Overview

Our client had identified an emotional territory for a new creative direction. But to bring it to life, the team needed to understand what that emotion actually meant to consumers and how the brand could connect with it in an authentic and compelling way.

Asking people to explain a feeling risked producing abstract definitions or plausible accounts that missed the influences behind it. We needed to understand how it unfolded in real situations, giving the client and its creative agencies a richer foundation for campaign development.

Approach

People can describe a feeling. But the words they choose don’t necessarily reveal everything happening beneath the surface.

We conducted individual depth interviews with consumers, using ReTrack™ to relive recent experiences relevant to the territory. These covered both significant events and smaller everyday moments.

We helped people relive how each experience unfolded, exploring what they thought, felt and did at different stages. This allowed us to investigate the influences shaping their experience without relying on participants to identify or explain those influences themselves.

The experiences guided the interviews. Rather than work through a fixed set of direct questions, we explored key moments and psychological drivers as they emerged in the experiences people relived. This meant what we explored wasn’t limited to a predetermined set of questions, and also reduced the risk of artificially directing attention towards things that hadn’t mattered at the time, or prompting answers simply because we had introduced a topic.

We also explored associations between the emotional territory, selected moments and the brand itself. Interpreting these alongside the relived experiences helped us assess where connections were meaningful and where they required greater care.

Output

The research gave the client a deeper and more precise understanding of the emotional territory, connecting the language people used with the psychological influences shaping their experiences.

We mapped how these experiences developed over time, identifying the triggers, behaviours and underlying motivations involved. This helped the team understand where creative work could connect with recognisable experiences, and where language or framing might evoke an unintended response.

By exploring how the emotion related to different occasions and the brand, we identified opportunities where there were credible connections to build on and where relevance could not simply be assumed.

Together, these insights provided a springboard for creative briefs, including areas to explore, psychological considerations to guide development and watchouts for how the territory was expressed. This gave the client and its agencies a clearer foundation for turning an emotional idea into relevant brand communications.