Brand Growth starts with personal growth

Column Lucas Hulsebos – CEO DVJ Insights

The last few months have been special for DVJ. The Brand Growth study that we conducted in the Netherlands for the third consecutive year had its first year in the UK. The great thing about the study in the UK is the collaboration with Les Binet and Mark Ritson. The thing that always strikes me is the enormous amount of learnings that the work of these men provide. Enormous amounts of data that are reduced to simple choices for marketers. Naturally, the same applies to the work of Byron Sharp, Kahneman and 10 other scientists off the top of my head who have revealed important insights for marketing based on a lot of data. Learnings that really help us do our job better and provide guidelines for growth.

Sovereign

However, I see that many people from the industry choose one scientist and declare that work absolute. For me, it’s a testament to naivety and laziness. Of course, the learnings are welcome, but we also all know that nothing is as vague as marketing for your own brand. It’s about the combination of insights that should help you further. To me, that was the power of Mark Ritson. He managed to switch effortlessly between different trends in academic literature and did not declare one to be sovereign.

Invest

It indicates to me what the most important driver for brand growth is. Personal development. Marketers who are willing to invest in knowledge and, in particular, read a lot from different scientists, are more successful, as our research among more than 1.000 marketers has shown. If you are willing to invest in this personal growth, brand growth will follow. In my opinion, the use of academic knowledge supplemented by common sense is the most important ingredient for growth. Within DVJ we try to stimulate this growth by giving people the opportunity to read and learn. Building an academic network has helped us gain a lot of knowledge and various universities use our data sets to create even more learnings. Learnings that will only work for your brand if you are willing to invest in reading them.