Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, April 2026 — Kantar has promoted Imma Bardés to Chief People Officer, EMEA & Corporate Functions, recognizing her exceptional leadership across global people strategy, organizational transformation, and talent development. With more than 25 years of international HR leadership experience, Imma has played a pivotal role in shaping Kantar’s people agenda across Europe and Asia-Pacific, while driving organizational capability in an increasingly AI-enabled world of work.
In her new role, Imma will lead the People strategy across Kantar’s EMEA region and Corporate Functions, partnering with senior business leaders to strengthen organizational capability, leadership effectiveness, culture, and workforce transformation. She will also spearhead the adoption of AI and agent-based ways of working, helping employees and leaders leverage emerging technologies to improve productivity, agility, collaboration, and innovation while continuing to build an inclusive, high-performing organization.
This promotion represents the latest milestone in Imma’s distinguished decade-long journey with Kantar. Most recently, she served as Global People Director – Product, Technology and Transformation, where she partnered with global leadership teams to shape talent acquisition, leadership development, employee engagement, compensation, diversity, inclusion, and workforce planning across the organization’s technology and transformation functions. A major focus of her role was enabling enterprise-wide AI adoption by designing learning strategies, building AI capabilities across the workforce, and equipping leaders to successfully manage technology-driven organizational change.
Prior to that, Imma served as Global People Director – Technology, partnering closely with Kantar’s Global Chief Technology Officer to develop global talent strategies covering attraction, retention, engagement, development, and organizational capability while embedding inclusion across every stage of the employee lifecycle.
Earlier, she served as Country HR Director – Southern Europe, leading the people strategy across Spain, Italy, Portugal, Turkey, Greece, and Israel. During this period, she worked closely with business leaders to align workforce planning, talent management, leadership capability, and organizational culture with regional business priorities across multiple markets.
Her international leadership journey also includes serving as HR Director for South East Asia and North Asia, followed by Cluster HR Director – South East Asia, where she successfully led regional HR transformation, coached HR business partners, strengthened operational excellence, and partnered with global Centers of Excellence to deliver integrated talent, learning, leadership, and reward strategies across multiple Asian markets.
Before joining Kantar’s global HR leadership team, Imma spent more than 16 years with Kantar Worldpanel, holding several increasingly senior leadership positions. As Regional HR Director – APAC, based in Shanghai, she partnered directly with the regional CEO to build comprehensive talent attraction, leadership development, retention, engagement, and learning strategies across Asia-Pacific while supporting local markets in becoming employers of choice. Earlier, as Regional HR Director – Spain & Portugal, she led people transformation initiatives that earned the organization recognition as one of Spain’s Great Place to Work organizations. She began her leadership journey within Kantar Worldpanel as People Development Director, where she spent eight years building leadership development and talent capability programs that laid the foundation for her global HR career.
Across more than two decades, Imma has developed deep expertise in global HR strategy, leadership development, organizational transformation, employee experience, talent management, culture building, coaching, workforce planning, diversity and inclusion, change management, and AI-enabled organizational capability. Her ability to combine strategic people leadership with digital transformation has made her one of Kantar’s most influential HR leaders during a period of significant business evolution.
About Kantar
Kantar is the world’s leading marketing data and analytics company, providing organizations with the intelligence needed to drive sustainable brand growth. Combining deep human insights with advanced analytics, AI-native platforms, predictive intelligence, and proprietary data, Kantar helps businesses make confident marketing and commercial decisions across global markets. Operating in over 90 markets, the company partners with many of the world’s leading brands to transform consumer understanding into measurable business growth through innovative research, analytics, consulting, and technology solutions.
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