Dirk Essing / Consultant Research Communities (NL)

“I started working for GfK in 2006 as a Marketing Executive in the Marketing department. Over the years, my job has shifted more and more away from Marketing and towards Business Development. One of my projects in 2009 was customer panels and research communities. Once I was able to convince the board that this would be profitable for GfK, they challenged me to start it up.

Since then I’ve acted as a start-up with responsibility for everything to do with customer panels and communities. I do this for all the divisions in the Netherlands and Belgium. When you’re starting up, you are faced with wide-ranging questions. I was able to answer them in the thesis I wrote for my C diploma from the Dutch Marketing Institute (NIMA-C).
The external diversity of my job is vast, given that I accompany market specialists on visits to customers. It can mean that one day I'm talking to a Mayor, another day to the marketing manager of Hornbach and the next to Unicef’s market researcher.

Start-ups at GfK are constantly busy communicating the added value of their project to the market, and certainly also to their colleagues. Luckily you can fall back on the huge array of specialists GfK employs. GfK also offers opportunities for rolling out your project internationally.

In short, if freedom and responsibility are concepts that suit you, you’ll certainly get your chance at GfK.”