Anthony Paine

Co-CEO & Co-founder

⭐ Helping disabled people live with greater independence @ Designability
🚀 Supporting early-stage entrepreneurs @ KCL Entrepreneurship Institute
📦 Founder @ Stashbee

CEO & Co-Founder

Stashbee is the simplest, smartest, most sustainable way for anyone to share and fill storage space. Whatever your situation or ambition, we have spaces of all sizes for people at all stages.

Customer IQ

Founder of Customer IQ - Market Research for Startups 🚀

Our mission: levelling the playing field by giving founders access to high-quality customer research and market insight.
 
Customer IQ offers something for startup founders at every stage: 

1] Bootstrapped and early stage - training and coaching for DIY research done well. 
2] Market research essentials such as market sizing, competitor reviews and idea validation.
3] Outsourced research projects to get closer to product market fit, eg customer discovery, product testing.
4] Research to help get you scaling eg brand awareness tracking, brand development research.

Founder / Research & Insight Director

Profundo Research & Insight (now Customer IQ)

Profundo was my first go at creating and running a business and took me on a great journey of learning and discovery!

I started out contracting and freelancing, working for corporates and market research agencies who needed my skills or an extra pair of hands.

Whilst this type of work gave me some freedom to manage my own time, it didn't give me the professional reward I was looking for longer-term. 

So around 2016 I focused on positioning myself as a consultancy, delivering research projects to clients, whilst trying to maintain an income. Hard work!

But in 2 short years I turned the business around from 67:33 contracting:freelancing to 82% project work. This was no mean feat and I am genuinely thankful to those early clients for trusting me. 

Building up the business into 2019 and being fortunate enough to be accepted onto the NatWest Accelerator, we then had covid to deal with. 

I managed to scrape through but by 2021, I realised there was a greater mission for me to tackle. The time was right for Customer IQ...

Insight Director [Founder, Owner]

Digital-i

I launched and established the Consultancy division of Digital-i, delivering a number of high profile strategic insight projects to a wide range of Broadcast clients.

More info here: http://digital-i.com/

Head of Consultancy (Contract)

William Hill

Research Consultant (Contract)

Head of Brand, Services & Strategy Research (Contract)

ASOS.com

Lloyds Banking Group

Research Manager

Channel 5

Research & Insight Manager

Startups cannot access good quality market research. 

AND THAT'S UNFAIR!

Certainly when you consider it's startups who need it the most. Through my business - Customer IQ - I am on a mission to change that by changing the way research and customer insight is delivered to the startup community. 

I started my career in research in the year 2000 and spent 10 years in a mix of agency and client roles (BMRB, BBC, Channel 5). 

In 2010 I set up on my own - spent some years in the wilderness of contracting and freelancing before developing a vision and mission to help startup founders and their teams. 

Fancy a chat? Book in at meetgideon.com 🖖

Gideon Barker

No one ever smiles when they're running!
True. But does it mean they're not enjoying it? 

T minus 15 days until I run a half-marathon.  In today's world, this is just a small, meagre feat. Running ultra-marathons or 7 marathons in one week is more at the cutting edge of physical challenges. 

But for someone like me who wasn't put on this earth to run and has only ever run a maximum of 10km until recently, this has turned out to be bl00dy hard!

😭 Bits of my body that I never really knew about before have started to present themselves, and they're often in full-on crisis mode.
 
😭 My warm up routine is now ridiculously long as I try and ward off injury before the big day and warm up every muscle, joint, ligament I still have left. 

😭 Climbing stairs the day after a long run has become a task that creates fear and panic in my mind.

But, despite this I AM enjoying it. 

😁 The sense of accomplishment you get after running 10+ miles in one go. 

😁 The sheer distances you can cover just by running is amazing. 

😁 The emotional effect of endorphins kicking in when 'that tune' starts playing in my ears. 

So what does running help teach us about B2B sales? 

Err, nothing except "It's a (half) marathon, not a sprint!" 😆

(BTW, if you're still keen to sponsor me, I've put the link in the comments).


_______________ 
My name is Gideon, founder of Customer iQ 
I live in the world of customer insight 
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#HalfMarathon #Running

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Growth Coach - Growth Forge Programme

Blogger

Impactful insight for hungry CMOs

FFS would you all stop buying research! 
Nobody needs research 🛑

Instead, think about buying these: 

GREASE  
The kind that prevents moving parts from sticking. 
Grease that helps to make things move more smoothly, more quickly with less friction. 
Like the things that typically get stuck or grind to a halt within your organisation: 

🤝 Decision-making
💬 Communication within teams / across departments
💡 Idea development

Your more single-minded view of the customer can bring people together, it can help move things on more quickly, it can reduce blockages in pipework. 


