Niniane Veldhoen

Junior Researcher

As I enjoy being creative and coming up with new creative ideas, I always had the ambition to study at the school of arts. Because I couldn't find an art school to my liking, I went to England to study English for a year. When I returned I discovered the study commercial and presentation communication in Utrecht, called 'Het Nimeto'. This was a study were I could use my creativity for commercialized purposes (display, stand, visual merchandise, packaging, outdoor and print). In 2002 I graduated with a focus on graphic design. At this study I focused on design for different branding aspects but there was no focus on the online part, therefore it was a very logical step to study digital communication at the University of applied sciences in Utrecht. Here my interest in marketing grew and I continued developing my marketing skills.

Together with Matthijs Rotte I did research on new ways of marketing within the social media landscape. We discovered that traditional ways of segmenting target groups isn't suitable for social marketing. Therefore we started a research on segmentation based on mentality. In 2008 we graduated on our thesis about social media, social marketing and mentality, also known as 'een kwestie van mentaliteit'.

Nowadays I'm still working on segmentation based on mentality together with Matthijs Rotte and Kees Winkel. In our thesis we named six basic mentalities and now we're trying to develop a tool to profile a person's mentality. Apart from personal mentality profiles, we?re also trying to profile brand mentalities. This to find out if there is an overlap between a person's mentality and the mentality of brands this person prefers.