About Me
Gareth is the Director of Consumer Psychology for Decide, the UK’s oldest independent creative agency. Before joining Decide he was an Associate Professor of Consumer Psychology, having taught at universities in Geneva, Paris, and North Wales.
Initially completing his PhD in Consumer Psychology, Gareth specialised in understanding how small changes in the shopping environment can change what people buy, from the music a supermarket plays, the intensity of the lighting, to even how wide the aisles are. But rather than just accepting what other people said, Gareth created numerous laboratory-based experiments to test his ideas. But for an idea to be useful to businesses it can’t just work inside a laboratory - it also needs to work in the real world. Consequently, Gareth has worked with the largest supermarkets across Europe where his ideas were tested using a mixture of eye-tracking, neuromarketing, and of course sales data, before being rolled out to stores across the globe.
Four years and numerous projects later, Gareth became the Director of the Laboratory of Consumer Psychology where he conducted projects for the likes of Unilever, Cadburys, and Aldi; applying principles of psychology to improve their marketing. However, along the way he has also tackled some more unusual projects for clients. For example, working with counter terrorism units to identify techniques used to smuggle contraband through ports and airports, exploring how shoppers react when they come across robot shelf stackers and creating ways to make them less intimidating. And even investigating how visitor’s brains react as they explore art galleries to help understand what exhibitions visitors enjoyed the most but were often too embarrassed to admit to.
A decade later and Gareth is now a Chartered Psychologist (CPsychol), an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society and a member of the ‘Global Association of Applied Behavioural Scientists’.
Teaching
For over three years Gareth was the Course Director for Bangor University’s MSc in Consumer Psychology, teaching a number of highly specialised master level modules including: Consumer Psychology: Theory, Nudges and Behaviour Change, and Applied Consumer Psychology. He then moved to Geneva (Switzerland) where he was appointed as the Head of Marketing Science and Analytics programme at Haute Ecole de Gestion; Haute Ecole Spécialisée de Suisse occidentale.
Although he no longer works in academia full time, he remains a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and continues to act as an external examiner for several Marketing Science and Consumer Psychology programmes. He also continues to teach on a Post Graduate Certificate in Consumer Psychology (a master’s level qualification), helping marketing professionals understand consumer psychology and how to use it in their work.
Gareth is also passionate about teaching the next generation of Consumer Psychologists, supervising PhD students in both the UK and Switzerland. If you’re interested in working with Gareth as an external advisor for a PhD project or if you’d like him to act as an external examiner for a viva, please do get in touch. He’s particularly interested in the impact of environmental cues on consumer behaviour and experiments conducted in a naturalistic supermarket context, both physical and online.
Beyond Work
Outside of work, and when not writing about himself in the third person, Gareth enjoys finding increasingly creative (and expensive) ways to fall off mountains.
Currently, this includes mountaineering, snowboarding, and paragliding, although he’s always looking for new hobbies to add to this list (much to his mum’s delight !).
He can regularly be found travelling and working in his van looking for his next adventure (and attempting to convince his colleagues that he is really working and not just looking for the next mountain to fall off…..)
