It is the second high-profile hire for the company in as many weeks following last week’s appointment of former Forrester analyst Tamara Barber as senior director of strategic marketing.

Both moves signal a commitment by the company to boost its visibility in the marketplace. Until now, Henning says, Affinnova has been “growing rapidly but under the radar”.

Henning will lead the company’s brand management, public relations, advertising and social media marketing efforts. A noted blogger for Vovici, he has already set up a new blog for Affinnova called Innovation Evolved.

Indeed, his familiarity with social media helped land Henning this new job, having struck up a conversation with an Affinnova account executive at a Tweetup – gatherings of people who know each other through Twitter.

“I had been winning customers through Twitter and this was a job I got through Twitter,” he says.

Henning has worked in the enterprise feedback management software space for the past 17 years, setting up Perseus Development Corporation in 1993 before selling it five years ago to Austin Ventures.

Austin Ventures then merged the company with another firm, WebSurveyor, to form Vovici where Henning held the role of chief strategy officer.

Earlier in his career he worked in product development and evaluation, the space Affinnova is active in. Its concept optimisation technology guides respondents through a series of dynamically generated concept sets where they are asked to select the concepts that are most appealing. Each decision feeds into an algorithm which then affects the content of subsequent concept sets.