chilled.

Approach to work… Eager to learn and curious about new challenges; Emily believes in asking questions and the value of teamwork for success.

Sally Faedda Ph.D

Managing Director

Sally is a founding director of instinct and reason and has 23 years’ research and consulting experience. For the last 16 years she has headed the London consulting team, has been delivering research insights in over 35 countries and has a passion for building relationships across cultures and a genuine intercultural competence that is hard to beat. Sally’s focus is on pragmatic results, bringing data to life, and providing clear, simple and commercially relevant direction to clients all over the world. She has worked on solving pricing problems for one of the largest agribusiness companies globally for almost 20 years.

Sally has a PhD in Psychology which looked at why we help aging parents looking at reciprocal altruism and kin selection theories. She has a double major in Psychology and Art History.

Sally specialises in new product development, price optimisation, positioning and strategic go-to-market segmentations, but embraces any business problem and has worked for TOP 100 companies on hundreds of studies across a breadth of other sectors, financial, insurance, not for profit, industrial and consumer. Before instinct and reason sally held analytical and consulting roles agency-side, as well as academic roles busy publishing and lecturing. These days, Sally splits her time between London and Sydney, is an inveterate traveller, dabbles in drawing, and loves a good challenge.

Sally is fluent in English and Italian and (a little conversational French).

Did you know… Sally has a passion for seeing the world and travelled to 51 countries. She is an experienced volunteer crisis counsellor.

Approach to work… Resilience and Adaptability

Danica Jobson

Senior Research Executive

Danica has been part of the Instinct and Reason team since 2019 and works out of our Sydney office. Working across a broad range of qualitative and quantitative projects, Danica has experience in attitudinal and behavioural research, community attitudes, customer satisfaction and communications research, and brand tracking, to name a few areas. Some memorable projects she has worked on include evaluating how to optimise government communications for inclusivity, measuring engagement with recycling and environmental campaigns, and determining how to best optimise multi-day walks to facilitate nature-based tourism in regional areas. Prior to joining, Danica spent a year and a half working at a boutique insights and strategy consultancy, focusing on commercial market research around property, retail and FMCG.

No two projects are the same, and Danica loves the variety and learning social and market research brings.

In her spare time, Danica is currently completing a masters by research, looking at behaviour change interventions to reduce food waste. Having graduated with a Bachelor of Criminology and Criminal Justice from the University of New South Wales, with a dual stream of Social Research and Policy, Danica has a strong foundation of interdisciplinary research and analysis skills. Through her studies, Danica developed a passion for social research and a keen interest in human attitudes and behaviour. Furthermore, she has a valuable background in Industrial & Graphic Design. Danica combines her critical thinking and analytical brain with her creative thinking to each project for a fresh point of view.

Did you know… Danica is a board game enthusiast and avid traveller.

Approach to work… Curious and methodical.

Clifford Lewis

Consultant

Clifford (he/him/his) completed a PhD in Marketing exploring how brands can be positioned in the marketplace in 2015. He has over 14 years of research experience across both academia and industry. He has conducted research for clients across a range of industries include fast moving consumer goods, health and pharma, entertainment, insurance and finance, counselling services, tourism destinations and experiences, government and not for profits.

He is passionate about developing research solutions that are inclusive of people from diverse backgrounds and lived experiences and have published approaches for conducting such work in high-ranking peer-reviewed journals. For his work on diversity in research, he was awarded a Research Hero award by the Market Research Society (UK) in 2022. He is a member of ACON’s (Australia’s largest LGBTQIA+ advocacy organisation) Research Ethics Review Committee, and the Market Research Society (UK) Diversity and Inclusion in Research committee.

Lina Pugliese

Senior Consultant

Lina has nearly 30 years experience in market research, marketing communication and brand strategy. Her experience spans both agency and client sides, equally versed in qualitative and quantitative research so she brings research-technical expertise along with a client-side perspective and empathy, having solid experience implementing on the client side.

Key areas of specialization include brand, communication/messaging (her passion), customer satisfaction, value proposition development, product and service proposition development as well as change management. Throughout her career, Lina’s clients have included the wider service sector with Tourism and hospitality playing a major role, government agencies/non-profits, media/streaming/entertainment, financial services, funeral industry and luxury consumer goods.

Lina has recently moved back to her home in Australia after spending over a decade in New York City, where she was able to further widen her research and strategy consulting lens.

