Helen Jones
Head of Qualitative Research & Insight Consultant
Helen Jones is an experienced insight and research professional with more than 20 years’ experience across agency and client-side roles. As Head of Qualitative at Vision One, she brings extensive expertise in understanding what people think, feel and do—and, importantly, why.
With a background spanning consumer insight, brand strategy, customer experience, behavioural insight and commercial strategy, Helen specialises in designing and delivering qualitative research that gets beyond the obvious answers to uncover the deeper motivations, needs and tensions that shape behaviour.
She works across both consumer and business challenges, helping clients turn rich qualitative insight into clear strategic direction—from brand positioning and proposition development to communications, customer experience and innovation.
Helen holds a BSc (Hons) in Psychology & Sociology from the University of Leeds.
Uncovering the human insight behind behaviour, brands and decisions.
Helen’s Story
Helen’s career has been built around understanding people and helping organisations make better decisions from what they learn.
She began her career in marketing before moving into research and insight roles across retail, financial services, FMCG and healthcare. Her experience includes senior client-side insight positions at Danone Nutricia and Screwfix, as well as more than a decade leading insight and planning at a specialist communications and insight agency.
More recently, Helen has worked as an independent insight consultant, delivering strategic research programmes for leading UK brands and major retailers.
This combination of agency and client-side experience gives Helen a strong understanding of both sides of the research relationship. She understands not just how to conduct great research, but how insight needs to be presented and applied to influence marketing, brand and commercial decisions.
Helen joined Vision One to lead our qualitative capability, bringing her experience in qualitative research, customer understanding and strategic insight to a wider range of brands and organisations.
Qualitative Research Expertise
Helen has extensive experience designing and delivering qualitative research across a wide range of business challenges, including:
- Focus groups and group discussions
- In-depth interviews
- Customer and consumer closeness
- Brand and proposition development
- Brand positioning
- Communications and creative testing
- Customer experience and CX
- User experience and UX
- Shopper research
- Innovation and NPD
- Behavioural and motivational research
- Segmentation and customer understanding
- Insight workshops and co-creation
- Immersive qualitative programmes
Helen’s approach is deliberately strategic. She looks beyond what people say to understand the underlying motivations, behaviours and emotional drivers that can help brands make better decisions.
Clients Worked with
Here is just a few of the clients that Helen has helped over the years
Tribe Communications
During her time at Tribe Communications, Helen designed and delivered a continuous Consumer Closeness programme that won Best Consumer Insight Strategy at the Drum Marketing Awards.
Danone Nutricia
At Danone Nutricia, Helen led UK consumer, shopper and healthcare-professional insight programmes to inform brand strategy, category growth and new product development.
Freemans Grattan Holdings
At FGH, Helen worked in customer insight, using research and customer understanding to inform strategic and commercial decision-making, through a crucial period of brand rerepositioning and digital growth”.
Helen’s role as Head of Qualitative Research covers a range of industry sectors across the field.
What Helen Brings to Vision One
Helen brings a powerful combination of qualitative research experience, strategic insight, commercial understanding and client-side perspective.
She understands that the best research doesn’t simply generate interesting findings. It should change the way a business thinks, help teams make better decisions and ultimately create better experiences for customers.
As Head of Qualitative at Vision One, Helen works closely with clients to design research that gets to the heart of their challenge and delivers insight with genuine strategic value.
Whether the question is about people, brands, customers or behaviour, Helen is passionate about finding the human insight that makes the difference.
Away from Vision One, Helen has a particular interest in health and wellbeing. She is also a qualified wellbeing coach and founder of Helen Jones Nutrition, where she has delivered digital content, workshops and coaching to private and corporate clients.
“So what attracted you to a career in Market Research?”
“I actually fell into market research rather than consciously choosing it as a career. Research became part of my first ever job as a Strategic Marketing Executive at PasTest, and I quickly realised it was the part of the job I loved most. I’ve always been fascinated by people – what makes them tick, why they behave the way they do and what influences the choices they make – and I realised research was the perfect fit for me. More than 20 years later, the opportunity to keep learning about people is still what I love most about it.”
One of the things I’m most proud of is establishing insight capability within organisations where there hasn’t been any before. At Screwfix, I built the customer insight function from the ground up, establishing new ways of bringing the customer voice into all aspects of the business. Later, as an independent consultant, I had the opportunity to do something similar with Toolstation. Seeing insight become embedded in decision-making and changing the way organisations think about and understand their customers has been hugely rewarding.
I’ve always been particularly interested in getting beneath what people say to understand what’s really driving their behaviour – the motivations, emotions, tensions and context underneath the rational answer – endlessly fascinating!
I’m also a huge believer in consumer closeness which is all about bringing clients in direct contact with consumers, giving them the opportunity to see and hear things first-hand rather than everything coming through a research debrief. There’s something really powerful about experiencing that connection for yourself and I’ve seen how it can bring insight to life and change the way people think and feel about their customers.
To keep doing work that I find interesting, varied and meaningful, and to never stop learning. That’s one of the things I love about research – every project brings a new challenge, a different client or a new group of people to understand. At Vision One, I want to bring all of my experience to the work we do, while continuing to challenge myself, stay curious and make a real difference for our clients.
Get In Touch With Helen
helen@visionone.co.uk
Phone
Call 0151 945 0150
Connect with me on LinkedIn
Meet some other Vision One team members
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