Brand Love is in the air this week at the Engineering Brand Love Summit, a joint event hosted by Brand Innovators and The Shipyard, where marketers will have an exciting new data analytics tool at their disposal—PULSE—which is rolling out in beta test mode and represents the most comprehensive measurement of Brand Love to date.

Developed by The Shipyard in collaboration with researchers at The Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business, PULSE has identified four distinct layers of Brand Love along the customer journey. Each layer represents a different stage of falling in love with a brand as customers traverse their experiences from brand awareness to loyalty: Attraction, Affection, Passion, Commitment.

”PULSE has a critical role to play in evaluating marketing performance, as well as shaping future marketing strategy, by offering a more complete picture of how consumers are interacting with brands across today's fragmented digital media landscape," said Blake Williams, Director of Data Strategy at The Shipyard. "When assessing Brand Love, it is especially important to focus on what consumers do rather than just what they say about a brand. Direct actions are often more indicative of customers' true feelings and have a measurable impact on that brand's bottom line.”

Whereas traditional market indicators of Brand Love rely primarily on sentiment analysis, PULSE also includes performance metrics within the framework of a customizable and brand-specific tool that leverages paid, owned and earned media channels.  PULSE connects disparate sources of first-, second- and third-party data in order to generate a single holistic and prescriptive score.

”PULSE not only quantifies Brand Love, but also offers a clear roadmap of where a brand is excelling and where it's falling short," Williams explained.

Complimentary to a brand's core KPIs, these data points are designed to capture all the ways in which Brand Love can be measured.  "As a firm rooted in accounting and financial services, our measurement is always very precise. Yet quantifying 'brands' and 'love' have always been elusive for marketers," said Becky Bauer, Managing Director of Marketing and Brand at CLA. "CLA is excited to be at the forefront of this innovative analytics technique as The Shipyard's Alpha participant in the launch of PULSE."

Breaking Down the Layers of Brand Love

The PULSE scoring system includes an index for each individual layer in addition to a comprehensive score and competitive analysis. The results provide additional context to consumer journey mapping analyses and allow marketers to adjust budgeting, targeting and messaging strategies to improve performance at each stage. 

Here are the four layers of PULSE explained:

• Attraction – brand awareness: Users are simply getting an initial exposure to a brand. This component details the impact the initial exposures have, whether it be viewing an ad, seeing PR, or having an organic social post show in their feed.


• Affection – brand interaction: At this stage the user takes some action with the brand, whether it's watching a video, clicking through from an ad, attending a brand event or mentioning a brand on a social platform.


• Passion – brand sharing: Now users have moved from just engaging to demonstrating increased interest. They are spending more time on the website, watching videos to completion (or maybe multiple times), giving sales signals like researching where to buy the brands products or even submitting a purchase, and talking about the brand on social media.


• Commitment – brand loyalty: These users are officially obsessed with the brand. They're buying branded apparel, subscribing to and engaging with emails regularly, amplifying the brand regularly across social channels, and signaling they are willing to pay a premium and purchase without incentives to get products.

”We're thrilled to partner with Brand Innovators at the Engineering Brand Love Summit, where we will showcase some of the best and brightest talent in the industry," said Rick Milenthal, CEO of The Shipyard. "One of the highlights of the event will be the introduction of PULSE, which reaffirms our commitment to providing marketers with the resources they need to activate around The Shipyard's core principles of Engineering Brand Love."

Visit here to learn how to participate in The Shipyard's PULSE beta test.