The paper investigates how our understanding of human decision making has improved over the last few years and considers why this progress has had little impact on the majority of brand planning.

The core of the paper proposes a new way of looking at brand communication by broadening our perspective from explicit messages to implicit signals.

We’ve known for a long time that unconscious feelings dominate human decision making but this knowledge has made few inroads into how we approach brand planning. Whilst there have been theories around low involvement processing, it still remains conscious engagement, key messages, awareness and cut-through that rule the roost. This focus on messages means opportunities are often missed by brands.

Explicit communications are easily controlled and planned and therefore dominate thinking. But it is often signals from the brand’s behaviour or other people using/talking about the brand that can have the greatest effect.

These signals are often processed unconsciously by consumers and stored as feelings which greatly affect brand preference. With the growing socialisation of life and further personalisation of media these implicit sources of communication are becoming ever more important.

The paper looks at how understanding and optimising these signals offers great opportunities for brands, agencies and the discipline of marketing as a whole.

It starts with a brief overview of how we make decisions and what this means for brands and then defines what implicit brand communications are and concludes that visibility and social signals need to be the focus of brand behaviour in the future.

The concept of signalling is proposed as a way of better understanding implicit communications and explaining the two drivers of signal strength: cost and intention.

The term Signal Brands is introduced as a label for brands which manage and exploit their implicit communications effectively and the paper shows how this approach can have a real financial and business benefit for brands.

Four principles are established and illustrated as being able to optimise and strengthen brand signals. These are extravagance, sacrifice, concrete actions and distinctive design.

The final section of the paper discusses the implications a greater focus on implicit communications will have onadvertising, marketing, evaluation and brand planning.

Read the IPA’s award winning paper here…