A pioneer in applied marketing semiotics, Hamsini Shivakumar is the Founder-Director of Leapfrog Strategy Consulting. She personally steers all projects, initiatives, and client relationships, and is the firm’s leading authority on harnessing semiotics to help clients unlock deeper consumer insight and build more resonant brands.

Her 34+ years of experience spans Quant and Qual research, Brand Strategy Planning and Applied Semiotics. In her last corporate role, prior to starting Leapfrog, she was Vice President and Head of Strategy Planning at JWT Mumbai. In these years, she has dealt with a very wide range of brands, challenges, categories and consumer segments.

She is co-owner of Semiofest, the global unconference for applied semiotics. Pre-pandemic, Semiofest travelled the world from its origins in London – to Barcelona, Paris, Shanghai, Tallinn, Toronto and Mumbai.

She has an insatiable curiosity about people and cultures and enjoys the process of connecting ideas from multiple disciplines – be it philosophy, language, sociology, anthropology and psychology. The practice of semiotics gives her the opportunity to do this joined-up thinking at a professional level. In her spare time, she enjoys listening to classical music, trying out different cuisines and travelling the world.