William Higham

William Higham is a worldwide authority on future and evolving consumer behaviours. He helps organisations to understand how tomorrow’s Smart Consumers will think, feel, behave and how they can benefit from this in their business. William creates consumer strategy reports, runs management planning and innovation workshops, and writes and presents on trends.

He gained his initial experience with consumers in the entertainment industry in the 1990s. He began in marketing communications at Sony Music, where he worked on Michael Jackson, Motorhead and Alice Cooper. He later worked as Marketing Manager at Virgin & Universal, where he ran campaigns for The Rolling Stones, The Cure, Meat Loaf, Verve, XTC and Smashing Pumpkins.

His first trends role was Senior Trends Consultant at the Breaking Trends consultancy, whose clients included British Telecom and Levis. He was later appointed MD of research agency OnePoll, whose clients included Kelloggs, Findus and Hilton Hotels. He founded strategic consultancy Next Big Thing in 2002. The company has worked with a wide range of blue chip clients: from BBC to HSBC, Sainsbury’s to Siemens.

William has spoken at, chaired and facilitated conferences and internal events for brands, media and industry bodies: from Barclaycard to Retail Week, Hiscox to FHM.
He’s been interviewed across the media - BBC to Bloomberg TV, Cosmopolitan to The Times. He currently writes consumer trends columns for The Institute of Directors (IoD) magazine ‘Director’ and The Huffington Post.

He wrote one of the first ever handbooks for consumer trend forecasters: ‘The Next Big Thing: Spotting & Forecasting Consumer Trends For Profit’ (Kogan Page, 2009), which has been translated into four languages.

William’s interactive cocktail of the most up to date research guarantees maximum audience engagement. He mixes insight, inspiration and information in a way that always leaves an audience feeling energized and inspired.