Charlie Dawson and Anna Miley

Charlie Dawson established The Foundation in 1999 to help organisations be customer not financially led. Inspiration came from working on a new car company launch that disrupted an inward-looking industry. Examples of projects worked on include helping the £18bn supermarket Morrisons run a customer-led turnaround from 2015 to a PE sale for £7bn in 2021, helping Travelex create £100m of value through a customer-led proposition for a foreign currency payment cars, and helping Visa Europe establish contactless payment from the early days of it apparently being a solution to a problem retailers and consumers didn’t have. He co-authored The Customer Copernicus, completed in 2021, explaining why being customer-led is something that looks attractive and obvious but is in fact rare and temporary.

Anna Miley is a strategy and insight specialist with a knack for uncovering what really matters to customers and helping clients design innovative and commercial responses. While at The Foundation she has worked with the Board at Harvey Nichols to refresh the brand and return the business to profitable growth, with Battersea Cats and Dogs and CRUK to design their first audience-centric growth strategies and Valeo Confectionery to develop a customer-led approach to category management. A Unilever graduate Anna started her career as a consumer psychologist before taking her fascination in human behaviour into the insight and innovation world at Clear