What is Brand Growth Platform?

The Brand Growth platform is a knowledge base providing unique learnings for marketing and insight professionals looking to grow their brands.

The Platform consists of the following components:

  1. Following science and academic thinking: We like to combine academic experience with practice by cooperating with different universities through academic boards that we use for sparring and consultation, our PhD sponsorships to build extensive knowledge, and marketing programs to work with databases and validate insights and tools.
    We cooperate with marketing professors like Mark Ritson, Les Binet, and Peter Field.
  2. Vision interviews with marketing leaders: We have open conversations with marketing leaders to better understand the way they use marketing to support growth. These interviews cover a wide range of topics and are intended to structure our thinking, explore new thoughts and see what is missing in daily practice.
    Over the past years, we have spoken with hundreds of CMOs, CMIs and CEOs from brands like Vodafone, Domino´s, Volvo, Cloetta, Nestlé, and Unilever.
  3. Quantitative study with marketing professionals: For 8 years, we have conducted a large-scale quantitative study among 2,300+ European marketers and professionals & 3,000+ consumers. These studies validate our insights and help us understand which strategy or tactics work best. By measuring the success of each company, we are able to see what separates the well-performing companies from the rest and help clients develop winning strategies.
  4. Brand Growth Event: An annual event that showcases best practices from leading brands as well as the most recent academic learnings presented by marketers and professors. The purpose of the Brand Growth event is to bring together all the knowledge and learnings gathered from research, science, and practice over the course of the year.

Our goals

Based on DVJ’s values to share the passion for research and our mission to help clients grow, we developed the idea of our Brand Growth Platform where all learnings come together. The objectives of this platform are:

  • To innovate our own products and solutions. All our solutions are designed to support our client´s growth and therefore, we constantly seek to improve our products. The feedback from practice and science leads us to better solutions and products.
  • Train people internally. Our researchers and consultants add value to every study and help clients interpret the results of a study. By understanding the possibilities to grow better and the role of different ingredients, we are able to support our clients better.
  • Sharing knowledge through our content, workshops and events. We share our knowledge through content in different forms, by writing articles, cooperating with media partners, organising roundtables and workshops to dive deeper into the topic discussed and organising our yearly Brand Growth Event.

History of Brand Growth

Growth is a primary objective for many companies and therefore, it is an important topic to be at the centre of our focus. The mission of DVJ is to help companies grow and realise their objectives.

In 2010, Byron Sharp published his book ‘How Brands Grow: What marketers don’t know’. In this book, he presented decades of evidence-based scientific research for marketers to grow their brands. This book was the inspiration for us to start organising workshops and masterclasses about brand growth, how to implement the EBI findings and what the consequences of research are.

Our first learnings made us realise that:

  • There are many other ideas supporting the findings of the Ehrenberg Bass Institute. Sometimes we discovered new insights that showed a different perspective.
  • Many professors all around the world are investigating the topic of growth. The findings of those studies are not distributed well as the work from the Ehrenberg Bass Institute.

We wanted to share all insights related to Brand Growth from both the professors’ and marketers’ points of view and we realized that there was much more to that.

In 2016, DVJ started the Brand Growth Platform by setting up a long-term programme and an ambition that could last for ages. In order to do so, we had to find a way to bring all learnings together and make sure that we keep on sharing all perspectives from different people, professions and companies.

The development of the Brand Growth Platform started and then evolved into its current global state.

Because we believe that there are many angles related to Brand Growth we choose one ingredient that we explore each year. These Ingredients for Brand Growth are selected by our Brand Growth board and based upon developments in academics and practice.

 

Ingredients for Brand Growth

Promotions

“While sales promotions can boost sales temporarily, they don’t lead to long-term growth or increased loyalty.”

How to integrate Promotions into a winning strategy?

Is there a consensus in the academic world regarding the impact of promotions on sales?

Why do brands use promotions so often? What are the main reasons for having an active promotion strategy?

CSR

Corporate Social Responsibility is a management concept in which companies integrate social and environmental concerns into their business and marketing strategy and interactions with their stakeholders.