Lina has a B.A. with major in Sociology (focus on communication and media)

Did you know that Lina loves jazz and food (she insists, carbs is not a dirty word). Her life in NYC was spent deli hopping by day and jazz club crawling by night so now on a mission to replicate this experience back home in Australia…know of any good jazz clubs in Sydney?

Approach to work… put yourself in the customer’s shoes, then tell the story.

Alison Dexter

Head of Consulting – Australia

Ali is a newer member of the team, yet a previous colleague of Sally, David and Lina’s, initiating some fond trips down memory lane. Ali has 30+ years of research and consulting experience and has worked locally and globally in the UK, Asia, US.

Ali’s first job for a management consultancy as a business analyst gave her an end user perspective on research before becoming a researcher herself. Ali is all about end user centricity in clarifying objectives and research design, hybrid methodologies and leveraging new techniques and tech. Driven to constantly lift the bar and find the most effective and efficient way to achieve great results. Ali has a degree in Education from the University of Sydney. Majors included Psychology, Anthropology, English Literature.

Ali is an enthusiastic partner in supporting informed decision making to unlock growth and success. She has worked across industries including all layers of government, Not For Profits and Non Government Organisations, as well as blue chips and Small to Medium Enterprises.

Ali is passionate about elevating insights within organisations and the market research industry itself; taking on advisory/committee roles, training, mentorship and conference papers/presentations. Ali is a contributing author to Esomar’s publication ‘Answers to Contemporary Market Research Questions’ (published in 2014; republished in 2020).

Did you know… Ali once tried tap dancing and mistakenly got asked to join a professional tap dancing group. For a few seconds there she thought she’d found a new calling…

Approach to work… How can we do this better?

Belinda Heath

Consultant, Literature Review Specialist

Belinda is a highly experienced literature review specialist, based in NSW. To support a range of government and commercial projects, her expertise involves sourcing, reviewing, collating and analysing information from academic, archival and grey literature sources.

Partnering with Instinct and Reason since 2015, Belinda has provided extensive literature reviews for diverse project topics such as occupational mental health, patient management of Type 2 diabetes, aquatic animal pathologies, tourism trends, recreational 4WD usage, transportation protocols for hazardous waste disposal, energy efficiency in public housing and agricultural adaptation to climate change – amongst others.

Belinda gained her MA in International Studies/Sociology from UTS, Sydney in 2003, and completed her fieldwork and dissertation at Kagoshima University, Japan. As a socio-cultural researcher, she focussed on exploring the distinctly multicultural, regional ethos embodied in ceramic production and marketing activities in Southern Kyushu. Formerly, Belinda gained a Bachelor of Education (Visual Art) from COFA, UNSW where she majored in European modernity/post-modernity studies, feminist theory and drawing.

Compiling literature reviews is a natural extension of Belinda’s passion for a wide array of subject areas. Previous studies include examining Sydney’s department store history, the role of women and class politics in service industries, contemporary and historic mortuary practices, small-scale food production, and poultry breeding and genetics. Her previous work features in ‘The Handbook of Anthropology in Business,’ (2014, R. Denny and P. Sutherland eds).

Matthew Johnson

Senior Consultant

Matthew is a senior consultant drawing on 5 years’ research experience across varying industries and research approaches. Prior to joining us in 2019, Matthew worked with healthcare professionals – both in syndicated and custom studies – to determine treatment approaches that enabled pharmaceutical companies to implement effective marketing strategies. Matthew also has experience across consumer industries; including health, retail, FMCG, tobacco and alcohol.

Matthew’s applied social policy and research background (Bachelor of Social Science and a Master of Applied Social Research and Policy) provides extensive knowledge across social research methodologies, and combined with custom and syndicated experience, enables a clear determination of real-world implications.

Did you know… Matthew is a keen fitness addict, but he will rarely say no to a not so healthy food option – especially when travelling overseas

Approach to work… “Quae Seminaveris Metes” (what you sow, so shall you reap) AND Live every moment

Francois Le Poder

Senior Consultant

François is a senior consultant at instinct and reason and is a valuable part of the London team. Since he joined us 3 years ago, he has been servicing the Agribusiness sector, in charge of the coordination of both qualitative and quantitative projects globally, covering over 20 markets. He has particular interest in qual research, segmentation and multi-country projects.

