In the Netherlands, the debate about institutional racism flared up in May. Rapper Akwasi took on the role of spokesman for the Black Lives Matter movement in the Netherlands. He wondered why Black Pete still exists and said he would punch Black Pete in the face if he saw him in November. When Johan Derksen made a joke on Veronica Inside about whether a protester dressed as Black Pete was not Akwasi, all hell broke loose. Derksen was vilified and the program Veronica Inside was stopped prematurely. Derksen admitted that he had made the wrong joke and that he is against racism. But he also continued to maintain that he should be able to make a joke about such a situation.
As intense as this is of course, we looked at it india telegram data through a brand lens and asked ourselves: what is the effect of their statements in relation to Black Lives Matter (Akwasi) and Johan Derksen's bad joke about Akwasi on their personal brands? Should Akwasi and Derksen both rebrand or not?
We were curious about the effects on both personalities, which we consider personal brands. Both are personalities who use the media to plead their case. Given the enormous commotion, it could be expected that Derksen would be considerably damaged and that Akwasi could count on broad support (given the sentiment on social media and from celebrities such as Arie Boomsma). That is why we investigated the effects on both brands via the CG Research panel. A preliminary note: we do not have a measurement from before the incident, which means we cannot make a statistical comparison with a classic 0 and 1 measurement. We are purely looking at the situation after the incident.
You never get a second chance to make a first impression
Because we record the order in which associations are mentioned in the research, we can also get an idea of the first association that is evoked by a cue, in this case a personal brand, a celebrity. This first association is important because it is the first that is directly linked to the cue. A second reason is that scientists agree that this is also the strongest association. Let us see what the first association is that comes to mind with these celebrities, see figure 1.