What can we learn from socially and environmentally responsible businesses and marketers? How can we all start behaving and consuming in a more sustainable way? How to include CSR in business strategy?

Moment of Truth

The MoT can be defined as a specific point in the customer journey, where the customer forms an indelible impression and/or an opinion of the product, brand or service, which influences the customer’s decision to purchase or enter into a transaction. For many firms, the MoT equals the Moment of Purchase.

What is the most important Moment of Truth? What are the main challenges in influencing the Moment of Truth?

Data driven decision-making

As firms have more and more data, it becomes more and more important what they subsequently do with it.

To what extent are firms already data-driven? To what extent do they use data for important marketing decisions?

Creative development

Creative development is of utmost importance for making your advertising successful. Creatively strong ads need fewer GRPs to gain the same impact as weak ads.

What does the creative development process look like? What are the challenges in this? To what extent and in what phase is research used?

Innovation

Innovation, which can be both radical and incremental, appears to be one of the largest drivers of brand growth.

What are the sources of innovation and who is responsible for innovation? What does the innovation process look like and is research involved in it?

Media

Byron Sharp argues that you should always be visible as a brand and therefore, use an always-on strategy.

To what extent are firms focusing on branding and to what extent on sales activation? Are they applying the 60/40 rule as preached by Les Binet and Peter Field? Which media are being used?

Brand

The brand is at the core of Brand Growth, which is why the first year, we focused on the brand and its strategy.

Is branding used throughout the organisation? Is there a brand policy? And is the brand used consistently?

Brand Growth Study

For the past 8 years, we have conducted a yearly study among 2,000+ marketing professionals across 10 countries in Europe and the US to validate our ideas, zoom in on a specific topic and come up with recommendations to use this in marketing and marketing research.

In the study, we also measure the success of each company. This enables us to see what separates the well-performing companies from the rest and helps clients to develop winning strategies.

Brand Growth Event

Brand Growth event is an inspiring event where science and practice bring all the insights and learnings about the Ingredient of the year together.

Our events, now in the form of a live stream, have hosted altogether 2,100+ attendees in the past years. Our last event had a 100% revisiting rate and scored 8.8/10.

Part of the success is the quality of the stories and presenters and the different angles that we bring:

  • Academic angle: We have hosted highly awarded professors from science, such as Mark Ritson, Les Binet, Laurens Sloot, Tammo Bijmolt, Jenny van Doorn, Peter Verlegh, Ronald Voorn, Jaap Wieringa, and Arne de Keyser. All professors are well-known in their specific areas of expertise.
  • Practitioners’ view: We always host companies that are known for their successful approach or keynote speakers that have a strong message to share. We had inspiring presentations from Tony’s Chocolonely, RItuals, Domino’s, Versuni, Facebook, MediaMarktSaturn, Tenzing, Sir Joe, Mischa Coster, Royal Swinkels Family Brewers, Rabobank, Unilever, and many more.
  • Brand Growth Study: The results of the yearly quantitative Brand Growth Study and a summary of the vision interviews are shared. The study dives deeper into the ingredients for Brand Growth and we present guidelines on how to integrate specific ingredients of the year into a winning growth strategy.

Stats from the past years

  2,300+ attendees

   280+ interviews
with CMOs and CMIs

8 years of research into Brand Growth Ingredients

8 Events

What others said about Brand Growth

“One of the best webinars of the year.”

“Practical tips on how to build your brand presented in an easy to understand and professional format.”

“My only regret is that I hadn’t invited more colleagues.”

This year´s Brand Growth ingredient: Promotions

The Brand Growth theme for 2024 is Promotions.

This edition provides insights on how can Promotions contribute to Brand Growth.

“While sales promotions can boost sales temporarily, they don’t lead to long-term growth or increased loyalty.”

We focus on answering:

  • How to integrate Promotions into a winning strategy?
  • Is there a consensus in the academic world regarding the impact of promotions on sales?
  • Why do brands use promotions so often?
  • What are the main reasons for having an active promotion strategy?
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