Living Brands: Marketing Through Human Nature

What if brand strategy started not with what consumers say they want, but with the deeper human motives that make certain ideas, meanings and experiences instinctively compelling?

Presented at the Unleashing Innovation in Branding Strategy Summit in Amsterdam on 2 November 2017, this presentation introduced a methodology for creating brands by moving beyond psychology to the biological roots of human behaviour.

Drawing on biology and affective neuroscience, the approach identifies the fundamental human motives underlying emotion, preference and choice. But understanding these motives is only the beginning. The greater challenge is to turn an intangible emotional territory into a distinctive positioning—and then make that positioning tangible across everything the brand says, makes and does.

The presentation explained this journey through four connected phases.

Brand Decoding uncovers the brand's underlying motivational DNA, while Category Decoding reveals the deeper motives shaping behaviour within the category. Bringing these perspectives together provides the foundation for identifying the emotional territory the brand can authentically and distinctively own.

Brand Enlivenment then moves from identifying the motive to defining how that motive should uniquely live through the brand—transforming a universal human motivation into a distinctive strategic idea and positioning.

Finally, Neurolanguage takes that strategy downstream. It translates emotional meaning into semantic, sensory and executional principles capable of guiding communication, concepts, visual identity, design and the wider brand experience. In this way, strategy and execution are connected by the same underlying emotional logic rather than developed as separate exercises.

Examples from Heineken, fashion and a Johnson & Johnson cosmetics brand demonstrated how the same fundamental human motives can generate very different expressions depending on the brand's own character and category context.

The presentation captured an early articulation of what would become central to THE WHEEL OF MOTIVES® and the BRAND AVIATORS® approach: emotion should not remain something marketers discuss, creatives intuit or researchers measure. It can become a system—moving from biology and human motivation, to strategy and positioning, and from positioning into the communications, concepts, designs and experiences through which people encounter the brand.

The methodology enables marketers, consumer insight managers, communication professionals, designers, PR specialists and brand owners to move beyond disconnected functional and emotional benefits and build brands around something more fundamental: the biological drivers that make certain meanings, narratives and experiences intrinsically engaging to people.

Understand the human motive. Discover the territory the brand can own. Then bring that meaning to life through everything the brand does.