We help companies grow their brands & business by putting people at the heart
Brand building
In our view, a brand is simply a psychological means-to-an-end for customers & consumers: it allows them to make a fast, safe, effort-free and satisfying choice among a range of options.
Growing a brand means to anchor it strongly into people‘s lives
Earning a spot in their hearts & minds, so that at the moment of choice, your brand comes to mind fast and first and conveniently gets into their hands.
People at the heart
Our core belief: People at the heart
Companies don‘t grow brands or businesses, they grow brand-builders across functions. And then those brand-builders grow the brands and the businesses.
A brand’s revenue and profit will grow when the focus is on people: Consumers, Customers, Company employees within the broader Community. This focus helps to decide how to anchor brands in people‘s lives, take a spot in their hearts and minds and get them into their hands.
… because brand-builders who love people build brands that people love.
We train and support brand builders
across commercial functions
always up to date theory | real-life application
Capability development
We train brand builders
Consulting
We support brand builders
We work across all commerce areas:
Sales, Category Management, Trade/Shopper Marketing and Brand Marketing
We have the pleasure to work with:
'Made a real difference'
“The Brand Building Framework you introduced has made a real difference. You listened to understand exactly what we needed and turned it into inspiring content and practical tools we actually use. And the trainings were really engaging and fun!
Thanks for making this such a great and lasting experience. We continue to apply the Brand Building Framework across our organisation.”
Head of Brand Europe – Mazda
'Nothing but a pleasure'
“Working with Anne-Katrin and Tijs from the Brand Faculty was nothing but a pleasure. Their expertise and deep knowledge in the field were instrumental in our success and contributed largely to the level of facilitation they brought along. During the 2-day workshop they facilitated, they helped us identify the opportunity, encouraged active and out-of-the-box brainstorming and managed to get everyone on the same page with a strategy we all believed in.
Their ability to engage, inspire and push the boundaries is truly what sets them apart and we would highly recommend working with them if you are looking to crack the next big business opportunity in your respective field.”
Senior Brand Manager Snacking – Unilever
'Their people-centric approach brought strong results'
“The strategic insights, innovative attitude and clear, structured framework of The Brand Faculty as well as their people-centric approach have brought strong results and powerful activation toolkits that greatly support our brand marketing, trade marketing, and sales team’s efforts in growing our brands.
I would definitely recommend TBF as reliable partners for any Brand, Shopper Marketing, and Category development challenges!”
Marketing Director – EMEA
'Robust strategic thinking and practical tools'
“I had the opportunity to work with The Brand Faculty as a client on the definition of the Brand Positioning for Booking.com. They brought both robust strategic thinking and practical tools that facilitated the process, inspired the right discussions and helped us take this project from ideation to execution.
Next to this project, we also collaborated on training a group of employees on consumer insight crafting. They are a serious, reliable and trustable partner I would recommend to anyone.”
Global head of brand – Booking.com
The Brand Faculty members
Tijs Timmerman
Tijs
Passionate brand and consumer strategist and capability builder. Tijs earned his PhD for research on the psychology of brands, worked in brand development all his career, across Unilever, Philips and Heineken, where he was a founding member of the global Marketing Capability team.
Besides his work at The Brand Faculty, Tijs currently owns a professorship for Marketing and Customer Experience at Utrecht University of applied science.
Anne-Katrin Müller
Anne-Katrin
Senior Marketing leader with 20 years of hands on strategic and operational brand building and sales experience.
She held leading local, regional and global positions at P&G, Danone, Heineken and FrieslandCampina. At Heineken, Anne-Katrin led the global Marketing Capability Team, where she introduced a How Brands Grow fuelled Brand Building Framework, developed trainings, tools and approaches to improve the skills and competences of >1.500 marketers globally of different seniority levels.
Anne-Katrin also regularly lectures at the Markenakademie.
Ksenia Khalina
Ksenia
Executive Category, Brand, Shopper Marketing and Sales Leader with a proven track in record in developing and implementing brand, shopper marketing, channels and category strategies, plans and capabilities across both B2C and B2B sectors.
Ksenia has worked for multinationals like Colgate-Palmolive, Reckitt, Chupa-Chups, and Heineken, starting her career as a Key Account Manager at CP. Most recently, she held senior leadership roles at Heineken, incl. C&EE Head of Category & Channel Development and Global Head of Trade and Shopper Marketing.
The strengths that set us apart from others
Experience & expertise
We held operational, strategic and capability leadership positions in different functions in the industry. With this experience plus our background expertise, we cover the full Commercial Spectrum.
Commercial Academy
We developed from scratch and ran a successful, self-sufficient, fully inhouse Commercial Academy at a company with a similar decentralized structure: global, premium, and with markets of vastly different level of maturity – the Heineken Global Commerce University (GCU).
Practice what we preach
We ‘practice what we preach’: we acted as internal consultants, putting in practice the tools and frameworks we developed after having deployed and trained them in. From this, we know what works and how to most effectively embed a (new) capability.
Feel free to contact us
The easiest way to contact us is to write a short email. And w’ll get back to you!
Or, you can also simply give us a call.
Telephone numbers
+31 622320640 (Tijs, NL)
+49 17680107931 (Anne-Katrin, GER)
+43 6641004552 (Ksenia, AU)