A year defined by resilience and a willingness to change

Editor’s note: Samworth Brothers Insight Team are finalists of the 2026 Best Client-Side Team award, a category in the Quirk’s Awards. The winners of the awards will be announced on November 17 during a virtual celebration. To find out more about the awards, visit QuirksAwards.com.

The insight team at Samworth Brothers is a small, close-knit group delivering meaningful impact across a £1.7 billion business and more than 400 stakeholders. The team focuses on turning insight into long-term strategic value, but this year has brought budget and personnel cuts.

They responded with resilience and adaptability to these challenges. By listening to feedback and working more resourcefully, they improved both efficiency and impact, saving the organization money while maintaining high-quality output.

This response is something the judges of the Quirk’s Awards Best Client-Side Team award category believe should be recognized, which led to the team being named as a 2026 finalists.

Hear from Nic Keeley, head of insight at Samworth Brothers Group, on what makes the team so influential and how the group stayed resilient.

What is one thing your team does to ensure insights are influential in the organization’s decision-making?

We involve decision makers throughout the process, not just at the point of delivery.

We work closely with stakeholders to understand the business decisions they need to make, helping shape research around real commercial challenges rather than simply answering questions. By keeping stakeholders engaged throughout projects, we build ownership and ensure insights are relevant, actionable and quickly adopted.

We also make insights highly visible across the business through initiatives such as Insight Week, regular business updates and collaborative workshops. This helps create a culture where consumer understanding informs everyday decision-making.

Our role extends beyond reporting findings. We connect consumer needs, market trends and commercial priorities to provide clear recommendations that drive action. This approach has helped the insight team become trusted advisers across Samworth Brothers, ensuring insight consistently informs innovation, strategy and investment decisions.

Describe a challenge your team has faced in the last year and how you overcame it.

One of the biggest challenges our team faced this year came shortly after being named AURA Team of the Year 2025. We experienced significant budget reductions and the loss of two team members, creating pressure on both capacity and delivery. With more than 400 stakeholders relying on insight across a £1.7bn business, maintaining a high level of support was critical.

To overcome this challenge, we fundamentally redesigned our insight delivery model. We prioritized the projects with the greatest commercial impact, increased our use of agile research techniques and found new ways to leverage existing knowledge and data assets before commissioning new research. We also strengthened partnerships with stakeholders, ensuring resources were focused where they could create the most value.

As a result, we reduced costs substantially while maintaining the quality, relevance and influence of our work. Despite operating with fewer resources, the team continued to shape key business decisions and deliver significant commercial impact.

In what ways did your team respond to the challenges of the year with resilience and adaptability?

Our response to a challenging year was characterized by resilience, adaptability and a willingness to change. Rather than allowing reduced resources to limit our contribution, we embraced the opportunity to work differently. Team members stepped outside their traditional roles, shared expertise more broadly and supported one another to ensure critical business needs continued to be met.

We also became more agile in how we identify and respond to emerging priorities. Whether bringing new topics such as GLP-1 and AI into strategic conversations, facilitating collaborative workshops or helping teams make faster decisions using existing evidence, we remain proactive rather than reactive. We focused on finding opportunities within constraints and maintaining a positive, solution-oriented mindset.

The experience strengthened our culture, increased cross-functional collaboration and reinforced our reputation as a trusted business partner. As a result, we emerged as a more agile, confident and future-focused team, better equipped to deliver value in a rapidly changing environment.