Our mission
Emerson & Hughes began in 1991 with a simple mission – to provide our clients with a competitive advantage driven by advanced market research based on marketing theory, using the latest techniques and the latest technology.
To help us achieve this we:
Built a field team across Australia specialising in in-store audits for the purposes of quantifying the sales persons role, measuring the effectiveness of your field operations, and providing compliance measurement.
We built our own online surveying system called SMP to enable us to migrate the powerful consumer modelling techniques we had deveopled to the more affordable online surveying methodology (smpsurveys.com).
The management team
Dr Phil Emerson – Technical Director
Phil has moved between market research and academia for most of his working life, combining a history of corporate research for Amatil (where his role was to create new techniques that provided the corporation with a succinct marketing advantage) with academia (at UTS and as Senior Lecturer at Macquarie Graduate School of Management) and research supplier (co-founding Emerson & Hughes 20 year ago)
Boldly going where no other researcher has been before, Phil specialises in mathematical modelling and multivariate statistics. One of his current preoccupations lies with improving online surveys by designing new question types that truly engage respondents and extracting findings from data of unprecedented clarity
John Hughes – Managing Director
John’s corporate career began as a computer systems manager, then senior market researcher with Coca Cola Amatil, followed by brand management as Brand Manager for the iconic Benson and Hedges brand for WD and HO Wills.
With ambition to run his own business, and siezing on a perceived void in the marketplace, John then went into the supply side of market research, co-founding Emerson & Hughes 20 years ago and more recently SMP Research Software.
Wenyang Yu – IT Director
Combining a passion for computer gaming with a love of getting computer code to do the clever things it’s supposed to do, Wenyang then commenced his IT career in the highly competitive area of game development.
These days at Emerson & Hughes, Wenyang focuses on developing sophisticated web-based user interfaces (web UIs)/dashboards and getting these to connect to and transparently interact with our market research-generated databases. He also manages a team of programmers dedicated to the development of our various marketing research software solutions.
Kelly Pedras – National Field Manager
Kelly started at Emerson & Hughes over 15 years ago in data entry. Her leadership skills quickly emerged, so she then steadily progressed to become Sydney Team Leader, then National Field Manager for Australia and later also for New Zealand.
Kelly is a team player with a strong “can do” attitude that sees her always keen to take on new challenges. Coupled with her strong attributes of confidence, loyalty and honesty, Kelly never fails to give 100% in all that she does. When she has time, one of her favourite hobbies is cooking.