Erik Saelens
Most organisations manage their brand as a communications output rather than a commercial asset – which means brand decisions get delegated to agencies while strategic questions about trust, market positioning, and identity remain unresolved at the leadership level. When a merger, market shift, or reputational event forces a rebrand, few executive teams have the analytical tools to distinguish what is worth keeping, what needs to change, and what the exercise will actually cost in customer equity. The result is expensive, slow, and often wrong.
Erik Saelens, founder of Brandhome and creator of the Triple-A Brand Index, helps organisations treat brand as a strategic commercial asset – drawing on proprietary frameworks and research into more than 300 rebranding operations worldwide.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Erik Saelens
- The Triple-A Brand Index (Authenticity, Accountability, Activation) gives leadership teams a structured diagnostic – not a creative brief – for understanding why brand trust is gained or lost, and what to do about it.
- His research base of 300+ rebranding and renaming operations worldwide is one of the largest of its kind; most brand consultants draw on case studies, Saelens draws on a proprietary empirical database.
- He operates at board level rather than at agency level – having served as senior brand advisor to the board of Royal Dutch Telecom KPN and as a current board director at multiple companies – which means his framing of brand problems maps directly onto the decisions executives actually face.
- His work on brand and M&A strategy addresses a gap that most marketing speakers ignore: the specific identity and equity challenges that arise when companies merge, acquire, or prepare for IPO.
- The Brandhome Method® gives marketing and strategy teams a replicable operating system for brand building, not a set of principles to interpret.
Biography highlights
- Founder and executive strategic director of Brandhome Group, established 1995; active across strategy, design, and brand consultancy
- Creator of the Triple-A Brand Index – a proprietary brand measurement framework built around Authenticity, Accountability, and Activation
- Researched and executed more than 300 rebranding and renaming operations worldwide
- Former senior brand advisor to the board of Royal Dutch Telecom KPN; earlier career at Sodexo’s international brand management team
- Board director at Unbox (Belgium), CQ (US), and Stackin (US)
- Author of 15+ books on brand marketing, including The Brandhome Method®, The Story Wars, In Triple-A® We Trust, and Branded
- Columnist for The Drum; regularly profiled by the London Speaker Bureau and other international platforms
Biography
Brand equity is consistently listed as one of the most valuable intangible assets on a company’s balance sheet – and consistently treated as one of the least manageable. The gap between what organisations believe their brand is worth and their ability to actively steer it is where most brand strategy fails.
Erik Saelens has spent 25 years closing that gap. As founder and executive strategic director of Brandhome Group, he has built one of the more unusual intellectual positions in brand strategy: a proprietary empirical base of more than 300 rebranding and renaming operations that allows him to speak about brand transformation not as a philosophy but as a pattern-recognition exercise. His Triple-A Brand Index – built around Authenticity, Accountability, and Activation – gives organisations a diagnostic framework for auditing brand trust, not just measuring brand awareness.
His credibility at the executive level is grounded in practice rather than proximity. Before founding Brandhome, Saelens served as senior brand advisor to the board of Royal Dutch Telecom KPN, and he currently sits on the boards of companies including Unbox, CQ, and Stackin. His work on brand strategy in M&A and IPO contexts gives him a specific fluency in the decisions that matter most when brand equity is genuinely at stake – acquisition integration, identity rationalisation, and the reputational dimensions of market entry.
Across 15 books – including The Brandhome Method®, The Story Wars, and In Triple-A® We Trust – and as a regular columnist for The Drum, Saelens has developed a body of work that is practical in architecture and commercially framed in argument. His audiences leave with a structured vocabulary for brand decisions, not a renewed conviction that branding matters.
Key speaking topics
- Brand strategy and commercial brand architecture
- Rebranding and renaming operations
- Brand trust measurement and the Triple-A framework
- Brand management in M&A and IPO contexts
- Storytelling as a strategic brand instrument
- Internal branding and identity-driven organisations
- The future of marketing and consumer attention
Ideal for
- CMOs and marketing leadership teams navigating brand transformation or post-acquisition integration
- Boards and C-suite executives making decisions on brand equity in M&A, IPO, or market expansion contexts
- Strategy and transformation leads in organisations undergoing identity change
- Senior marketers and brand managers seeking a structured, evidence-based approach to brand building
Audience outcomes
- A clearer understanding of brand as a commercial asset with measurable dimensions, not a creative output
- Practical familiarity with the Triple-A framework as a diagnostic tool for brand trust
- A structured way to think about what changes – and what must be protected – in a rebranding operation
- Sharper criteria for brand investment decisions, particularly in M&A, IPO, and market entry scenarios
- An accessible methodology (the Brandhome Method®) for building or rebuilding brand from a strategic starting point
Talks
A structured walk through the proprietary brand-building system Saelens developed across 25 years and 300+ brand operations, showing how organisations can move from brand ambiguity to commercial clarity.
Key takeaways:
- What the Brandhome Method® diagnoses that conventional brand audits miss
- The difference between brand management and brand architecture – and why the distinction matters operationally
- How to translate brand equity into decisions leadership teams can actually act on
A presentation built around the Triple-A Brand Index – Authenticity, Accountability, Activation – as a framework for understanding and managing brand trust in conditions of market disruption.
Key takeaways:
- How the Triple-A index works as a diagnostic, not a scoring system
- Why brands lose trust – and the specific sequence in which it happens
- Practical steps to re-establish brand credibility without abandoning brand heritage
Based on Saelens’ book of the same name, this talk frames storytelling as a strategic brand instrument rather than a communications technique, showing how brand narratives are built, sustained, and lost.
Key takeaways:
- The difference between a brand story and brand advertising – and why audiences respond differently to each
- How to mine, structure, and activate an authentic brand story across internal and external audiences
- The conditions under which a brand story stops working – and how to identify them early
Drawing on research into more than 300 rebranding and renaming operations, this talk presents the empirical patterns behind successful and unsuccessful brand transformations.
Key takeaways:
- The most common and most costly mistakes organisations make when rebranding
- How to assess whether a rebrand is a strategic necessity or a costly distraction
- The role of brand equity measurement in managing the risk of identity change