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Brand direction
& strategy

In order to remain relevant and appealing to consumers, we assist brands in aligning themselves with sociocultural trends. In today’s rapidly changing world, it’s important for brands to stand for something without standing still. Brands have the power to inspire change and influence consumer behavior. To do so, we help brands make sense of the world around them and anticipate their future.

What we do:

  • Develop brand purpose
  • Develop brand positioning
  • Objectify long term vision
  • Create brand architecture and portfolio strategy

Challenges

"Develop our health care proposition"

"Enable us to create the healthiest generation of the world in 2024"

"Objectify our vision towards 2030"

"Co-create our global brand positioning and guide us with the implementation"

"Develop a consumer centric vision on the implementation of the smart grid"

"Reposition Donald Duck in a relevant way for todays consumers"

"Enable us to make our CSR strategy more relevant for people"
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People expect brands to be relevant and add meaning to their lives.

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More areas of
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Marketing
& Communication

Innovation

Organization
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Marketing
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Innovation

Organization
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Trendsactive_blau

Kees Elands

Founder & Strategist

Kees Elands

Founder & Strategist

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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.

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.

Kim

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.

Douwe

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. 

Aljan

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.

Kees