Nicola brings 25 years’ experience across quantitative and qualitative research, including continuous tracking and ad hoc studies. She helps clients understand what the data is actually telling them, from first question to final readout. Collaborative by instinct. Sea swimmer.
The question is rarely the problem.
The conditions are.
Q&R was built around one conviction: people will tell you what they really think, if you make it safe enough, quick enough, and worth their time. Everything here, the method, the programmes, the books, the coaching, follows from that.
Listen.Better
The Belief Before the Biography
Annabel founded Q&R because she had seen the same failure repeat across organisations of every kind: research commissioned, delivered, presented, and quietly shelved. The gap was never indifference. It was structure. Nobody had designed the follow-through. Nobody had made it anyone’s job to close the loop.
Q&R was built to be that thing.
Annabel Dunstan is an anthropologist by training, which means she spent her degree learning to understand what people actually do rather than what they say they do. It turns out this is useful in research.
Her career before Q&R was not linear. She started as a lumberjack’s assistant in Switzerland, became a ski guide, then a sailing instructor, then joined the marketing team at Gulf Air during the first Gulf War. She became a regional television presenter, fronting a business programme that required her to interview CEOs without warning and keep them talking. She was good at it.
She joined a top PR consultancy in 2003, was appointed Managing Director three years later, and grew it to a top-50 UK agency with £7.5 million in revenues and 75 consultants.
In 2011, she set out to build something of her own, not because something had gone wrong, but because she had a conviction about listening that she could only build herself. Q&R launched in 2012.
Since then she has turned the work into a body of proof: four books, a case study archive across sectors, an ILM Level 5 accredited coaching practice, and a public interview series where leaders talk about what changes when you listen properly.
She also plays alto saxophone. She is working on it.
The Work Is the Evidence
Q&R’s intellectual foundation is not asserted. It is documented.
Four books. A case study archive spanning agencies, membership organisations, corporates, and public bodies. A methodology, the Listen Better Loop, built from practice and written to be used, not displayed. A public interview series where leaders talk about what changes when you listen properly.
The work is the evidence.
The Books
Annabel has written four practitioner guides, each one the thinking behind a service lane, written to be used rather than shelved.
The Art of Client Satisfaction is for anyone responsible for a client relationship that is performing on paper and feels different in the room.
The Art of Employee Experience is for leaders who are hearing the official version and want the real one.
The Art of Membership is for membership organisations navigating the gap between renewal data and genuine engagement.
The Art of Listening Better is for anyone who wants to understand what they are missing, and what to do with it.
The Team
Q&R is a small team of specialists. Everyone here is brought in because they are genuinely good at one thing. That is how the work stays sharp.
Nicola Haworth-Booth
Market Research Consultant
Amy Rarity
Operations
Amy keeps the engine room running cleanly: scheduling, logistics, delivery support, and the quiet detail that stops work slipping. Excellent cook.
Rachel Allison
EDI Consultant
Rachel brings EDI expertise rooted in communications and storytelling. Over ten years in PR, then founder of her own practice, Axe and Saw. Calm, direct, and practical.
Sarah Jones
Design
Sarah turns findings into visuals a room can understand quickly. She builds infographics and data storytelling for agency pace and agency deadlines. County-level badminton.
Julian Davies
Finance
Julian brings commercial and financial counsel with over thirty years supporting marketing services businesses. He has worked with Annabel for more than fifteen years. Snowboarder.
Ian Henderson
Board Advisor
Ian brings senior counsel spanning creative direction, marketing consultancy, and agency leadership. He keeps Q&R honest, sharp, and focused on what will work in the real world. Long-distance cyclist.
Coaching
Coaching is the same listening discipline applied at individual level. Annabel works with leaders and professionals who can feel something is being edited, from the people around them or from themselves.
It is practical, direct, and built around follow-through. ILM Level 5 accredited.
Watch and follow
The Listen Better YouTube channel is where Annabel interviews leaders about the hardest parts of listening: the conversations people avoid, the feedback that changes things, and what follow-through actually looks like in practice.
I started Q&R because I believed organisations that genuinely listen to their people, and act on what they hear, outperform those that do not. I still believe it. The evidence has been gathering for over a decade.
Most organisations do the asking. Very few close the loop.
If you want to talk about what your people have stopped saying out loud, book a call.
If you wait for the truth to surface on its own, it will. Usually at the worst moment.
Or start with a book. We will point you to the right one.