About
HI, I’M VERA GAVRILOVA.
I’m an independent consumer intelligence and brand strategy consultant, and the person behind The Brand Blender.
My work sits somewhere between data, culture and strategy.
I spend a lot of time looking at what people say and do, finding patterns in messy information and figuring out what those patterns actually mean for a brand.
I’ve worked across beauty, luxury, retail, travel, food, health, finance, mobility and corporate reputation (quite sure to forget something!), often across markets.
But the common thread is usually the same: there’s a complicated question, and someone needs to make sense of it.
How my brain works
I’m drawn to contradictions.
When the data says one thing but people behave differently.
When everybody knows a brand but nobody actually thinks about it.
When something looks like a price problem but turns out to be about fairness.
When a huge trend turns out not to matter, and a tiny conversation does.
I like taking something messy, pulling it apart and putting it back together until the story becomes clear. Which is probably why I ended up doing research for a living.
Things I tend to obsess over
- Learning languages I absolutely did not need to start learning.
- Why some brands age into nostalgia and others just age.
- Opera arias I remember three words from and then need to identify.
- The strange gap between what a brand thinks it stands for and what people actually associate with it.
- Why the same noun can be masculine in one language and feminine in another, and what that might reveal about culture.
- Brand content “made with AI” vs. “made by AI,” and the point where communities start to feel cheated.
- Why sailing is elitist in some countries and completely ordinary in others.
- Politicians who became brands, and brands that tried to become political.
I don’t really switch off the part of my brain that wants to understand things. At work, it means looking for the signal in 10,000 conversations. Outside work, it means becoming unnecessarily invested in the history of a street, the origin of a word or what locals actually eat.