Insights from the Data & Insights Network – and what it means for the future of brand building By: Lisette Kruizinga – de Vries (DVJ...

DVJ Insights is pleased to announce the appointment of Elin Scotford as Global Client Director, further reinforcing its commitment to...

The fast-growing international market research agency DVJ Insights has expanded its European presence with the opening of a new office in...

When Advertising Consistency Kills Curiosity Distinctive Brand Assets (DBAs) have become the go-to tactic for many marketers. And rightly so. The theory is sound: use consistent, recognisable cues like colours, logos, sounds and characters to help people quickly identify your brand in a cluttered media world. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has made a strong case, and brands have listened. Recognition drives recall, and recall is a prerequisite for effectiveness.

The Pack That Thinks Fast and Slow Most packs are built for speed. Flash of colour. Hint of brand. Maybe a benefit if you're lucky. That works well enough when shoppers are rushing, which they usually are. Still, sometimes they stop. And when they do, the pack that got them to pause can just as easily talk them out of it. What looked bold from a distance falls apart up close. It’s loud but empty. Eye-catching but not convincing.

Stressed Senses, Flooded Brain and Limited Exposure The modern shopper is exposed to an overwhelming number of options, between 20,000 and 40,000 SKUs in a typical grocery store, and up to 200,000 in a home improvement store. Yet how many of these do we truly recognise or recall? Unless you work in the industry, it’s likely you’ll recognise less than 10%, possibly even below 1%. This is a result of both limited exposure as a shopper and the natural cognitive constraints we fa

A New Standard of Intelligence We have grown used to AI as a smooth-talking oracle: confident, responsive, often correct and occasionally overconfidently wrong. Yet it has always remained sealed. Even at its best, the large language model has been a closed circuit. It speaks but does not show. It appears to know but cannot explain how. This opaque fluency has defined the past generation of AI systems. They are impressive in performance, yet ultimately unaccountable in nature

Retail media, including digital in-store ads, is gaining importance for brands aiming to drive sales at the point of purchase. While it enables precise targeting through retailers' first-party data, measuring its impact remains challenging due to fragmented metrics and attribution complexity.

Emotions are powerful predictors of consumer behaviour. Yet understanding and measuring them effectively is a complex challenge. In a recent webinar hosted by DVJ Insights, Professor Dr. Bob Fennis from the University of Groningen shared the academic state of emotion measurement. Lucas Hulsebos, CEO of DVJ Insights, followed by translating these insights into real-world, scalable applications.

Is the One They See First In every aisle, the pack is the first thing a shopper notices. It’s what catches the eye, starts the decision and shapes the choice. While it doesn’t get media spend, it still speaks every day to every buyer in every store.

When Adidas moved all their media spend to digital in an effort to become “digital first,” it seemed like the obvious move. Consumers were flocking to online platforms, traditional media was supposedly dying, and everyone was preaching digital transformation. But a few years later, Adidas quietly reversed that decision. Why? Because it didn’t work. Their brand salience suffered, and their business results showed it. The campaign didn’t break through the clutter the way they h

The Twin Goals of Innovation: Effectiveness and Efficiency Innovation has long been one of the hottest debated topics in business. With thousands of books written and countless corporate strategies developed around it, asking “ What’s the best way to innovate? ” Let’s begin with a simple but powerful truth: the goal of innovation is to develop products that consumers want to buy. This is the effectiveness objective  - creating something that resonates so strongly with users t

What does it mean to be a loyal customer? And more importantly, what drives that loyalty in the first place? We often look to commercial brands for the answer, but the insights from Dansk Erhverv, Denmark’s second-largest business organisation, offer a surprisingly fresh perspective. In a recent conversation with Annette Bentzien Bastidas, Data Analysis and Insights Manager at Dansk Erhverv, we explored how a trade organisation with no traditional “products” to sell builds me

Oslo, May 1 ,  2025  - DVJ Insights continues to expand its international consultancy team with the addition of Alexandra Brendan in...

Hamburg, May 1, 2025 – DVJ Insights proudly welcomes Gabriele Herrmann (Gabri) to its growing German consultancy team. With a background...

We’ve grown accustomed to AI as a responsive tool, an intelligent mirror reflecting our queries. Ask, and you shall receive. But a subtle shift is underway, one that may redefine the boundary between automation and autonomy. Enter the era of AI agents. While platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok have made headlines for their language capabilities, their most transformative potential lies not in conversation but in initiative. Not what they say, but what they do. At the cor

An Ever-Changing Way to Shop Nordic grocery shopping used to be predictable. Not anymore One minute customers are filling their baskets...

In today’s media landscape, attention is fleeting and memory is selective. With every second of airtime, brands fight not only to be...

Brand activation is evolving, shifting from short-term sales drivers to essential tools for long-term brand growth. In this interview, we speak with Sanne Demir, Communication & Behavioural Strategist at De Combinatie van Factoren (DCVF), a Dutch activation agency known for combining creativity, behavioural science and retail design into impactful brand experiences. From developing concepts to 3D retail design and production, DCVF helps brands bring their strategies to life w

The challenge of breaking through with new products Think back to your recent grocery shopping trips: If your answers suggest that only a small fraction of new products stood out to you, you’re not alone. Many consumers navigate stores in "automatic mode," overwhelmed by the sheer volume of options – which easily can be around 30.000 SKUs (stock keeping units) compared to only around 300 articles a shopper stores at home. So, the reality is that most new products struggle to