Lisa Bertelsen

Global Director, Research Insights, Leadership, Research, based in New York

On the path to becoming a highly experienced researcher, Lisa picked up invaluable skills in a few career stops along the way: as a paralegal in a law firm, she studied how juries responded to courtroom arguments and advised litigators how to simplify their deliveries; as a journalist, she had to gather a wide variety of opinions, and weave them together to reveal a (sometimes hidden) narrative; and as an interface designer and usability engineer she found that the oldest research tool in the book—good listening—reveals the often deeply hidden reasons why people connect to a brand.

The analytical and storytelling skills she honed in the courtroom, editorial room and usability lab sparked a passion for finding the human face behind statistics—a passion that has fueled the nearly two decades of experience in consumer and business-to-business research and online strategy that she brings to Siegel+Gale as director of our Global Research Insights practice.

For Siegel+Gale, Lisa has led research projects for mega-brands SAP, Aetna and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, among others.

Before joining Siegel+Gale, she founded LB Research Group, a firm that combined market intelligence with human factors engineering and information design. Her pre-Siegel+Gale client list includes Yahoo! Microsoft, Oracle, Intel, Samsung, Fidelity, AIG, Visa, T. Rowe Price, Merrill Lynch, Dun & Bradstreet, IBM, UBS, Miller Brewing, FedEx, and Cola-Cola. Prior to that, she was VP of Qualitative Research at Ipsos, an internationally recognized market research firm, where she led strategy and operations for a unit specializing in the financial services, high-tech and telecom sectors.

Earlier, Lisa worked for Vividence (since acquired by Keynote), and she also served as Director of Usability and Customer Experience at Charles Schwab, where she designed, launched and implemented the firm’s first user-experience metrics, as well as a persona program that helped usher in a new way of looking at behavioral segmentation.

Lisa holds a bachelor of arts degree in political science from the University of California at Santa Barbara and specialty degrees in politics and multimedia from the University of Kent in England and San Francisco State University, respectively.

When not immersed in research, Lisa can be found sharpening the French cooking skills she picked up in culinary school—or camping in the Sahara desert, listening to Tuareg music outside Timbuktu.