Planning Committee
Gary is founder of Hitch, a leading and award-winning UK social change marketing agency that works with organisations and brands committed to changing society for the better. During his career he has tackled social issues as a public health commissioner, marketing consultant, research practitioner, social activist and social entrepreneur.
Gary began his agency life in advertising, working for a portfolio of leading consumer brands. As a social marketing and behaviour change practitioner, he has worked on and led many programs, campaigns and projects with central and local government, international charities and corporates on health, wellbeing and sustainability challenges.
Hitch is an integrated agency with departments in Behavioural Insights; Strategy & Planning ; and Creative & Digital (plus capabilities in digital R&D). Recent briefs have been as diverse as: piloting and scaling the international Dry January alcohol harm prevention campaign; program directing community services for families in crisis; designing and implementing a refugee anti-stigma national program; convincing rail users to travel safely; engaging street drinkers to access support services; eliminating new cases of HIV in city regions; and transforming the way parents think about accessing health services.
Gary has been a contributor at St Andrews University, Edge Hill University and Liverpool University, as well as at international conferences, speaking on the application of social marketing practice.
Gary also leads Hitched Communities, a not-for-profit company focussed on working with the charity sector to resource, design, pilot and scale social innovation initiatives.
As a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and Certified Member of the Market Research Society, Gary focusses his energy on designing insight driven solutions whilst bringing together partners, technology and new ways of thinking to ultimately challenge attitudes and change behaviours for the social - and sustainable - good.
It's a privilege to work across the private, public and third sectors where I help organisations build capability to reach and communicate with their clients. I do this through marketing, behaviour change programmes, management development, training and consultancy. I work with the disciplines of behavioural science and customer experience which embraces marketing, behaviour change strategy and learning and development to achieve this.
Liz Barnes is a registered member of the Global Association of Applied Behavioural Scientists.
I am a qualified Behavioural Scientist, strategic Chartered Marketer and Fellow of the Chartered Institute Marketing, as well as being a qualified trainer. I work as a consultant, strategist, trainer, facilitator and practitioner. I advise on customer experience and journey mapping, behavioural science, customer research / insight, behaviour change, marketing and business strategy.
People comment on my tenacity and warm energetic style when training or managing client work. I also complement this with a high level of professionalism being commercially astute and widely respected with a solid track record of effective delivery.
Developing people, developing business and developing myself - I love the journey.
Jeff French is a recognised global leader in the application of behaviour change and social marketing. Jeff has extensive experience of developing leading and evaluating behaviour change projects, social marketing programmes and the development of communication strategies at international, national, regional and local level.
With over 30 years experience at the interface between government, public, private and NGO sectors Jeff has a broad practical and theoretical understanding of national and international health and social development issues.
Jeff and has published over 70 chapters, articles and books in the fields of behaviour change, social marketing, community development, health promotion and communications. Jeff is a visiting professor at Brunel University and Brighton University and a Fellow at Kings College University London and teaches at four other Universities in the UK.
Jeff was the Director of Communication and Policy at the Health Development Agency for five years from 2000 – 2005. In March 2005 From July 2006 through to July 2009 Jeff set up and managed the National Social Marketing Centre for England. In August 2009 Jeff became the Chief Executive of Strategic Social Marketing Ltd.
Strategic Social Marketing works with clients from all over the world in the private, NGO and public sector on the development and evaluation of social behaviour change programmes. Strategic Social Marketing also provides consultancy services to some of the world’s biggest corporate communications and research companies.
Jeff continues to act as the principle adviser to the National Social Marketing Centre and the Department of Health behaviour Change and Social Marketing policy team. Jeff also acts as an advisor to a number of national policy committees, the EUCDC Knowledge and Resource Centre in Health Communication project, and is a member of the organising committee of the Global Social Marketer’s network. Jeff is a member of the editorial Boards of the International Review on Public and Nonprofit Marketing and the Journal of Social Marketing.
Jeff is Conference Chair of the World Social Marketing Conference. His new book ‘Social Marketing and Public Health Theory and Practice’, published by Oxford University Press is now available. Jeff is also the author of the NSMC’s new guide to procuring and managing the delivery of social marketing service.
Sarah Cork is a Senior Lecturer in Social Marketing, Consumer Psychology and Marketing Ethics and Social Responsibility at Brighton Business School and leads the teaching of social marketing at Undergraduate and Postgraduate level, with research focused on bringing together the public, private and third sector to make positive lifestyle behaviours more easy, attractive, affordable and socially normal.
She combines this with practical experience as a founder and CEO of leading social marketing consultancy, Brilliant Futures, combining social marketing and behavioural science to encourage and enable positive health, social and environmental behaviours. Projects have included tackling a range of public health issues including mental and emotional wellbeing, healthy eating, physical activity, sunbed usage, binge drinking, smoking in pregnancy and wider issues including road safety, sustainable transport, increasing access to employment and reducing social isolation in older people.
Having started her career in FMCG and retail marketing, Sarah is particularly interested in bringing together a range of stakeholders to take a whole systems approach to tackling societal and environmental issues, focusing on using structural and policy levers to enable rather than just encourage positive behaviour change.