Bruce Shandler, CEO
Bruce has worked in the marketing research industry for over 35 years and was a partner at Intersearch, one of the premier top 10 research companies in the US. Prior to joining The Research Intelligence Group, Bruce was CEO of TNS North America and helped grow that organization from a 40 million dollar company to over 150 million dollar enterprise during his 6 year term.
Bruce's primary area of expertise is rapidly growing small to medium research entities into major international organizations. His other areas of expertise include strategic development, technology research and mergers and acquisitions.
Bruce served as a member of the TNS Board of Directors and the Advisory Board at University of Texas, Arlington. He is a graduate of Philadelphia University.
Serge Lafrance, Executive Vice-President Corporate Development
Holder of a Doctoral Scholarship in marketing (University of Montpellier, France) and a Masters in Marketing (MSc, University of Sherbrooke, Canada), Serge Lafrance is Executive Vice-President Corporate Development Leger Marketing (Canada) & TRIG (USA). Leger Marketing is the leading Canadian-owned market research and polling firm in Canada.
He has acted as consultant for a number of major companies in the past fifteen years, particularly in the areas of retail trade, branding, and corporate reputation management. Moreover, he has developed a superior model of corporate reputation management, the GRI (Global Reputation Index).
He has taught several university courses for the EMBA, MBA and MSc programs, including courses in Management, Commercial Decisions, Marketing Policies, and International Marketing. He has published articles, given lectures, and led seminars in Canada, the US, Chile, Argentina, France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Serbia, Portugal, North and West Africa. He received the Award for Best Paper from the Canadian Journal of Marketing Research in 2006 and was nominated “Best Professor" two years in a row (Sherbrooke University, Canada 1993 and 1994.)
Ron Cosgrove, Executive Vice President, President Healthcare Division
Ron is responsible for The Research Intelligence Group’s Healthcare consulting practice as well as the specialty sector of the Worldwide Independent Network (WIN) . His responsibilities are to support development of resources and services to fulfill client needs. He provides hands on management of key clients, supporting proposal development, quality control and analysis of results to support strategic marketing decisions. Having worked in pharmaceutical market research for over 15 years, Ron has the experience to know when to utilize custom and syndicated market research to support a broad array of pharmaceutical business decisions. Ron is equally experienced with qualitative and quantitative solutions because he focuses on the client's business decision and uses the right custom research design to support that decision within the budget and timeline. Prior to joining Leger, Ron had been with TNS for nearly 18 years. During that time, he held management positions in market research operations, Stakeholder Management and most recently served as a business unit leader within the Healthcare practice.
Robert Kaplan-Sherman, President Services Division
Rob has spent the past 17 years leading both qualitative and quantitative research initiatives. Most of the studies he leads involve advanced methodological designs and/or statistical analyses. Prior to joining The Research Intelligence Group (TRiG), Rob was the Senior Vice President and Managing Director of Research at LRA Worldwide and Vice President at Hase/Schannen. Rob graduated from Skidmore College with a degree in sociology and psychology and attended Indiana University’s graduate program in Sociology. For the past 10 years, he has specialized in research that can be characterized as customer experience measurement, where he specialized in validating improved customer experiences to targeted business outcomes (e.g., revenue, market share, reduced attrition). He frequently uses customized, innovative conjoint measurement techniques as a tool for these types of initiatives. While he has worked with a diverse range of industries, the bulk of his work has centered within financial services, hospitality and sports and entertainment. Rob is married to Alicia and has one son, Pax. In his spare time, you will find Rob managing his son’s travel baseball team and (loudly) cheering for his favorite team, the New York Mets.