WHO WE ARE

Les Winton has been a Strategic Consultant for many years,  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,  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 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.

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, eventually adding Winton Sustainable Research Strategies (WSRS) in 2006 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.

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.

Les is a long-standing Fellow of the Australian Marketing Institute (FAMI) through which he has Certified Practising Marketer status (CPM; a Member of the Australian Market and Social Research Society (AMSRS), through which he has Qualified Practising Market Researcher status (QPMR); and a Member of the Australasian Evaluation Society.

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