DVJ’s perspective on collaboration with students

Blog by Lisette Kruizinga-de Vries

At DVJ Insights, we have a passion for growth and research. Therefore, in research, we focus on the Data Quality, Value Added, and Joy. We strive for quality in each part of the research process, the processes themselves, the questionnaires, reporting, and consultancy. And we strive towards continuous improvement of our products and services. Secondly, we also add value for our clients; how do we translate data into actionable insights? Finally, we all work with passion and joy in everything we do.

Fulfilling this promise can only be done when listening carefully. To our clients, the broader market, the consumer and the academic world. This blog focuses on the latter.

why?

By listening to academia, we can learn a lot. The academic world plays an important role in the development of new products, the validation of new techniques and the increasingly intelligent analysis of data. And this is not only true for academic researchers, but also for students, who learnt in recent years a lot of advanced techniques in data analysis during their studies.

What is often a challenge in academic marketing research, is the access to high quality, relevant and real-life data. However, we have abundant data that we are willing to share. For students, this is great as they can work with ‘real’ data, get the opportunity to work on ‘real’ problems for either us or our clients, and we, in turn, get the opportunity someone to dive deeper into our data, finds interesting patterns, or classifies different ads, for example. Therefore, it is a win-win for everyone and a nice opportunity to start bridging the gap between science and academia.

what?

We have several connections with marketing academics as we have been working in academia ourselves, we use our network to connect. Our academic presence is reflected by several activities we incorporate into our strategy on a regular basis. First and foremost, each semester, we have a vacancy for a full-time intern who can write his/her master thesis using our data and collaborate on various data or analysis projects. In addition to that, several students can write their master thesis with our data, without doing an internship at the same time. In such cases, we simply deliver the data and the student writes his/her master thesis independently. Regarding master theses, we mainly cooperate with the University of Groningen through the RUG Customer Insights Center, but we also provide data to students from Hamburg University and are continuously extending our cooperation. We have had several interesting master thesis students working on different topics, such as looking into design elements of OOH or TikTok ads, deriving determinants of zapping behaviour, the effects of humour in TV ads, the impact of branding in OLV, etc. Hence, we are provided with relevant insights and new ideas on how to analyse data and coded data in return. It offers students the opportunity to work with real-life qualitatively good data.

What we also do regularly is give guest lectures in courses for master students. People in the organisation do this in places where they have previously studied and worked, such as the University of Groningen, Tilburg University, the VU Amsterdam, the University of Amsterdam (UvA), Radboud University, and the University of Münster. Often, marketing students do not know about marketing research agencies, and this is the perfect opportunity to be able to teach them something about marketing research and among some students evoke a spark for marketing research. Every year, we have several applicants inspired by these guest lectures.

In 2023, we started cooperating with the VU Amsterdam more intensely by giving introductory guest lectures and actively collaborating in the master course ‘Survey Research Methods’ given by Professor Dennis Herhausen. The course aims to make students familiar with survey data and teach them what type of analyses they can subsequently do with it. We provided the students with survey data from two different types of pre-tests, namely for OOH and TikTok ads, as well as the corresponding ads. The students received all the individual-level data on how respondents perceived those ads, how they evaluated them, whether they paid attention to them, and whether they could recall the brands. The students were asked to code the ads and they came up with very creative elements, that we would have not thought of ourselves.

Last but not least, we have the MARUG Consultancy Group, where five or six students work on a business case. We started this cooperation in 2022 when a group of highly talented marketing students worked on a business case for Samsung. In 2023, we again cooperated with MARUG on this and provided them with a business case for DPG Media on mental availability and associations and how advertising plays a role in this. Both business cases revealed to our clients new and valuable insights.

MCG group of 2022 (left) and 2023 (right), after they held the end presentation at our office

many advantages

To conclude, we cooperate a lot with students and each year we strengthen and intensify our cooperation. It results in several advantages, namely:

• We get in touch with very smart and qualified students.
• We gain top-notch and up-to-date academic knowledge on different topics.
• We are able to write interesting content pieces about the findings.
• We learn from it.
• It enables us to validate our research methods and analyses.
• It helps us think about things from a different perspective which fosters innovation.

And, this list of advantages is not even complete as can be extended at any time. We believe it is very beneficial for us and directly adds to our Data Quality, Value Added, and Joy, which enables us again to deliver more and more relevant insights to our (potential) clients