François has a Bachelor of Science from Agrocampus Ouest in Rennes, France. He has 9 years of experience in market research for a number of sectors, of which the last 7 have been specialising in agriculture and animal health with an international research focus. From time to time he also enjoys working with the Canberra Australia office on social and policy research.

Previous experiences include a senior research manager role at Ipsos, managing Tracking surveys, Brand Health studies, Concept test studies, as well as a sensory analysis role.

Francois is fluent in French, English and Spanish and conversational in German.

Did you know…François has run more than 4,000 kms in the last 3 years, including 3 marathons and 13 half-marathons

Approach to work…Curiosity and Determination

Stephen Mugford Ph.D

Consultant

Stephen, a Partner at Kinnford Consulting since June 2015, entered this role after 20 years in his successful business, QQSR. He brings over 40 years’ experience as an educator, researcher, facilitator and change management consultant to a variety of clients in government, the military, the private sector and non-government organisations both in Australia and overseas. Stephen has been a partner to instinct and reason, since the inception of our business, and our working relationship extends over 30 years.

Stephen originally specialised in sociology and social psychology. Trained in the UK, he held academic posts in Wellington, NZ, Berkeley, California (Visiting Prof in Public Health) and in Canberra, where he taught at ANU from 1974-1996. In this role, Stephen earned a major reputation as a scholarly researcher and policy developer in criminology and drug policy. His published work included papers on restorative justice and illegal drug use that have become citation classics. Stephen is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Management (AIM).

Stephen’s blend of academic training, practical experience and a lively interest in innovation creates a unique and exciting approach to underpin his work. This approach combines contemporary neuro-since and psychology with sociological work in organisational/cultural change. He also draws on techniques such as appreciative inquiry, advanced knowledge management perspectives, open space facilitation techniques and an understanding of complexity and chaos theories to:

• ensure best practice in leadership and strategy
• develop listening, assertion and conflict resolution skills in work contexts and manage under-performance
• understand and lead / influence change
• provide executive coaching.

Jennifer Dickson

Consultant

Jennifer is our Victorian based consultant and has worked closely with Instinct and Reason for over a decade.

She is a highly skilled communications and brand strategist and has in-depth experience across all aspects of research analysis, particularly when it comes to informing and developing effective communications for private and public sector clients. Her passion is using evidence based research to understand what makes people tick and how to best frame communications so that they resonate with customers’ values and encourage behavioural change.

Committed to helping clients get to where they are going, Jennifer takes a whole of business approach to each project – including identifying opportunities to deliver on strategic outcomes, build capability, achieve operational and marketing efficiencies and transition organisations to new media.

She also provides brand audit, strategy expertise and reputation management tools to evaluate how effectively (or not) a company is positioning its brand in the minds of its audiences and stakeholders through its communications, service delivery and organisational culture.

Prior to her consultancy work, Jennifer held senior positions across several Federal and State government portfolios including innovation, science and technology, the arts, tourism, and education. She holds a Bachelor of Arts (Asian Languages) from the Australian National University.

Did you know… Jennifer started life on a dairy farm before running away to Thailand at the age of 16 as an exchange student. The experience led to a lifelong interest into how language, culture and values shape and unlock our beliefs, thinking and decision making as individuals and as a society.

Approach to work… Problem solver, communicator and passionate about helping people find workable and achievable solutions.

Zhinan Li

Research Executive

Zhinan is a new research executive to our Darwin office. He is a recent graduate of a Master of Business Administration from Charles Darwin University and previously a Bachelor of Accountancy from Queensland University of Technology. Over the years of study in the business field, he developed an interest in consulting and helping people in search of solutions.

Zhinan has been assisting with tourism, agricultural and social research. Drawing from his previous admin/booking role in the real estate industry, Zhinan has a keen eye for detail and interest in listening to numbers and people.

Working out of our Darwin office he supports the team in project management, analysis and reporting in both the Northern Territory and our international projects.

Zhinan is fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese and English.

Did you know… Zhinan plays at the Darwin Basketball Association with team Lightning. He averages 7.5 points, 1.6 assist, 4 rebounds in the current 2021 Man’s Division 2 and 3 challenge season. His favourite players are Nicola Jokic and Rajon Rondo. Zhinan also likes to be called Li!

Approach to work… Enthusiastic to learn, ask questions, and always try to add value!

