Dawn Herdman

Founder & CEO

Illuminate Asia

Dawn Herdman combines commercial ethnography with cultural analysis: reading what people do, and the cultural codes behind it. She is CEO of Illuminate Asia, the Southeast Asia strategy consultancy she founded in Jakarta in 2011. It has offices in Jakarta and Singapore, and a team embedded across the region. Dawn brings nearly three decades of fieldwork across Europe, Australasia and Asia. She turns that understanding into growth strategy for brands in FMCG, mobility, travel, technology and finance. She is now testing where AI, wearables and synthetic data sharpen our picture of real people, and where they blur it.