'Building a Brand' - Wednesday 29th February

Monique Drummond is a caipirinha-loving mother with Kiwi roots and a penchant for diving, entertaining friends and getting into a good novel. She likes to be lazy almost as much as she likes to busy and booked an earlier train back from Leeds to join us this evening. 

Monique is also Senior Partner of Relish Research, which helps brands make the right decisions by offering consumer insights and perspectives on anything from advertising to new products, to branding, packaging and pricing. Her thirteen-strong team have offices in London and Leeds and pride themselves on their fresh and flexible approach. They have provided qualitative and quantitative advice to the likes of L'Oreal, Virgin Media, Vodafone, EDF and The Body Shop. The tightening of budgets for market research seems to be leading to fewer projects of larger-scale; this has in fact favoured Relish's thorough approach.      

Following a degree in English literature, Monique started life in consumer research. However, she was lured over to the dark side and worked as an advertising planner for a number of years in New Zealand and the UK before returning to qualitative research. At the start of 2011, Monique bought out her business partner and re-branded to form Relish. Senior Partner sounds rather hands-off; in fact, Monique spends her time leading groups and gauging Great British opinion (her pet-hate is the unwilling participant in it for the sandwiches!).

Monique is a member of the Market Research Society and the Association of Qualitative Researchers.

George Olver is the founder of Pendragon Productions Ltd, which he founded in 2000. His company creates and places videos telling brand narratives. So far, they are going great guns and have quite a list of clients: Google, Vodafone, Virgin, Aldi, the government of Abu Dhabi...Examples of their recent work include a video for the Vodafone Business homepage explaining the 'One Net' service; a short film about the Vogue jewellery editor's recent Fashion for Jewels book; and a documentary for Channel 4 investigating the rise of East Africa's marathon runners.

Before all this, George took a degree in Film Studies and Media and Cultural Studies at Bristol UWE. His talent for film-making was spotted early and his dissertation project won best documentary at the Moscow International Adventure Film Festival and the Peter Bird Memorial Prize at the Dijon Film Festival. Meanwhile, he began earning on the side by filming weddings. It was this Pendragon Weddings enterprise which eventually funded the full-blooded affair.

Olver produced and directed Tenacity on the Tasman, which was the first independently-produced film to premiere at the Leicester Square Odeon (to a capacity crowd). The film charted the efforts of Olly Hicks on the Virgin and Google sponsored Global Row. Hicks was attempting to be the first person to row around the antartic, passing through every ocean. Rough conditions led the expedition to flounder in the Tasman sea, where George Olver dramatically comandeered the maori-owned fishing vessel Shangrila and towed Hicks to the safety of New Zealand's south island. To make films, says Olver, "All you really need is a camera phone".

Susie Willis is the creative director and founder of Plum Baby. Susie is a mother of three and when she felt frustrated by the lack of a high-quality, off-the-shelf baby food option she did not hang around. She founded a company to provide an equivalent to 'homemade food, not tasteless paste'. Before her Plum brainwave in 2004, Susie had worked for Jeffrey Archer, organising his infamous shepherd's pie and Krug soirees, before running her own cookery school. She once did a stint as chef at the Savoy; now she can come and speak around the corner!

Plum moved rapidly from its conception to the supermarket shelves. Within nine months, Susie had the requisite capital; some of it she raised  from  investors, some from her life-savings, and some by remortgaging her house and taking bank loans. She assembled a team of nutritional experts and skilled workers (such as Bavarian cereal makers – traditional millers). There was no pottering around in farmers' markets, first stop – miraculously – Sainsbury's. Contracts with other supermarkets followed. The company began trading in 2006, enjoying a turnover of £1.6m in its first year. It grew voraciously thereafter, doubling it's yearly turnover in both 2007 and 2008, shrugging off the recession to establish itself as a UK baby-food giant alongside main competitor, Ella's Kitchen. For this astonishing feat, Susie won the Startups award for Female Entrepreneur of the Year, 2007.

The company was bought in 2010 by Darwin Private Equity; Susie stayed on as creative director. She has built a thorough-going brand trusted by mothers: among other projects, Plum has comissioned research by top nutritionalists and developed a series of television animations called 'Plum Vision' which are designed for developing young minds.

Susie is currently working to develop a line of make-up with a British edge. She admires Liz Hurley's style and would never wear white shoes.