Amsterdam, June 20th, 2019

Based in Amsterdam, GRRR is one of the first Dutch creative digital agencies to unite design and technology, seeking innovation and originality. The agency has a human-centered approach to help clients look through their eyes of their audience.

At GRRR, a team of strategists, designers and developers join forces to work on branding and digital innovation, creating websites and apps for companies – many of them seeking to make a positive impact on the world.

In an interview with TIA, Jim Driesen explored the development of the agency during the last few years and its main areas of focus.

What experiences led you to where you are today?

There are plenty of digital design agencies nowadays. Back in 2003 when we started GRRR, the landscape was totally different. We were one of the first agencies in The Netherlands to combine design and tech from the start. So, clients could come to us for branding, with a digital mindset. This pioneering attitude is something we started off with, and it always stayed with us.

So, from the start, we focused on creating outstanding design and combined this with focusing on the skills you need to make digital brands, products and services with it. This led to where we are today. An award winning Creative Digital Agency with a strong reputation in the field of meaningful matters.

The agency has recently introduced a meaningful matters policy, working with clients that seek to make the world a better place. Why did you choose that strategy and what are the steps being applied to follow it?

We found out that was most unique about GRRR is the type of clients we serve. We look around and see that the world is ready for an agency focused on meaningful matters. Consumers want it, so companies and institutions want it too.

Meaningful for us means working together with clients that are not only about making a profit, but also strive for societal impact. Our client base consists of (semi) public institutions, museums, NGOs and private purpose companies.

There is no agency that has such a strong track record in helping out this specific type of clients in strategic communication and digital design. But we didn’t really communicate this clearly yet. I think that is because it happened quite naturally.

The founders had certain values and preferences, which led to a certain type of clients. And everyone who joined the team and stayed, pretty much shared those same values. So here lies a big opportunity for us. This is already what we are doing, why not share this story? We think this positioning gives clients in the field of meaningful matters the confidence that we understand their challenges.

What are the steps you follow when working on a new campaign?

As a digital agency we focus on long-term relations with our clients. So, most of our campaigns are for clients we already know very well. We always start with research and mostly prefer to work in iterations. Testing what works well and proceeding with that. That is of course one of the big advantages of digital; you can test your assumptions instead of building from one big idea, working it out, and hoping it will work.

We always study our target audience and build a customer journey based on user research, psychological insights and creative experience. The customer journey forms the basis for creating campaigns.

What kind of elements do you use on your campaigns to make them more interactive?

This really depends on the matter at hand. Sometimes it is not interactive at all, for example a trailer to promote Picl, on online platform for art house movies. The trailer was shown in movie theatres and just had to be very compelling and well designed. Sometimes it’s as interactive as can be. For instance, a geocaching audiotour we created for Calefax Reed Quartet. This was a first of its kind campaign in The Netherlands.

How do you prioritize which product/service features to keep or discard in your campaigns?

Of course, features of products and services are important. But there are always also emotional reasons in play. As a creative agency focused on meaningful matters, all our clients are pursuing more than just sales or conversions.

They are all purpose organizations that want to make some kind of impact that goes beyond that. But surely, we also choose certain features to highlight. This always depends on the persona you are targeting and the place in the customer journey or sales funnel this person is in. To make that decision we use a combination of data and psychological insights. Our UX strategist Dave de Bakker has a background in behavioral psychology, so he covers that part. And we have several strategists and a marketeer who take care of the data and user insights part.

What role does innovation play in your agency?

Our focus as a creative digital agency is on three main services: Digital Identity, Digital Solutions and Innovation. So, innovation is really important for us. We also understand that the term innovation has become an all-purpose word, and therefore subject to inflation. Still we decide to use it, as it covers a large part of our creative work. We are an early adopter of the Design Thinking and Service Design approaches.

In the past few years we have seen a huge shift in the market: these creative problem-solving approaches are now seen as proper ways of strategy consulting. This led to a wave of mergers and acquisitions between strategy consulting multinationals and creative agencies. In a way we saw this coming, but to be honest, we didn’t think this would be so huge as it is now. We just thought it was an approach that made sense. And rightly so: major GRRR projects started as strategy consulting jobs using Design Thinking, and later led to a broader digital identity designs and campaigns. And the number of requests we get from companies that seek this type of creative consultancy is increasing exponentially.

How do you make sure you are being innovative in all your projects?

To be honest, we are not. A large part of our work is also to design outstanding digital identities. We believe real good design is timeless. Like the digital identity we created for Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. It’s based on brutalism and typography and builds on the character of the old Stedelijk branding.

We have always combined our interactive design skills with our expertise on the technology front. Over the years we have tuned our various tech stacks to fit specific requirements that help out our clients, often in ways they haven’t considered before. Innovation is key, because a lack of progress in the world of development means being left behind and settling for mediocre solutions that cause frustration and cost money.

At GRRR we have a clear vision on what makes digital products and services an improvement to our lives. Our forte is combining digital design and fact-based UX with a strong and smart underlying digital architecture to back it up. We always focus on the end user, but definitely also on the client who creates the wonderful content for those users.

What are their needs? We believe it’s important to take clients seriously, because they know their users best. But also, to advise a client against certain tendencies they might have, that don’t serve them in the end. We’d rather rely on facts and real-world proven insights that have proven to work.

What piece of advice would you give to a recent grad looking to work in the digital industry?

We can’t speak for the whole industry but to join GRRR you need a broad skillset. Our designers are tech savvy and our developers have an eye for design.

Thanks Jim!

Learn more about Grrr

Follow Jim Driesen on social media:
LinkedIn
Twitter

Follow Grrr on social media:
Facebook
Twitter

AmsterdamDesignDesign ThinkingDigital agencyJim Driesen