R Douglas Grant

If you Google "Doug Grant" you'll learn about a man found guilty in a bizarre bathtub drowning—that’s not this Doug Grant. You'll also read about an NHL hockey player—not him either. The Genesis fan with a horse fetish? Not him. The creator of the “greatest vitamin in the world?” Wrong Doug. The septuagenarian rugby star? Nope.

This Doug Grant co-founded Brandtrust at the dawn of the millennium. A reformer at heart, he embraced a mission of bringing the advances in the social sciences to the world of business and, in the process, helped transform the way many of the most advanced insights departments think about how customers think.

Over the years, Doug has worked closely with scores of talented psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and others from the social sciences to uncover insights and inspire fresh ways of approaching challenges. However, Doug isn’t a psychologist who is dabbling in marketing, he is a marketer who has become a social scientist. It’s a mindset that has driven success at a diverse range of world-class clients such as Abbott Laboratories, Allstate, Coca-Cola Company, Danaher, General Mills, FedEx, Harley-Davidson, Hewlett-Packard, Honda, Intel, Kraft, Eli Lilly, Nestlé and Snap-on Tools.

At work, Doug is probably best known as the guy who is always rethinking the way things can be done. At heart, he is an innovator and a process improvement guy—always looking for the smartest thing to do while inspiring others to excel (If he were the eighth dwarf, his name would be “Sparky”.) It is in the very DNA of the company he helped create.

At home, Doug is a runner, reader and an unrepentant napper. But, he is probably best known as an accomplished photographer and photojournalist (you can see his portfolio at http://www.rdouglasgrant.com/). Doug is particularly proud of a project that earned the “Best of Photojournalism” award (http://mediastorm.com/training/family-kocktail). Not surprisingly, this approach to visual storytelling permeates the work of Brandtrust.

Doug also has a passion for teaching. He has taught courses at both the University of Chicago and Columbia College and has been a guest speaker at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism (his alma mater).

If you find that you still want to know more about what makes him tick, you can hunt him down on Linkedin (www.linkedin.com/in/rdouglasgrant) or friend him on facebook (www.facebook.com/rdouglasgrant).