GLUE
You need glue for your strategies because your strategies need to stick. 
They need to be long-lasting for them to create any kind of impact. 
Glue does that really well (when you get the right kind of glue). 

Evidence of customer behaviours, attitudes, motivations, needs can form the backbone of your strategies and help them stick for a long time to come. 


GOLD
Last but not least, you need to find that pot of gold. 
The gold your competitors will find if you don't find it first. 
The gold that's often sitting there right under your nose but you were too distracted to see it. 

Spending time with customers through interviews, discussion groups or just hanging out and observing them reveals incredible opportunities and ta-dah! moments that are as delightful as they are unexpected. 
Pure gold. 


So no more research please! You likely have enough of that already. 
But do you have enough grease, glue and gold I wonder?


_______________ 
My name is Gideon, founder of Customer iQ 
I live in the world of customer insight 
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The 3 must have metrics no CMO should be without 📐

Metrics are the lifeblood of a CMO. The issue is, there are so many of them and too many of them are complex / difficult for those outside of the marketing dept to understand (or care about).

Received wisdom suggests the 3 key metrics a CMO should have: 

- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
- Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI)

I would argue that whilst these kind of metrics are important, there are 3 more which are EVEN more crucial to a CMO. 

Excited to know what they are?
Read on!


1. AWARENESS
No one is going to engage with, buy from, advocate for or love your brand if they don't know you exist. Awareness tracking (imho) is a key pillar of any marketing dept and, therefore, any CMO. 

It also has the simplicity to be well understood by the C-suite and the potential to create real impact on long-term brand and business success. 

Ok, I know this might be tricky data to collect, say if you're in B2B or a very small, emerging player. But, there are different and quite clever ways to measure awareness - or find a proxy for it. 

Analysing your awareness data - where is it strongest / weakest? - will be fundamental to your marketing and media planning. 


2. PERCEPTION. 
Ok, I'm not talking here about some kind of highly complex, technical brand-perception-come-econometric-modelling study. 

Let's keep it simple and break this down into 2 things:

a. The ONE attribute you most need to protect.
b. The ONE attribute you most need to shift. 

Brand perception tracking doesn't need to be super expensive, it doesn't need to track those 100 finely crafted, semantically-beautiful brand attributes. 

Often, it's best done coupled with your awareness tracking. 

And keeping the focus on the attribute you're protecting and the one you're trying to shift will create a halo effect on the brand and help ensure long-term success. 


3. CSAT  / NPS 
The satisfaction of your customers (CSAT) - or potential customers, audiences etc - or (slightly controversial I know) the NPS score - the extent to which customers would advocate you to their family, friends or colleagues.  

This is your North Star⭐

This is how the CMO is going to create leverage and gain influence across senior managers and across the business. 

CSAT impacts:

📦 Product
🤑 Sales
💬 Customer service
💸 Finance
and elsewhere

And - crucially - this is how the CMO will ally with the CFO. Using customer satisfaction to make a friend of the CFO will pay back huge dividends for the marketing department. 

So there you have it, my 3 key metrics for any CMO. 
Simple, impactful - and perhaps most crucially these are metrics that the Board, C-suite and the whole business can get onboard with. 

What do you think?
Agree/disagree?
I'd love to know 🗨


_______________ 
My name is Gideon, founder of Customer iQ 
I live in the world of customer insight 
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#CMO #Metrics #Marketing

Is the algo pushing your brand down a cul-de-sac to nowhere fast?

When I think about pay-per-click ads and online marketplaces, the image I often have in my mind is of the old-fashioned market, with lines and lines of stall holders flogging their stuff to punters. Amazon, TikTok, Meta etc feel like the modern-day version of this.

Maybe good for shifting product, but what about as a means for building a brand? 

If you are relying on the algorithm for seeking out short-term conversion - what's that actually doing for long-term success? 

I recently worked with a fantastic, category-busting healthcare brand who were doing great at DTC sales, largely through ppc ads. 

Except, when we looked at the customer base and its profile, something stuck out that looked like it was hampering the brand's potential. 

The algorithm was pushing conversion down a particular narrow seam - it had found a niche audience in terms of profile and needs and it was algorithmic-ally double-downing on them. 

Lovely and rich in terms of conversion, sure, but not necessarily the right audience for the business to really scale and realise its potential. 

And for a business which was so very brand and communications focused, this niche felt like only a fraction of the story. It felt like potential was being missed. 

Some inexpensive quant research helped to prove this out - that actually the product concept was much broader than this ppc-created niche might let on. The mass appeal of the product was definitely not being fully realised. 

The action on the back of this work was to give the business the confidence to experiment with a more brand-led approach to audience targeting. Using the research to create a set of personas which represented a huge opportunity to turn the product from niche into much-needed by a mass of potential customers. 

