“All our learning and thinking is driven by emotion. Everything. Emotions can be about ideas, about complex dilemmas, or they can simply be reactive. What… Read More »Emotion is essential in learning, yet schools ignore it
The DINKWAD (double-income, no-kids, with-a-dog) lifestyle is on the rise. DINKs is actually an old buzzword, coined when yuppies (a 1980s buzzword for young urban… Read More »The DINKWAD: Pets over parenthood
With the rise in popularity of the extreme right across Europe, including among young people, many have started questioning if the youth is becoming more… Read More »The Rightward Turn of Europe’s Youth: A Closer Look
Many people are experiencing apocalypse fatigue, which is especially common around the topic of sustainability. Global Web Index defines this as “the exhaustion of making… Read More »3 learnings on how to human-proof sustainability
Once you have an emotional memory tied to smell, they’re married together for the rest of your life. Scents trigger more intense and subconscious memories… Read More »Smells like branding
Three times as many teens between 10 and 14 have started their own business in the last year compared to 2019 in the Netherlands, according… Read More »Why are teens starting businesses?
Our online culture is flooded with memes. They are omnipresent and so powerful that entire communities form around them, where people can simply feel good,… Read More »Memes: The witty take on reality
Every holiday season, we’re pressured to buy more and new – at the cost of our wallets and the planet. Design agency AKQA aims to break this… Read More »Merry Fixmas
Laughing is like exercising, meditating, and having sex at the same time, according to the behavioral scientist Jennifer Aaker of Stanford University. When we laugh, our brains… Read More »Why humorous ads are a form of purposeful marketing?
Despite the Gen Z craze, businesses still fail to grasp young people’s grievances. Recognizing emerging cultural narratives. The longitudinal ethnographic research within social movements has consistently… Read More »culturally relevant insights in an era of unrest
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.
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.
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
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 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
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.
