My mother, Jackie Cooper, who has died aged 79, led the field in market research, helping to launch many of the everyday brands we now take for granted, including Quality Street, Persil, Guinness, Yorkie, Audi and many more.
Jackie, along with my father, Peter, co-founded Cooper Research & Marketing (CRAM) in the mid-1960s. In developing unique psychological approaches, including one of the first incarnations of the focus group, CRAM transformed the nature of market research.
My mother, known professionally as Jackie French, had an academic rigour combined with empathetic and creative methods that meant she was in big demand from multinational companies, including Unilever, Schweppes, the BBC and Max Factor, among others.
Jackie was born and grew up in north London. Her father, Wilfred, was a glassblower and her mother, Marjorie, a teacher. She was head girl at Hornsey high school and went on to Homerton College, Cambridge, where she trained to become a teacher. Her path seemed set, but then in 1959 she married my father, whom she had known since school days, and they set up CRAM together in Manchester, where he was working as a psychology lecturer at the university.
They returned to London a few years later, but in 1973 they bought a farm and moved to Devon. For the next decade or so my parents farmed at the weekend and worked during the week in the capital. While helping to launch Yorkie bars, my mother won first prize in the Devon county show for her clotted cream.
In the late 1980s she and my father divorced, but stayed the closest of friends. When my mother was in her 50s she moved to New York, where she set up and successfully ran CRAM Inc.
My mother took equality for granted. She did not notice she was a woman working in a man’s world. She was naturally and instinctively stylish, a successful company director, market researcher and a remarkable mum.
She is survived by her three children, Diana, Helen and me; and five grandchildren.
