PhD. Robert Hocking

Founder, CEO Independence Market Ltd.

London, Greater London, United Kingdom Management Consulting.

Robert’s career began in the late ‘80s and led to him launching his own agency in January 1995. In the course of nearly eight years, he was responsible for building the business from a single advertising agency into a group of four integrated agencies working in the areas of advertising, public relations, digital, and environmental design. In this period, he was also rated as one of the Canadian capital’s top executives under the age of 40.

After selling his interest in the business, Robert was recruited into the strategic planning department of Ogilvy & Mather, where he worked in the position of Vice President, Strategic Planning between Toron-to, New York, and Chicago. From this role he was recruited to sister agency Young & Rubicam into the position of Senior Vice President, Managing Director, with responsibility for two of the firm’s offices.

In September 2007 Fitch Worldwide, the world’s foremost retail design company, recruited Robert to London where he served for five years on the global board as the Chief Development Officer. And in 2012, Robert founded an independent consultancy, working with the likes of Waitrose, Disney, Diageo, GSK, Lau-rent-Perrier and others. Today, he is a management consultant with a business ventures group and runs his own food venture, Independence Market. In addition he complements his consulting and food work as a writer for Design: Retail Magazine and The Robin Report in the US, and The Huffington Post in the UK.

Robert’s overall experience spans B2B and B2C categories for the likes of Motorola, Kraft, Nokia, Unilever, Avon, Dell, IBM, British American Tobacco, Moet Hennessey, Cisco, Dell, Philips, and Fairmont Hotels, across global markets, including the US, the UK, Germany, Russia, Nigeria, India, the UAE, Argentina and China.