Let’s Cowork Week, that took place in Seats2meet Utrecht last week (15-19 July), brought together many professionals from different fields connected to entrepreneurship and business development. In “expert room” you could get a free consultation about marketing strategy, branding, market positioning and on many more topics associated with building a successful company.
Here we would like to introduce you some of the experts we were lucky enough to meet and talk to during one of the days. We asked them about their background, their field of work and what brought them to the Let’s Cowork Week at Seats2meet.
Nynke Appels, branding and marketing strategy expert:
“I give branding and marketing strategy advice. I work with different companies and social enterprises and help them to find more sustainable ways of working and develop the right market positioning for their brands.
I organize brand thinking workshops, which help businessmen to see if their brands fit into the market and teach entrepreneurs to present themselves well on the market. The structure is quite similar to business canvas but designed specifically for branding.
Usually, people that seek for my advice are marketing teams of big companies that miss some branding knowledge or individual entrepreneurs with small businesses who need help with branding and overall marketing strategy.
I came to the Let’s Cowork week because I really like to share ideas and meet new people to enlarge my network. I live in Rotterdam and there’s not really any hub like here at Seats2meet there, where you can get together with like-minded people, so I am very excited to be here today.”
Chichi Zhang, influencer, founder of Social Nomads:
“I have my own social media agency, its called Social Nomads. We are both a B to B and B to C company and we focus on education.
From B to C perspective we train people to become influencers. Being an influencer is something that a lot of people want nowadays to become more powerful on the market and to be able to work with different brands. However, I believe that “influencer” is not the right name for it. I would prefer to call influencers “KOL’s” instead, which are “Key Opinion Leaders”.
I believe that you are not only an influencer if you are, for example, someone who promotes fashion and gets free stuff for promotion. But you are also an influencer if you promote your own brand or business. That’s why the term “KOL” is stronger and more appropriate in my opinion.
On the B to B side we help companies to develop their social media strategy. We organize workshops and do private consultancy sessions. As part of the workshop, for example, we train people how they can use Instagram as the main platform to promote their companies and how to use influencer marketing and implement it into their own marketing strategy.
Next to that, I am also working as a freelance photographer. I am really interested in helping others succeed, that’s why I’m actually here today – as an expert in social media, helping other entrepreneurs with their questions.”
Wesley Kruijthof, coach, business renovation specialist:
“I am a coach at Spare Space, which is a platform for starting entrepreneurs in Rotterdam. Today I’m here as an expert in business renovation.
I’ve recently graduated from a Bachelor of Commerce. After my graduation, I became involved in many different advisory projects for creative entrepreneurs in Rotterdam. I felt inspired by the whole process and became motivated to work with entrepreneurs even more.
What I do now is primarily giving workshops on how to innovate in entrepreneurship. During my workshops I raise questions like how do I continuously renew my business model, how do I stick to my concept while moving where the world is moving, how do I keep optimising what is often a service? In a nutshell, I give workshops on how to renew your company.
For entrepreneurs, there is always a question of how to make their value proposition fit more customers? So during my sessions, I focus a lot on how to discover what your consumers actually want.
Also, we talk a lot about tough decisions making in business. For example, decision making like which trend to follow and which not. Nowadays there are many trends that counter each other, so the key thing is to identify the right trend that fits your particular company.”
