Rik Keessen - Mountain

In a marketing world shaped by fragmented media, growing pressure on short-term results and an endless stream of new tools, it can be tempting to believe that brand growth has become more complicated than ever. For Rik Keessen, Brand Tailor at Mountain, the opposite is often true. While the context has changed, the foundations of growth remain strikingly consistent. Brands still grow by reaching more people, being easy to recognise, and showing up consistently over time. From Mountain’s position between strategy, identity and design, Rik sees growth not as a matter of adding complexity, but of applying the right principles with greater clarity and discipline.

Growth Starts With Reaching More Buyers

For Rik, the most important question in brand growth is still a simple one: how many people buy your brand? He sees penetration as the key driver of growth, especially in FMCG and retail categories where margins are tight and competition is constant. “What we do see, in the more successful cases at least, is that growth really comes from more buyers, but also from higher penetration.” In that context, loyalty matters less than many marketers assume. “You really need to get it from high penetration and less from loyalty.”

That perspective shapes Mountain’s work. The agency operates at the intersection of strategy, identity and design, often helping brands that want to remain category leaders or become one. In that role, design is never just a finishing touch. It is part of how a brand becomes mentally and physically available. As Rik puts it, “We can only practise our profession if we truly understand the business context or the category context, or what is really behind it.”

For Rik, the fundamentals of growth are still clear: brands need to reach people, take up a distinctive position and stay consistent.

“What we do see, in the more successful cases at least, is that growth really comes from more buyers, but also from higher penetration.”

Mental And Physical Availability Still Do The Heavy Lifting

Although the marketing landscape has changed dramatically, Rik believes the basic mechanics of growth have not. Brands still need to come to mind in buying situations and they need to be easy to buy when that moment arrives. “If you strip everything back to the essentials,” he says, “it still comes down to mental and physical availability. They are still the big levers.”

That is why he remains sceptical of marketing approaches that become too narrow or too focused on short-term activation. Growth comes from reaching as many category buyers as possible, not from endlessly refining smaller audiences. Or as Rik puts it: “You cannot harvest demand that you have not first created.”

He is careful to say that he is not a media specialist, but from a brand-building perspective he sees a clear need for balance. Long-term brand building still matters. Mass reach still matters. Social can play an important role, but not every brand problem should be reduced to a social-first solution. “I also get a bit tired sometimes of the idea that everything is social-first, while the science also shows that that is not everything.”

“If you strip everything back to the essentials, it still comes down to mental and physical availability. They are still the big levers.”

The First Few Seconds Matter Enormously

Because Mountain works so closely on packaging and identity, Rik looks at brand growth very much through the lens of the buying moment itself. In many categories, that moment is extremely short. Consumers notice, recognise and choose quickly. That makes design a commercial tool, not just a creative one.

“You get three seconds, six seconds. That’s it,” he says. “And if you are not immediately in the right emotional space or not recognisable straight away, then you fall short.” In those few seconds, a brand needs to stand out and be easy to understand. “At the very least, in those six seconds, you need to stand out on the shelf. And people need to be able to find their variant easily.”

This is where Rik sees a big underestimation of design in growth discussions. Distinctive brand assets such as colour, typography and structure are not aesthetic details. They help brands get recognised faster and remembered longer. They also reduce friction in the moment of choice. In that sense, recognisability matters enormously. A brand does not always need to feel radically different, but it does need to be easy to notice and easy to identify.

Consumers Know Less Than Marketers Think

Another recurring theme in Rik’s thinking is how little consumers often know or remember about brands. Marketers tend to assume that their message has landed more strongly than it really has. Rik is much more sober about that. “Consumers know damned little about you, to put it plainly.”

That is one reason Mountain has started paying more attention again to associations. For Rik, association research helps reveal what people actually connect with a brand and whether those connections are strong enough to matter in real buying situations. It is also important because branding is not only about the mind. Rik explicitly adds the emotional layer. “I think it is not just about positioning in the mind, it is also about positioning in the heart, because you need both the brain and the heart to be able to influence people’s behaviour.”

That combination of recognition and feeling is what makes branding work. It is not enough for a brand to be visible. It also needs to create the right response when it appears.

“I think it is not just about positioning in the mind, it is also about positioning in the heart, because you need both the brain and the heart to be able to influence people’s behaviour.”

Creativity Remains Essential

Even with all the new possibilities around AI, testing and data, Rik has no doubt that creativity remains one of the strongest multipliers of effectiveness. “Despite all the wonderful AI techniques, excellent creativity can still help enormously,” he says. “We still need to stay sharp and produce strong creative work, simply because that remains important.”

At the same time, he is realistic about the tension inside design itself. Some agencies, he says, focus too heavily on aesthetics without thinking enough about commercial effectiveness. Mountain tries to balance the two. For Rik, the challenge is to keep a brand fresh without losing the elements that make it recognisable. Brands need to evolve, but not so much that they lose the memory structures they have spent years building.

The Biggest Barriers Are Often Internal

When Rik talks about what blocks growth, he does not start with external market conditions. He starts inside organisations. “I think that is much more internal than external, just to be clear.” Short-term thinking, lack of consistency, fragmented choices and poor alignment all make growth harder than it needs to be.

He is especially critical of the way marketing has become more complex in recent years. Internal structures, processes and efficiency models may all have their place, but they can also distract from what matters most. Rik describes it sharply: “It almost feels like people are more busy with the engine than with actually riding the motorbike.”

For him, that is where many brands go wrong. They optimise details, but lose sight of the larger growth logic. Stronger alignment, clearer focus and more consistency would often do more for growth than another layer of complexity.

“It almost feels like people are more busy with the engine than with actually riding the motorbike.”

Back To Simple, Scalable Growth

Rik’s overall message is not that marketing should ignore new tools or changing realities. Mountain actively uses data, scientific insight and AI where they help sharpen thinking. But he does believe many marketers have drifted too far from a few basic truths.

“Growth still often comes through the simplicity you try to find in the whole story, and making sure you can scale that simplicity.” In the end, his view of growth remains grounded in a few enduring principles: reach more people, make the brand easy to recognise, and show up consistently in the moments that matter most. Or, as he puts it, “We are not in the reach business, so to speak, because there are communication agencies for that. But we are in the business of making sure that in those three to six seconds, in the right order, the right things happen.”

“Growth still often comes through the simplicity you try to find in the whole story, and making sure you can scale that simplicity.”