Pretty simple, quick and cost-effective to carry this kind of research out, but the impact is potentially massive. 

Do you recognise this issue within your business? Are you letting the 'market stall' approach to selling dampen your brand's potential?

If so, let's have a chat. 

_______________ 
My name is Gideon, founder of Customer iQ 
I live in the world of customer insight 
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#PPC #Marketplace #CustomerInsight

Is Marketing in a marketing crisis? 😱

"Marketeers need to market marketing much better than they do today"
"We are experts in communicating our products and proposition. Why can't we explain the role of marketing?"

This was just part of a fascinating conversation between Jon Evans and Thomas Barta on the #UncensoredCMO podcast. The topic was 'Why Marketers Don't Make the Boardroom'. 

Imho the Marketing dept of any organisation has the potential to be the most influential and create the most impact. 

Marketing has the potential to impact so many other areas: 

- Product and product development
- Sales / Commercial
- Finance
- Customer service
- HR / Recruitment
- Operations

The Marketing team are the bridge between business and customer. Any CMO has the absolute potential to sit on the Board to ensure their influence is maximised. 

But it's not happening. Very few CMOs sit on company Boards. 

Why so? Potentially Marketing has lost its way - ironically, it may be suffering from a marketing crisis. 

Marketing has always been a discipline which covers a wide range of skillsets, but it hasn't helped itself in terms of how it positions itself to the business world, eg: 

- The reinvention into concepts like 'performance marketing' or 'growth marketing' (all marketing is about growth, no?), 'product marketing' etc. 

- The fragmentation of roles and titles - digital marketers, content marketers, marketing analysts, social media marketers.

So, is there a 'crisis' in how marketing markets itself?
If so, what's the answer? 

Let me know your thoughts 💬


_______________ 
My name is Gideon, founder of Customer iQ 
I live in the world of customer insight 
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#Marketing #MarketingCrisis

Chief Customer Officer | CMO | Uncensored CMO Podcast host | Speaker | Columnist | PMW Top 20 2025

Marketing Leadership

What if YOUR clients and customers could feel like this? 👇
 
"I feel so much lighter now I've got it off my chest..." 
"It's often a lot easier when you're not speaking to the people directly involved"

This is what I was told at the end of a recent client interview. 

Unprompted. They just came straight out with it.

A lighter feeling for being given the opportunity to get things off their chest PLUS having an objective third party to speak to, making honest and open feedback easier to give.

You get that from a Trustpilot review? 
(The 33rd time you've asked them to do it). 

You get that from a client filling in another satisfaction survey?

Nope.

You get this from conversation. 
Real conversation. 
Real conversation between two humans.

You gotta love that ❤

_______________ 
My name is Gideon, founder of Customer iQ 
I live in the world of customer insight 
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#Feedback #CustomerInsight

Q: What's it worth to you to gain WAY more confidence?

Here's the problem... decision-making isn't getting any easier. The world gets more complex (more bonkers too), the market gets more competitive, the ability to grab attention becomes harder and harder. 

So our level of confidence that we're making the right decision is likely to be taking a knock, right? It's going to be more difficult to be certain that if I follow actions A, B and C I will likely get results E, F and G. 

That is, unless your gut instinct is soooo good and reliable that you are literally oozing decision-making confidence through your skin. Not sure how many of us can recognise that description though!

So, how much would you be willing to part with to increase your confidence by X%? 

Let's take the following scenario: 

Company A has £250k to spend on its main marketing campaign of the year. The big one. The one which needs to pay off and ensure that 2026 is a cracking year. 

And let's say - for sake or argument - that the spend on marketing might return anything from £0 to £1m in sales. You might say that confidence here is low - the risk-reward ratio is high when the two extremes are so far apart as £0 to £1m.

No one wants to spend £250k of their budget and get nothing in return.

So what would you be willing to spend to make that risk-reward ratio narrower? What would it be worth paying to turn the potential return in sales into a range from £500k to £1m?  

£100?
£1,000?  
£10,000?

Even at £10,000 - we're taking just 4% of the overall marketing budget.  

That, in my eyes, is what good research and insight can do. It can reduce the risk-reward ratio so that decision-making becomes more certain and you gain more confidence in the outcome. 

But this is all too theoretical of course! Nothing works like this, there are way too many uncontrollable variables at play.

But CONFIDENCE is very often what I deliver to clients, in much more practical ways: 

💫 The confidence that comes from knowing your customers are much more progressive than you might have ever imagined, which means you can confidently develop those innovative new products and services you thought would never fly.

💫 The confidence that comes from testing a really wild and 'out there' creative direction and finding out your customers are willing to go with you on this journey.  

