Erik Saelens is a consultant and interim manager with over 15 years’ experience in brand marketing and communications. He currently holds the position of strategy director at Brandhome.
Erik specializes in rebranding and renaming operations, and has researched more than 250 brand-change operations worldwide. He is also an expert on brand management and M&A and IPO strategies, and draws on a strong operational background when putting these strategies into practice. Erik has a solid track record too as an interim manager, performing various roles for a range of international companies and brands.
Until 2002 Erik worked as senior brand adviser to the board of Royal Dutch Telecom KPN in The Hague and Brussels. He was previously employed at Sodexo as a member of the international brand management team, having started his career at Walibi, a European amusement park group.
Erik studied Economics at the University of Antwerp. He holds a Master in hotel and leisure marketing, and completed several other brand marketing studies.
Erik is the author of Brandhome Platform I: Over maatschappij, mens en merk, which explores the relationship between branding, society and individual people. Erik created the Triple-A brand index and published a book on Triple-A brands in 2012 in English and Arabic. In 2013 he published the book about the Brandhome method®. He is a regular guest speaker at conferences and universities, and a frequent contributor to specialist sector media in Benelux. Erik is currently finalizing a new book on rebranding operations.
Erik holds Belgian nationality and is fluent in English, Dutch and French.
In The Age of Attention, Erik Saelens and Nicoline Spruijt offer a manual to help you go from getting to giving and finally to earning consumer attention. The time has come for marketers to sit down with consumers and get personal. Because if you don’t follow them, they won’t follow you.
Does traditional marketing have a future in our technology-driven world? How does one go about it in today’s over-regulated, over-transparent, over-stressed markets? Do you go for value or volume? That’s the billion-dollar question for many brands and corporations. So skip marketing x.0! Go back to the future of marketing and make tough choices today. Find out how in Brandhome’s new book.
In Branded, Erik Saelens, strategic director of Brandhome, describes the course of the N-VA campaign in the run-up to the mother of all Belgian elections on May 25, 2014. His personal account offers a suspenseful and disconcerting view from the inside of how opposing forces in the media, politics, culture and business actively worked against the N-VA, against Brandhome and against Saelens himself.
In 'Gebrandmerkt' beschrijft Erik Saelens de ontwikkeling en het verloop van de N-VA campagne in de aanloop naar de moeder aller verkiezingen, de verkiezingen op 25 mei 2014. Zijn persoonlijke verslag geeft een meeslepende en vooral onthutsende kijk van binnenuit op de actieve tegenkrachten vanuit media, politiek, cultuur en bedrijfsleven tegen de N-VA, tegen Brandhome en tegen Saelens zelf.
Temporary half price!
The Iron is hot, the anvil is ready and it’s time for you to start forging your story. In his new book, The Story Wars, Erik Saelens, executive strategic director and founder of Brandhome, explains why storytelling isn’t just hype. Storytelling is an essential weapon for every marketer out there.
Two international top marketers meet in a bar. They start talking... and they see in each other a passion for brand marketing. For a whole year, they bombard each other with ideas on the meaning and future of brands, marketing, the world and life. This book is the fascinating story of their intense dialogue written in a unique storytelling style and at the speed at which they live their lives.