After spending most of her career client side—including senior roles at TD, Hudsons Bay and Loblaw—Meghan Nameth has joined Toronto-based boutique market research firm Heads Up as president and chief operating officer.

Since leaving Loblaw last fall, Nameth has kept busy with the CMA, as a member on the board of directors for the Toronto Grace Health Centre, and with iVirtual Technologies Inc., a company she co-founded.

But when it came time to choose new full-time work, she was less interested in another client role.

“I love working on a number of different brands and categories,” she said. “It was hard for me to think about narrowing in on just one… so it’s really about being able to work across many different industries and brands, and help them in new ways.”

Nameth was also familiar with Heads Up, having hired the conpany multiple times in the last decade to work on brands she was leading.

“They have been my go-to partner whenever there’s been very difficult brand or consumer experience challenges,” she said. “They do really innovative consumer research, that takes you to the next level of how do you turn insight into a transformation plan for your brand.”

“Our journey with Meghan as a client over the past 10 years has been nothing short of remarkable,” said Heads Up founder and CEO Lisa Elder in a release. “Some of our most gratifying work has emerged from our collaborations.

Nameth is also excited about getting into market research at a time when the industry could be transformed by AI over the next five to 10 years.

“I think there are just new ways to reach consumers [and] to process data,” she said. “Think about the ability to gather insights at scale from consumers—connect actual behaviour to claimed behaviours—because of the processing power of AI, and how quickly you can train [it] against an objective, that’s really where the game changing capability will come in. The speed at which we can connect insights together and the speed at which we can gather it.”