Ross McKnight

I am passionate about investigating and interpreting data, engaging audiences with great stories and delivering insights that make an impact.

I have fifteen years of experience in market research working across client service, analytical, consultative and product development roles. Understanding clients’ objectives and working out the best way to help them understand how to achieve their goals is what makes me excited about work. I take great pride in finding new, different and better ways to solve problems.

Freelance Insight Strategist, Remote (Jan ’22 – present)

• Wide coverage – working with Quantitative and Qualitative clients, both major market research players and start-ups, using both local and global data
• Flexibility – I have helped clients with a wide range of needs, from writing and testing questionnaires and extracting data from various software, to building insightful reports and presentations

Deployment Strategist, Streetbees, London (Feb ‘20 – Jan ‘22)

• Inspiring action – Providing clients with insights and recommendations that have influenced their decisions. For example, helping a leading food manufacturer create and launch a new range of ‘Fakeaway’ sauce products
• Qualitative and quantitative experience – Providing clients with actionable insights using quantitative data to size opportunities and qualitative data to dig deep into consumers’ needs and usage
• End-to-end project management – Designing, launching, monitoring and delivering bespoke primary research projects for clients across many sectors including FMCG, finance, entertainment and insurance
• Building relationships – I have been responsible for Streetbees first projects with many clients and successfully collaborated with them and helped win repeat business
• Experience working globally – On most projects I worked across several markets and keeping multiple stakeholders happy by understanding their different cultures, agendas and needs from the projects
• Excellent organisational and prioritisation skills – Conducting multiple projects of varying size at any given time and coordinating and line managing a team of three researchers

Consumer Insight Director, Kantar Worldpanel, London (Mar ’17 – Feb ‘20)

• Led and grew a team responsible for servicing a portfolio of contracted clients from across the Dairy industry, worth over £2m
• Making an impact – Delivered presentations in creative ways at conferences run by Kantar Worldpanel and invited to speak at multiple clients’ conferences
• Trusted Advisor – Partnered with key clients to help them achieve their goals. For example, delivering insight masterclasses to upskill category managers at a major dairy manufacturer to help the Category Director
• Delivering actionable insights – Created bespoke analyses that have helped shaped category strategies and been instrumental in building my clients’ relationships with their customers 
• Growing business – Successfully renewed multi-year, seven figure contracts in competitive pitches and doubled the annual contracted spend of one client through incremental sales

Analytical Consultant, Kantar Worldpanel, London (Mar ’15 – Mar ‘17)

• Responsible for end-to-end delivery of consultative projects to a wide variety of FMCG clients
• Involved in briefings and proposal stages through to creation and presentation of insights and recommendations
• Projects vary from people & occasion based segmentations, analysis of promotional strategies, reviews of media campaigns and creating ranging tools, amongst other things
• Manipulate any datasets in SAS and run them through analytical procedures relevant to particular project

Senior Analyst, Kantar Worldpanel, London (Jan ’14 – Mar ‘15)

• Moved into this role to develop my analytical skills and add depth to my expertise in consumer panel data
• Learnt how to use Base SAS to write code in order to manipulate data and run statistical procedures

Sept 2004 – 2008:              2:1 MEng Hons Architecture & Environmental Design (University of Nottingham)

Sept 1997 – 2004:              Canon Slade School, Bolton

A-Levels 2004: Mathematics (A), Further Maths (A), Physics (A), Art (B), General Studies (A)

AS-Levels 2003: Critical Thinking (B)

GCSEs 2002: 10 (5A*, 5A)