Tony Durham Consulting Limited

Tony is 59 years old and was born and lives in England. Tony is one of the world’s leading experts in the application of shopper behaviour and shopper psychology knowledge to the retail environment with a proven track record of building sales and profit with leading retailers around the world. Tony runs his own training and consultancy company, Tony Durham Consulting Limited, specialising in training shopper behaviour/shopper psychology both in a classroom setting and on his famous “store walks” where this knowledge is directly applied in a real store. In addition, he is available for corporate and conference speeches on a range of topics. He also runs Claims Development workshops and Brand Clinics bringing over 35 years of expertise in marketing and shopper behaviour to brand owners focused on the complete path to purchase from pack design to final consumption. These Brand Clinics are based on a similar format to the “Store-thought Clinics” he used to run at Procter & Gamble and which won the “best organisational capability building globally” in the P&G global Brand Building awards. Tony works with brand owners, retailers, consultancies and agencies including some of the world’s largest blue-chip companies.

After gaining a BA in Economics at Leeds University and a short period working for Makro his entire 35 year career was with Procter & Gamble. Tony held a variety of commercial roles before specialising for the last 20 years in the application of shopper research, liaising with leading academics to better understand how shoppers process information and behave within the retail environment. Building on these insights Tony created a new department within P&G that built on the key pillars of category management by incorporating the core principles of shopper psychology. This department combined an understanding of the commercial realities for retailers and manufacturers alongside unique shopper research and was so successful that the concept was rolled out across Europe before becoming a key part of P&G’s global strategy focused on the shopper. Tony sat on the global steering team for Shopper Based Design.

In 2008 Tony wrote ‘The Complete Guide To In-store Claims,’ a book which covers in great detail the process from identifying purchase barriers to developing claims and choosing vehicles on which to promote them. Over 30,000 copies of the book were distributed globally within P&G and it formed the basis of the claims training he ran internally at P&G for many years.

Tony’s next major innovation was to develop the concept of regional First Moment of Truth Centres (FMOT) where all the relevant shopper knowledge and category best practice could be housed and used with retailers to raise the standard of in-store executions. These have now evolved into learning facilities in their own right where ideas developed jointly with retailers can be tested with shoppers either via real fixtures or via virtual reality, or a mixture of both. The FMOT centres became such a competitive advantage that a network of these centres was rolled out globally and eventually this approach was copied by several of the world’s leading FMCG companies.

Tony is evangelical about emphasising the importance of incorporating shopper psychology into all in-store design work and so is a regular speaker at Global conferences. He created the original shopper psychology course that all P&G people with contact with the shopper were encouraged to attend, before updating this with shopper psychology 2 three years ago and recently co-wrote a new version that applies this knowledge to the digital world. Tony was the Global Master Trainer responsible for training P&G trainers on how to deliver and apply this expertise. For the last 20 years he has also run these courses for the boards of the major global retailers who are close partners of P&G in addition to running on-going training for their employees at all levels. This has resulted in Tony running projects and tests with a huge variety of retailers across many markets and in every channel.

The expertise in cognitive psychology and behavioural science led to Tony being invited to join the Procter & Gamble Global Packaging Qualification Council which was designed to ensure packaging was designed that delighted shoppers and consumers whilst building the business. Approval by the council was mandated for all high-risk packaging initiatives.

A P&G Director/Associate Director for 15 years, Tony is one of the highest rated trainers both within P&G and externally with many describing this training and the insights and actionability of the content as the best in their careers.

For the last 2 years, through his own consultancy, Tony has proved this expertise can be applied across a diverse range of companies in a variety of markets from traditional FMCG ( from Yoghurts to Cleaning products) to Electrical, Pharmacy and Specialist Beauty. He recently updated his knowledge with a specialist short course in Behavioural Science with Warwick Business School.