Sydney: 27 July 2022: Kantar Australia has announced the appointment of Carla Bonifacio to Head of Innovation and Product Development. Promoted from her role as Director, Sensory; Carla’s passion for and expertise in innovation and NPD will guide clients to identify opportunities for growth and facilitate sensory ideation and innovation.

Based in Melbourne, Carla brings over 15 years of research experience in food, beverages, FMCG, retail and building business capabilities including working agency-side for Nielsen and Colmar Brunton, and in-house for Schweppes and Mattel. She says that she is “genuinely excited to be taking on this new challenge”.

“Innovation is the driving force of brands and those recognised as innovative are more valuable than those who aren’t – a fact substantiated by our global BrandZ valuations. Kantar has well developed agile solutions and I’ll build on those from the start of every client’s journey to ideate and segment consumers, identify white space, test concepts and track the performance. It is this end-to-end thinking where Kantar stands out for growing with clients.”

“Our local and global wealth of knowledge across Kantar ensures exceptional client value and helps accelerate their growth and shape their futures. Successful innovation must grow portfolio sales in the short-term and build brand equity in the long-term. To do this, we must create avenues for sustainable brand growth with meaningfully different innovations fueled by a holistic understanding of people, their contexts and brands. Partnering with clients to really understand the ins and outs of their business will help them prioritise the ideas for now and the future.”

Kantar Australia Managing Director Jon Foged says, “Carla has a real passion for innovation, is a problem solver and a very commercially and strategically focused leader who will take our innovation domain to the next level”.

“Our clients will truly benefit from Carla’s ability to leverage and solidify the unique assets of Kantar Australia across the full innovation cycle. She’ll be a strategic partner to our Consulting, Qualitative, Sensory, Analytics and Kantar Marketplace teams across areas such as growth strategy and demand space; ideation; idea, concept and packaging testing; taste and sensorial evaluation; pricing; portfolio optimization; forecasting and volumetrics. I am delighted to have her lead our innovation capability.”

Kantar’s accelerated global focus on driving innovation growth for clients was recently augmented with the launch of iLab – a new open innovation ecosystem – at the Cannes Festival of Creativity last month. iLab brings together consumer brands, academia and start-up partners to experiment, create and test innovative solutions and products; increase diversity and inclusion within the innovation community, boost collaboration; empower innovators to reach scale; and disrupt how marketing solutions are created. iLab launch partners include Coca-Cola, Twitter, Oxford University and Audiense.

-ends-