Danone
strategy
culture
Jul 2025
Story: Danone
Since 2023, we’ve worked with Danone Netherlands to understand how trust is built and felt across complex public debates on health and sustainability. Through science‑based, playful 23plusone sessions with key voices, we moved beyond dashboards to hear the human stories behind reputation and translate insight into a shared corporate brand rooted in One Planet. One Health.
Danone
Trust is quiet. You feel it before you hear it, and you notice its absence long before anyone says so out loud. For a company like Danone, sitting at the intersection of two of the loudest public debates of the decade, health and sustainability, that silence matters. The distance between what you mean and what the world sees you do can get wide very fast, especially when "food company with global reach" is all anyone needs on a banner.
Danone Netherlands didn't want a polish job on the public perception metrics. They wanted to know what the people shaping those debates actually think, and why. The kind of answer you don't get from a dashboard.
Reputation, one honest conversation at a time
Since 2023 we've worked with Danone Netherlands to map the landscape of trust around the organisation: not the aggregated score, but the stories underneath it. We ran 23plusone dialogue sessions with key opinion leaders from across the spectrum: policymakers, NGOs, health experts, sustainability critics. The people who set the weather, and the people who call it out when it turns.
The method does what most "stakeholder interviews" quietly skip: it surfaces which of the 24 fundamental human drivers are activated when people think about Danone, positively and negatively. Sometimes the headline driver isn't what you'd bet on. That's where the strategy gets interesting.
"The collaboration with BR-ND People helped us turn the abstract term 'reputation' into concrete, human insights that actually guide our strategy." Danone Netherlands team member
From listening to One Planet. One Health
What came out wasn't a slogan, it was a direction. The listening work fed into a corporate brand story anchored in Danone's "One Planet. One Health" vision, and into an employer brand that carries the same truth inside as it does outside. Because the fastest way to lose trust externally is to have a story internally that doesn't hold up by Wednesday.
Reputation shifts from a quarterly number to a living network of relationships, which is harder to manage and much more honest.
Working in a space where the perception gap keeps widening?
If your organisation is doing real work on health, sustainability or any other transition that gets debated in public, and the public conversation doesn't quite match the one inside your walls, there's a way to close that gap by listening better rather than talking louder. Let's talk about what it could look like for you.
Reach out to Kim or Alexander if you're looking for something similar