Hi, I’m Willem van der Horst, a brand strategist. I consult with international businesses and organisations to build remarkable brands and effective marketing plans.
Over 20 years' experience have contributed to brand building initiatives and generated competitive advantages through brand strategy, marketing, and training. Having lived and worked in London, Singapore, Chicago, Paris, gives me a truly cross-cultural outlook on the world.
Fostering a play state of mind and leveraging elements inspired from tabletop and video game design studies, such as custom cards in immersive workshops, generates new competitive ideas for clients, hence the moniker "playful brand strategy."
Ice cream may seem childishly simple, yet it’s a deceptively complex chemical emulsion. It's fun, too. A great brand should attract attention and bolster positive memory associations. It’s also a nod to Noam Chomsky's ice cream thought experiment, meant to combat cynicism about human nature.
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You might not know what a brand strategist does, let alone a self-proclaimed playful one. In short, I help brands solve marketing and communications challenges.
Highdive | Boost Mobile
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Highdive is an independent advertising agency in Chicago. This project was with Boost Mobile, a telecommunications mobile virtual network company, to refine the brand’s position and meaning for their audience in the American market.
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Working under a tight timeline with the team at Highdive, the project involved researching the mobile telecommunications market challenges and opportunities, providing a view on the best way to refine and evolve the brand’s meaning and positioning to reach their objectives, identifying an insight about the situation and/or consumer audience to leverage in communications, and write a briefing document to prepare for the upcoming promotional marketing campaigns.
Highlights:
Illustrating Jungian brand archetypes with pop culture references. Fun fact, this TikTok video was extremely useful to illustrate the competitive landscape in a humorous way
Refining an existing brand positioning to be more relevant to the audience’s situation in the midst of the pandemic.
Showing how the overarching brand archetypal ideas can come to life in practical sales promotion communications.
TDH Creative | Optiver
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TDH Creative is an independent marketing agency based in Chicago. This project was working with their client in the United States, Optiver, a global trading firm working on their brand positioning, particularly in an employment context.
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This was a significant project involving qualitative research to better understand the brands’ situation, and the challenges they were facing in terms of reputation and communications to help them be known and considered by top university graduate talent, while competing directly with large financial institutions and big technology companies. The image above is from one of the workshops I facilitated, in which I developed an exercise inspired by the mechanics of a tabletop roleplaying game to explore the events, choices, and emotional states of an imagined ideal candidate from the moment they begin looking for a career to the moment they accept a job offer.
Highlights:
Qualitative research
Workshop development and facilitation, with both employees and senior leadership (with different exercises).
Brand positioning and recruitment communications campaign briefing.
UNESCO Education Division
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UNESCO is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. It contributes to peace and security by promoting international cooperation in education, sciences, culture, communication, and information.
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Working with the Education division, we developed a series of inspiring educational workshops for employees to improve their practice and understanding of brand building, communications, copywriting for the web and social media, storytelling, and cognitive biases.
Highlights:
Introduction to semiotic brand analysis.
Critical perspectives on branding and media.
Brand communications audit.
Hopefully the following examples can help you get a better sense of the types of projects I work on, and there are more in the pages on brand strategy, training, and teaching.
Learn more about my experience in global brand strategy and marketing communications.
Find out about training design, facilitation, immersive exercises, and teaching students.
Check out articles and media content on marketing, brands, digital media, play, gaming, and more.
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I write and publish two different editions: One is in English, l’autre est en français.
You can browse past editions in English here, et en français, ici.
