Les Winton             Director and Lead Consultant

 

Les Winton has been a Researcher and Strategic Consultant for many years, specialising in research, insights, strategies and outcomes.

 

His search for insights has blossomed over the past 45 years through his activities as a social and market researcher, an evaluator of policies and programs, and a developer of marketing and communications strategies.  He is an enthusiastic and genuinely inquisitive person.

 

On leaving Sydney Boys High School in the early 1960s, he spent some time with a Swedish steel company in Australia, before being called up for National Service, serving in Australia and South Vietnam. On return to Australia, he grew his hair very long and wandered off to university where he took part in a number of protest marches and obtained a Bachelors Degree in the social sciences, following this up later with a Master of Arts in Marketing Communication.

 

To stave off starvation while completing his first degree, he took a casual job coding questionnaires at Australian Nationwide Opinion Polls (later ANOP Research Services) for their very first opinion poll in 1971, subsequently embarking on a career in market and social research with the company which eventually led to a shareholding and executive directorship of the company.

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Wishing to change direction again, he started his own consultancy Artcraft Research (AR) in 1981 to encompass research-based program evaluation and community and stakeholder consultation and engagement to complement his market and social research activities, In 1998, he established the CANBERRA OMNIBUS SURVEY, which has grown to be a highly successful monthly vehicle for short surveys (some monitoring studies have been repeated over more than a decade) for various directorates and agencies of the ACT Government, along with all three utilities, many Not-for-Profits and a few selected commercial clients.

 

In 2006 Les added Winton Sustainable Research Strategies (WSRS) to reflect his growing interest in all things sustainable, and subsequently Amazing Insights (AI) in 2012 to more or less encapsulate his career so far.  In 2021, Les changed the company name to Winton Research and Insights Pty Ltd, of which Artcraft Research and Artcraft Strategic Consulting are subsidiary businesses. 

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These days Les (and his consultancy generally) still revels in actively pursuing research and evaluation projects, while also enjoying the challenges of community consultation and engagement always with the yearning to reveal fresh insights and new and better solutions to perennial challenges.

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Les is:

• a long-standing Fellow of the Australian Marketing Institute (FAMI), through which he has Certified Practising Marketer status (CPM);

• a Fellow of the Institute of Managers and Leaders (FIML), formerly the Australian Institute of Management (AIM);

• a Fellow of the Australian Market and Social Research Society (AMSRS), through which he has Qualified Professional Researcher status (QPR);

• a Member of the Australian Data and Insights Association (ADIA), through which Winton Research and Insights is an ADIA Trust Mark research organisation.

• a Member of the Australian Evaluation Society (AES); and

• a Member of the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2).

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Key Staff:

Les Winton

Marie Pears

Mandelbrot Quixote

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Associates:

Trevor Lee

Dave Barnes

Laurie West