Researching topics that matter

”Besides being CEO of DVJ I am also on the board of SIRE. SIRE wants to make people aware of difficult matters, and stimulate debate and interaction between people. We address topics in society that do not get enough attention. By creating campaigns, we make people more aware of the topics and it is our purpose to make society a little bit more beautiful. Every year we pick a topic, and we use a lot of research to see how relevant and important each topic is. Our recent campaign has the intention to avoid that polarization between people drifting them away from each other (polarization is not bad, but it should not lead to more distance between people). This is a relevant topic because more and more people have the feeling that polarization is growing and more importantly it means that people lose contact with family and friends. Research done by DVJ showed the importance and relevance of this topic and generated a lot of publicity for this recent campaign.

Being aware of the impact that organizations have on society, the environment and the economy is also a topic that is becoming more and more important for all brands. Some people even believe that without a purpose, companies do not have the right to exist. That is why we have picked this topic for our Brand Growth platform this year. Picking a topic for Brand Growth is comparable to how we pick themes within SIRE. We collect relevant input from what happens in society (or in this case business society) and start by talking to the scientists who are specialized in this theme. We have already spoken to different professors and experts and reviewed relevant academic literature to generate a theoretical framework. We then follow up by interviewing marketing- and insight- decision makers to understand their views on this topic and bring in the relevant nuances. And this year we even added a large-scale European study on what dimensions consumers evaluate companies on their contribution to society.

All the knowledge we build up will be shared via different articles, interviews and case studies and will also be presented during our annual Brand Growth Event. We are really proud of this event which already had top speakers like Les Binet, and Mark Ritson, different well-known professors and many practitioners from companies like Unilever, Rabobank, Tony Chocelonely, Media Market, Facebook, Domino’s and many others. This year, our event will be broadcasted from our studio in Amsterdam on the 11th of May. I hope you all join to understand the relevance of this topic. I also hope that we can show the two sides of this story. Not to polarize, but to show that different opinions can live together and that we only learn by seeing all sides of a story.”