💫 The confidence that comes from knowing much more about who your customers are and why they buy from you so that you can develop messaging and comms that really resonates with them. 

Is this the kind of confidence you might be interested in? 

Let me know what you think 🗨

_______________ 
My name is Gideon, founder of Customer iQ 
I live in the world of customer insight 
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#Insight #Confidence #DecisionMaking

Did you hear the one about the brave cat food brand?
Or, 'how insight can favour the bold' 😽💪

I've recently updated this case study, which was one of my favourite examples of how research and insight can give clients the confidence to make a big, bold decision. 

It's not always about following the decision of the crowd - in fact when testing creative and brand ideas, the 'wisdom of the crowd' can often be misleading. 

Audiences can tend to focus on the path of least resistance. Like water, they can gravitate to something which gives the least friction. But when it comes to ideas and creative execution, this can be less helpful. 

So in testing this bold new cat food brand's creative options, we were able to help them come to the best decision. 

The best decision in this case was not to go with the idea that audiences preferred, but to help give them the confidence to go with a  braver, bolder and way more, way out there idea. 

It's often said that research can kill creativity. And, I would often agree. But in this case, we used research to cultivate it. 

More info available here: https://lnkd.in/ebuNASMW

_______________ 
My name is Gideon, founder of Customer iQ 
I live in the world of customer insight 
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#CaseStudy #Insight

Love this from Kasey Ly.
That first line sounds like a mantra for every CMO who is hungry for results: 
"𝑇𝑜 𝑔𝑒𝑡 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑢𝑙𝑡𝑠 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑝𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑠 𝑑𝑜𝑛'𝑡, 𝑦𝑜𝑢 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑑𝑜 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑤𝑜𝑛'𝑡"
🖖

Brand as a business capability for scaling companies | Checkout.com, Virgin Atlantic, SThree

To get results competitors don’t, you have to do things they won’t.

When you sacrifice something your competitors care about, it opens up entirely new possibilities.

Contrarian value

Bona fide career development or cashing-in on their cachet?
What do you think? 💬

I have heard really good things about the MiniMBA founded by Mark Ritson. 

But now I am also seeing Rory Sutherland's MAD Masters course and wondering whether this is a trend we want to see more of? 

These courses ain't cheap - a little under £2k for the MiniMBA. But there are also now 3 to choose from so you gotta get them all, right? 

MAD Masters I think is more like £1,200 - but their pricing is a little harder to find compared to the MiniMBA. 

And how about £200 for a Seth Godin course via Udemy? Seems like a snip!

So, what do you think? Genuinely excited for this kind of opportunity, or is it feeling a bit too much like cashing-in on their cachet?

_______________ 
My name is Gideon, founder of Customer iQ 
I live in the world of customer insight 
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#CPD #Courses #MiniMBA

image.jpg

All this data... it's making us morally bereft 🤦‍♀️ 

Morals and ethics, great topic for the end of the week!

Sharing an extract from today's 5 Things newsletter. Hot off the press! If you like what you read, you can read more and sign up at https://c-iqmail.com/ 

Should there be a moral code in the application of data, insights, intelligence to business, organisations and people? I would say a big YES! to that. But the question also highlights a problem around how much we know - the extent to which our knowledge really understands the full impact.

Example - some basic analysis might tell us that app notifications increase customer retention. Great! Let’s get those notifications pinging. But what happens when we also find out that constant notifications are increasing anxiety among a particular group of customers?

This raises a real moral dilemma. And how many business leaders would respond one way over the other? The Cambridge Analytica scandal made it very clear that insights can be weaponised against public interest.

A one-off event though, right?

Well, you might think so if you’d not read or listened to Sarah Wynn-Williams book about the inner workings of Meta. Shocking stuff - and presumably much more widespread than just Meta (“just Meta”? Their platforms claim c.4 billion monthly active users!). Netflix’s Social Dilemma doc came out over 5 years ago and the Center for Humane Technology has been around since 2018.

So, here are 3 questions we can all ask ourselves before running any kind of research study or data analysis:

1. Who benefits?

Be explicit. List the primary and secondary beneficiaries of the research: customers, employees, platform, advertisers. If the customer isn’t a primary beneficiary, flag it.

2. What could go wrong?

Conduct a lightweight harms analysis. Consider mental health, financial strain, privacy erosion and social harms. Even a brief risk table will surface issues teams otherwise miss.

3. How will success be measured over time?

Short-term engagement metrics can mask slow‑burn harms. Commit to at least one long-term metric tied to customer wellbeing.

Want to chat more about morals and ethics in the use of data and research? 
Get in touch!

_______________ 
My name is Gideon, founder of Customer iQ 
I live in the world of customer insight 
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#Data #Morals #Ethics

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Gideon Barker's LinkedIn Performance

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