Cheralin Folliott

Senior Research Executive

Cheralin is a senior researcher with almost ten years’ market research industry experience. She truly understands the research process from end to end, with a strong background in the basics of research including managing a CATI call centre, scripting surveys and analysing data.

Cheralin went on to research roles leading both qualitative and quantitative studies across a number of sectors. She has experience with sensitive topics such as domestic abuse and Aboriginal health care and is passionate about working with clients to understand the backstory and truth of their audience to drive positive outcomes for business.

Cheralin has an attention for detail and is a valuable team member on some of our key tracking studies such as NT Tourism. Cheralin attended the University of Guelph in Canada for psychology, and furthered her passion for learning at UNSW with courses in Psychology and Social Marketing.

Did you know… Cheralin is our resident Canuck, having moved to Australia from Canada ten years ago. She spent her childhood and teenage years as a competitive figure skater.

Approach to work… Building strong relationships & working with the data as one piece of a very large puzzle.

Marie-Claire Buaud

Senior Research Executive

Marie-Claire is our Queensland based consultant. She draws on 7 years’ research experience across a variety of industries: including consumer, B2B, non for profit, and the public sector. She has consulted to a range of companies from small-medium enterprises to global ones, as well as both State and Federal governments, both in Australia and in the UK.

Marie-Claire holds a Bachelor of Commerce (Marketing) and Bachelor of Arts (Psychology) from the University of Melbourne. She particularly enjoys applying her knowledge of social psychology and marketing models to the research design and interpretation of results, to better understand or explain behaviours, interactions and engagement.

Did you know… Marie-Claire considers herself to be a ‘global citizen’, being both French and Australian and having spent her childhood in France and Hong-Kong before moving to Australia as a teenager in the year 2000. This experience has shaped her beliefs and view of the world, providing her with a global outlook and an insatiable curiosity about other cultures.

Approach to work… Passionate and willing to go the extra mile to get the job done.

David Donnelly

Director

David is a founding director of instinct and reason and has headed the Australian consulting team for almost 20 years. This means he has consulted and provided insights and advice to many TOP 100 companies, heads of federal and State government agencies and many not for profit organisations.

David specialises in segmentation, positioning, communications and new product development research and has worked on positioning significant brands like St George Bank and Australia’s International Education brand, has developed new products like ING Direct’ s Living Superannuation and Australians best new tourism product; the Three Capes Track. David did the strategy, formative and concept testing for Australia’s first global tourism campaign. David values the opportunity he has had to influence important decisions that have contributed to better lives by always taking account of the societal context in which we live.

Outside the office David lives adjacent to a national park in a small rural community and is involved in the local film club. He is working on his PhD at the University of Sydney looking at how the desire for over 50s to sea and tree change could improve the adaptive capacity of rural Australia.

Did you know… David has a passion for walking and has walked in wilderness in 10 countries.

Approach to work… Innovation and Insight

Eric Wu

Senior Analytical Consultant

Eric is a senior analytical consultant and forms an integral part of our advanced analytics team since he joined 12 years ago. Eric manages our in-house online survey system but spends most of his time using advanced statistical analysis to solve complex business challenges for our clients. He has expertise in handling big data set and highly skilled in creating segmentation algorithms based on the merger of client existing data, primary data and secondary data sets across industry. Eric consults to a number of private corporations and government agencies such as Barilla and the Office of Environment and Heritage, and regularly holds client workshops showcasing the decision support systems housing our choice modelling simulator.

Eric graduated with a Master of Applied Statistics and a Bachelor of Science with a major in statistics from Macquarie University, and has been rewarded with Accredited Statistician status. He has also completed a Diploma of Computer Science to meet the rapidly changing statistical and business environment.

Eric is fluent in English and Cantonese (and conversational Mandarin).

Did you know… Eric is a food enthusiast and wine connoisseur

Approach to work… Work hard and Play hard

Steve Abbott

Information Technology Consultant

Tim Totten

Senior Technical Consultant

Tim is our software development expert and has been an integral part of instinct and reason’s software development team for the last 8 years. He is a highly experienced software engineer, and cloud computing specialist.

