Paul graduated from Durham University in 1969. He worked in marketing for Dunlop and Johnson Firth Brown before establishing Business & Market Research (B&MR) in 1972.
Paul built B&MR to be ranked 20 out of 400 agencies in the UK with a turnover of £5 million and a throughput of 400 research projects per year. Business & Market Research plc became one of the largest business-to-business market research agencies in Europe and was the first to achieve ISO 9000.
Paul sold his majority share holding in B&MR to an MBO team in October 1996 and established with his former business partner, Peter Jackson, Hague Jackson Ltd, a marketing consultancy. Clients include Air Products, AXA, British Gas, Coca Cola, Dow Corning, Dow Chemicals, DHL, Shell Energy and Shell Global Solutions.
In 1998, Paul launched B2B International, a specialist international business-to-business market research consultancy.
There are three main types of business-to-business market research, and they form the basis of B2B International’s offering:
- Customer Loyalty
- Positioning
- Market Assessment
Paul is a Visiting Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University and a regular guest lecturer at Manchester Business School.
He has written the following texts: "Market Research", "The Industrial Market Research Handbook", "How To Do Market Research", "Market Research In Practice", "Questionnaire Design", "Interviewing", "Sampling & Statistics", "Presentations And Report Writing" and "The Power Of Industrial Branding“, which have been translated into Chinese and a number of other languages.