The science behind feel.forward™
We built the measurement, not the science underneath it.
Four pillars, four bodies of research. We built the measurement, not the science underneath it.
Brand feeling has a reputation for being the soft end of marketing, measured by instinct or gutfeel, and defended by taste. That reputation is mostly earned, but what it ignores is that the mechanisms behind feeling have been studied for forty years, across neuroscience, behavioural economics, social psychology and marketing effectiveness, and the findings are consistent enough to build on.
feel.forward™ measures four pillars. Each one rests on established research rather than on our own theory, which is what makes the framework credible rather than merely convenient.
Familiarity
mental availability
Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute analysed purchasing across thousands of brands and found that market share is driven less by being better than by coming to mind first in a buying situation. Brands grow by being mentally available to the whole category, not by deepening the attachment of people who already buy. Familiarity scores how far you have built that presence, and where its absence is costing you consideration.
Worth saying plainly: Ehrenberg-Bass is sceptical of emotional attachment as a growth lever, and we cite Sharp for mental availability alone. The disagreement is real and we would rather name it than quietly borrow his authority for an argument he does not make.
Source
Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know, Oxford University Press, 2010.
Emotion
somatic markers
Antonio Damasio studied patients whose emotional processing was damaged while their reasoning remained intact. They could analyse a decision indefinitely and could not arrive at one. Emotion is not a decoration on top of rational thought, it is part of the machinery that lets a decision close. Which makes what people feel about a brand a commercial input rather than a soft one, and makes it worth knowing whether the feeling you are creating is the one you intended.
Source
António Damásio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, Grosset/Putnam, 1994. See also Bechara & Damasio, The somatic marker hypothesis: a neural theory of economic decision, 2005.
Experience
cognitive ease
Things that are easy to process are judged more favourably and trusted more readily. Reber, Winkielman and Schwarz demonstrated the effect experimentally; Kahneman later set it in the wider architecture of fast and slow thinking. A brand that feels like itself across a website, a review and a visit is easier to take in than one that shifts between them, and that ease shows up as preference. People notice inconsistency long before they can explain it.
Source
Reber, Winkielman & Schwarz, Effects of Perceptual Fluency on Affective Judgments, Psychological Science, 1998; Reber & Schwarz, Effects of Perceptual Fluency on Judgments of Truth, 1999; Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011.
Loyalty
social identity
Henri Tajfel and John Turner established that people draw a meaningful part of their self-concept from the groups they belong to, and defend those memberships actively. Loyalty is less a calculation repeated at every purchase than a statement about who someone is. People stay with the brands that say something true about them, which is why satisfaction without attachment reads perfectly well on a feedback form and shows up nowhere in the numbers.
Source
Tajfel & Turner, An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict, in Austin & Worchel (eds), The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, pp. 33–47, Brooks/Cole, 1979.
Familiarity
mental availability
Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute analysed purchasing across thousands of brands and found that market share is driven less by being better than by coming to mind first in a buying situation. Brands grow by being mentally available to the whole category, not by deepening the attachment of people who already buy. Familiarity scores how far you have built that presence, and where its absence is costing you consideration.
Worth saying plainly: Ehrenberg-Bass is sceptical of emotional attachment as a growth lever, and we cite Sharp for mental availability alone. The disagreement is real and we would rather name it than quietly borrow his authority for an argument he does not make.
Source
Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know, Oxford University Press, 2010.
Emotion
somatic markers
Antonio Damasio studied patients whose emotional processing was damaged while their reasoning remained intact. They could analyse a decision indefinitely and could not arrive at one. Emotion is not a decoration on top of rational thought, it is part of the machinery that lets a decision close. Which makes what people feel about a brand a commercial input rather than a soft one, and makes it worth knowing whether the feeling you are creating is the one you intended.
Source
António Damásio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, Grosset/Putnam, 1994. See also Bechara & Damasio, The somatic marker hypothesis: a neural theory of economic decision, 2005.
Experience
cognitive ease
Things that are easy to process are judged more favourably and trusted more readily. Reber, Winkielman and Schwarz demonstrated the effect experimentally; Kahneman later set it in the wider architecture of fast and slow thinking. A brand that feels like itself across a website, a review and a visit is easier to take in than one that shifts between them, and that ease shows up as preference. People notice inconsistency long before they can explain it.
Source
Reber, Winkielman & Schwarz, Effects of Perceptual Fluency on Affective Judgments, Psychological Science, 1998; Reber & Schwarz, Effects of Perceptual Fluency on Judgments of Truth, 1999; Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011.
Loyalty
social identity
Henri Tajfel and John Turner established that people draw a meaningful part of their self-concept from the groups they belong to, and defend those memberships actively. Loyalty is less a calculation repeated at every purchase than a statement about who someone is. People stay with the brands that say something true about them, which is why satisfaction without attachment reads perfectly well on a feedback form and shows up nowhere in the numbers.
Source
Tajfel & Turner, An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict, in Austin & Worchel (eds), The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, pp. 33–47, Brooks/Cole, 1979.
Judgement, not just patterns
Every diagnostic is read by one of our strategists before a client sees it. Three exceptional reviews from people the whole sector listens to matter differently from two hundred ordinary ones, and knowing which is which is the job.