Tim has been responsible for building a wide variety of web applications and development libraries for us, from custom survey apps, to reporting dashboards, to complex integration interfaces. Tim worked in the IT industry building web-based applications, libraries, and frameworks for over 20 years. His primary interests in the IT field are distributed computing technologies, and flexible development methodologies. He’s worked with a wide variety of server platforms, from simple standalone Linux servers, to advanced clusters of distributed containers. Tim also served as chief platform architect and VP of Technology for a small development company in Castlegar, British Columbia. Following that, he was a senior Linux engineer for a major IT services company in Kelowna, British Columbia.

Tim lives and works in Canada.

Did you know: When not performing IT magic, Tim is also a black belt in traditional Taekwondo.

Approach to work: Balance between simplicity & flexibility. Pragmatism.

Fiona McLean

Senior Consultant

Laura Guerrero

Research Executive

Laura is a research executive at instinct and reason team and is a valuable part of the London team, where her main focus is on servicing clients in the agribusiness sector. Laura has 4 years’ experience in the industry, 2 years with us, and has a particular interest in digital strategies, qualitative & quantitative synergy, and developing markets globally.

She graduated as a Business Administrator in her hometown of Bogota, Colombia, and moved to London to undertake a MSc in International Business, where she today calls home. Laura also has a qualification in Project Management, PRINCE 2 (R) which she effectively puts to work managing multiple projects internationally.

Laura started her career in Millward Brown, where she had the opportunity to work in several business sectors (packaged foods, soft and alcoholic beverages, healthcare and media) for the Colombian and other Latin American markets.

Laura is fluent in Spanish and English.

Did you know… Laura is a yoga and fitness lover.

Approach to work… Positive and Determined

Luke Tuite

Office Manager

Luke is our team Office Manager. He is the eyes and ears of the company, juggling financial, human resource and operational responsibilities, and even enthusiastically helps the consulting team on report and charting design.

Luke has a background in retail and digital marketing and has vast experience in promotional and marketing design across offline and online media channels.

Luke bakes treats for the office and loves to bring his dog Vivienne to work. He is an actor and a singer (in his spare time!) and is usually heard singing in the office to radio tunes.

Did you know…. Luke has performed in 30 theatrical productions – his favourite performances being villains for Oklahoma and Wuthering Heights.

Approach to work… Clarity and focus

Rob Mercer

Head of Consulting – Canberra

Rob is head of the Canberra office and over the last 15 years at instinct and reason, has provided research and marketing services for most Australian Government agencies, as well as state/territory and local government, commercial businesses and not-for-profits.

He has 30 years of research, analysis, strategy development, communications, marketing, access and equity and stakeholder management experience in private and government organisations.

It has involved extensive work in the formulation, project management and evaluation of programs, strategies, communications and business processes with over six years in the finance and insurance sector, ten years working on major government programs and approximately fifteen years as a consultant.

Rob is a graduate in Business and a qualified practicing researcher.

It has often extended to supporting program, communications and operational solutions within highly sensitive consultation environments. For example, Rob’s work contributed towards a national organisation winning of major customer service awards, breakthroughs in the take up of electronic claiming and Indigenous Australian access to key health programs.

Rob has a passion for discovery and finding solutions.

Did you know… Rob has seen the sun set from the top of Mt Sinai in Egypt.

Approach to work…Strategic, insightful and outcomes focussed

Paul Wiebe

Director

Paul is a founding director of instinct and reason, has 25 years’ experience, and heads our math and software development team. He is our genius technical consultant creating algorithms, estimating advanced mathematical models, and writing code for our proprietary tools including our discrete choice modelling suite.

Paul has a B.Math from the University of Waterloo in Applied Mathematics focusing on Theoretical Physics and Pure Mathematics, and an M.Sc. from the University of Alberta in Mathematics especially Diffraction Patterns of Quasicrystals. In previous times, he worked at Advanis Inc modelling quantal choice data.

He spent many of his early career years developing new algorithms for experimental designs and an expert system for the estimation of choice data. The novelty in the first experimental design generator was its employment of pseudo estimation to optimize the search. The second generator is a trade secret. It was also during this period that he discovered a violation of the axiom of choice in a nested logit model put forward by some industry insiders. Unfortunately, his submissions were pre-empted. Paul returned to his studies, this time for his PhD in the area of Probability and Stochastic Analysis – which remains on hold but is an ambition to complete.

Paul lives and works in Canada. He is fluent in English and French.

Did you know… Paul has a passion for outdoor activities, especially cycling.

Approach to work… Pedantic

Darwin

Canberra

Sydney

London