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A grandmother and her granddaughter baking together in a kitchen

Your brand already lives in people's minds.

The Brand Connectome® is the map of your brand in their brain: what pulls people toward you, what holds you back, and what you need to own next.

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Why buyers reach for you.

What buyers remember about your brand comes from years of experience and habit. The Brand Connectome® maps those associations across distinct categories, showing why people choose you and what gets in the way.

A crystal network of glowing pink connections, most of it below the surface
  1. The implicit barriers that hold back competitive users.
  2. The true drivers that make Core Users buy.
  3. The vulnerabilities you can attack in your competitor’s Brand Connectome®.
Actual Brand Connectomes® will be shared in a live meeting. An actual Connectome® holds hundreds of associations, linked to one another, that we decode.

Stronger networks. Instinctive preference.

Brands are networks of associations in the buyer’s mind. Larger, stronger networks build instinctive preference. Gaps give competitors room to build associations that disrupt and displace you.

Example: an over-the-counter pain reliever.

Your brand

Dense network, a gap in expertise

Your brand: a dense network of associations with a gap in medical expertiseA grandmother and granddaughter baking together. A father helping his daughter ride a bicycle. A family laughing around the dinner table. A parent reading a bedtime story to a child. An older couple laughing together at the beach.The top space is empty: this brand has no association with medical expertise.These scenes illustrate associations, not findings from client research.
A dense, strong network builds instinctive preference. A missing association with expertise leaves an opening.

A competitor

Building where you’re vulnerable

A competitor: building medical expertise in your brand’s gapA grandmother and granddaughter baking together. A father helping his daughter ride a bicycle. An older couple laughing together at the beach.The top photograph shows a doctor consulting a patient, representing medical expertise, linked to the center by a strong pink line.These scenes illustrate associations, not findings from client research.
A competitor builds associations with expertise in your gap, creating an opportunity to disrupt and displace you.
  • Strong association
  • An association or memory

The Growth Blueprint shows your team where to capture more of your growth target and how to close the gaps competitors can exploit.

Illustrative and simplified. Not a client map.

Common questions

  • What is a Brand Connectome®?

    A detailed map of the network of memories and associations about your brand in the consumer's brain. It has been building for years, and it is already there before you spend a dollar on marketing. Everything people already think and feel about your brand, and how tightly each of those things is tied to it.

  • Why do instinctive memories drive the sale?

    Because people rarely compare. They reach for whichever brand feels like the obvious answer to what they need right now. The brand that owns that instinctive preference gets the hand, regardless of what the others are saying.

  • How do you find the associations with your brand?

    We’ve worked with behavioral scientists to create a unique way of eliciting memories and associations from your consumers that go beyond what they tell you about your brand. We ask your buyers questions built to get past the tidy answers people give to sound reasonable, then measure which associations are genuinely attached to your brand and how strongly. It takes weeks, not quarters.

  • What does Triggers deliver to clients?

    A visual representation of your brand in your core and growth targets’ memory, your competitors’ brands mapped the same way, and a strategy: what to keep, what to stop, what to start. Visuals, words, color, sounds, experiences. Specific enough that your team, your sellers and your agency can brief from it and act on it now, not next quarter.

See our approach

“Triggers’ work uncovering the instinctive drivers of health plans became the foundation of our brand work, our messaging, our imagery and even our member experience. This led to accelerated share increases in Medicare and Small Business.”

David Edelman, CMO, Aetna

A few of our clients

  • Kraft Heinz
  • McDonald’s
  • Colgate
  • MetLife
  • PepsiCo
  • Rite Aid
  • Ragú
  • Aetna
  • Sabra
  • Kenvue

We published the method, not just the results.

We don’t keep the science a secret. It’s decades of work on how memory shapes choice, and we write about it openly so you can use it whether you hire us or not.

Our founder Leslie Zane laid it out in The Power of Instinct. Start there, or subscribe to The Real Triggers for what we’re learning now.

More about the book

The Power of Instinct, the book by Leslie Zane

What is your brand connected to?

We’ll find what’s really standing in the way, and show you something you don’t already know.

Book a growth conversation