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Human-proof
your future

We are a trend consultancy helping organizations (re)connect to the human reality.

Human
context circle™

The Human Context Circle uses two decades of research and academic insights to transform sociocultural trends into business strategies that help clients human-proof their organization, brand, marketing, and innovation.

Why work
with us?

Deep Insights

We provide you deep insight into emerging consumer behaviors and preferences impacting your specific business.

Lowering Decision Risk

We provide you academic fuelled insights & consultancy derived from a proven model (1000+ projects) lowering decision risk.

Saving Time & Resources
 
We provide you with a proven methodology and model that shortens exploration with ready-to-apply strategies; saving time and resources.

Instant Activation

With over 20 years of experience and expertise, we provide guidance to implement improvements on all possible brand touchpoints today.

Ensure Future Relevance

We enable you to anticipate the changing needs & behaviour of people to find new dynamics between you and your target groups and competition to ensure future relevance and competitiveness.

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Challenges
we solve

Navigating the competitive landscape and fostering customer loyalty are just a few of the multifaceted challenges that brands encounter. In an ever-evolving market, staying relevant, maintaining authenticity and adapting to shifting consumer expectations are crucial to success. For over twenty years, TrendsActive successfully helped organisations with these challenges. Here’s a short overview with examples.

Areas of
application

Brand direction
& strategy

Brands that align with sociocultural trends.

Marketing
& Communication

Advertising, content and creativity that sticks.

Innovation

Products and services that are relevant and meaningful.

Organization

Change & leadership development that works.

Brand direction
& strategy

Brands that align with sociocultural trends.

Marketing
& Communication

Advertising, content and creativity that sticks.

Innovation

Products and services that are relevant and meaningful.

Organization

Change & leadership development that works.

Our
clients

What clients
say about us

Signals

In our blog, we track global events, interpreting their implications for brands and organizations based on sociocultural insights.

Reach out and
let's start a conversation!

Reach out and let's start a conversation!

Stay relevant.
Sign up for our
bi-weekly Signals.

A bi-weekly newsletter in which we keep track of what’s going on in the world and translate based on our sociocultural knowledge, what this means to brands.

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Kees Elands

Founder & Strategist

Kees Elands

Founder & Strategist

Kim Pillen

Consultant

Before Kim Pillen started as a trend consultant at TrendsActive, she worked for four years as a creative strategist at Dept. For brands such as Philips, bol.com, Beiersdorf, JBL, and the Consumers’ Association, she built (online) campaign, brand, and social media strategies. After four years, she decided that she wanted to better understand people and society in order to advise brands more effectively. That’s how she ended up at TrendsActive. Here, she can do what she loves most: digging into people’s needs and then working with brands to see how and where they can be relevant and meaningful.

Douwe Knijff

Researcher

Douwe is fascinated by how people work. With a background in Interdisciplinary Social Sciences (Bachelor) and Psychology (Master) and an analytical mind he tries figure out how societal shifts manifest themselves through social culture and human behaviour.

Aljan De Boer

Keynote speaker

Aljan has been widely recognized as an inspiring professional speaker on the critical trends that will shape society in the decades to come. He works as the Head of Inspiration at TrendsActive, a trend consultancy from the Netherlands using social science to human-proof business decision for brands like

  • Disney
  • Vodafone
  • Hugo Boss
  • ASR
  • Rabobank

Next to his role at TrendsActive he is the Community Director at the Institute for Real Growth where he inspires and connects a global community of +400 CMOs.  

He has been on the board of the Dutch Platform of Innovative Marketing for almost a decade. Regular speaker and moderator for the Dutch Marketing Awards and 3 times winner of the best of MIE. 

Kees Elands

Founder & Strategist

Kees his purpose is to help ambitious leaders and brands to human-proof their business. In 2003 he founded TrendsActive, a trend consultancy enabling brands to become more human centric.

Kees consults global brands like

  • Disney
  • The Coca-Cola Company
  • Asics
  • Discovery Channel
  • Swiss Life
  • Vodafone

and many more.

Next to being the founder of TrendsActive, he is also initiator of the first academic trend master for executives at the University of Utrecht and is initiator of various trend studies and white papers on subjects like trust, meaning, visual culture & generations.