Dr Rachel Lawes, Lawes Consulting Principal
Dr Rachel Lawes is a social psychologist and marketer who turns consumer insight into brand strategy. She brings her commercial experience to the lecture theatre and her academic expertise to the marketplace. Accordingly, her research interests centre on interdisciplinary methods, where the social sciences overlap with each other and usefully contribute to branding and marketing. She is the author of numerous marketing industry publications and conference papers that explain semiotics and similar research methods, the best-known being Demystifying Semiotics (2002). She is also the author of Futurology Through Semiotics (2009) and Rebranding Charmin (2011). Rachel has spent her commercial career encouraging brand owners and marketers to rely less on the psychological research methods of the early 20th century, which are concerned with individual psychology and cognition, and to take more interest in the social and cultural forces, regional, national and international, that shape the behaviour of consumers in very large numbers, cutting across individual differences. She is the founder of Lawes Consulting (2002), a business which serves brand owners around the world and in every consumer-facing sector. Notable clients include Mondelez, Procter & Gamble, JCDecaux and Lilly. Regions in which Lawes takes a special interest: Europe, North America, South America, China, India, South Africa. Commercial applications of semiotics go beyond packaging and advertising; they include branding (creating new brands from scratch, repositioning failing brands), innovating new products and services and predicting future social trends. Rachel is a regular speaker at industry conferences and Market Research Society events and is one of the most recognisable faces in British commercial semiotics.