Humanizing Brand Experience
How brand experience drives choice and loyalty
Brand experience is measurable
Brand experience may seem subjective, but it’s also a measurable competitive asset, shaped by universal human factors. When appropriately quantified, brand experience exposes why people choose one brand over another and stay loyal to that choice over time.
Humanizing Brand Experience, Monigle’s proprietary methodology, measures the sensorial, emotional, intellectual, and behavioral factors that shape how people experience a brand, and what that means for choice and advocacy.
The four dimensions of brand experience
The way a consumer experiences a brand can be measured across four dimensions, capturing how people sense, think about, feel toward, and interact with the brand.
Sensorial: The visual, auditory and olfactory brand cues, these drivers are all about how people sense your brand.
Intellectual: The functional, bread-and-butter benefits offered by your brand. It's what people think about your brand when they go through their mental decision-making checklists.
Emotional: The implicit brand motivators that define what people feel about your brand. These motivators drive powerful connections and associations.
Behavioral: The physical, intentional interactions people have with your brand. It's what people do with your brand, where engagement becomes action.
Where Humanizing Brand Experience has been proven
Humanizing Brand Experience has been validated through a decade of research in healthcare and financial services, but its underlying model measures how people sense, feel, think about, and interact with a brand in any industry.
Humanizing Brand Experience has been studying healthcare consumer behavior for nine years and counting, now in its 10th year of research. The most recent study, Volume 9, surveyed over 30,000 people across 75 markets nationwide, rating how they experience and choose healthcare brands.
Healthcare research is conducted by:
Dave Middendorf, Executive Director, Health, Care, and Wellness
Tim Srenaski, Associate Director, Insights
Starting with Volume 9, the healthcare study moved from an annual survey to four quarterly waves a year, a cadence that continues into Volume 10 and beyond.
Stronger brand experience scores track with higher HCAHPS ratings, connecting brand experience directly to hospital revenue.
Humanizing Brand Experience also extends into pediatric healthcare specifically, surveying over 6,000 consumers on their perceptions of 42 U.S. pediatric brands, with the model explaining 76% of what drives parents’ choice and loyalty.
In partnership with American Banker, Humanizing Brand Experience has spent five years and counting studying how more than 5,500 consumers annually choose financial brands.
Financial services research is conducted by:
Brian Elkins, Executive Director, Financial Services
Tim Srenaski, Associate Director, Insights
Monigle’s research with American Banker found that the underlying model accounts for 78% of what drives bank customer satisfaction and loyalty. –Journal of Digital Banking (2022)
How Humanizing Brand Experience predicts consumer behavior
Our Humanizing Brand Experience model captures 75% of what actually drives someone to choose and stay loyal to a brand in healthcare and 78% in financial services, with the same rigor built to apply to any industry.
Through structural equation modeling, we analyze how people rate a brand across specific attributes, isolating those that actually influence the decision to choose and recommend a brand.
1. Score the four dimensions:
Respondents rate each brand across nearly 60 attributes spanning sensorial, intellectual, emotional, and behavioral experience.2. Capture intent and advocacy:
Respondents answer how likely they are to use the brand and how likely they are to recommend it.3. Weigh each attribute and dimension:
We use a structural equation model to determine how much each individual attribute, and each of the four dimensions overall, actually drives intent and advocacy.4. Identify what matters most:
We rank every attribute by its actual influence, showing exactly which ones move the needle on someone's choice to use or recommend a brand, and which ones don't.5. Calculate the brand score:
We apply real respondent data to produce a weighted score for every brand based on its highest-impact dimensions and attributes.
The Humanizing Brand Experience model builds on foundational academic research into brand experience: Brakus, Schmitt, and Zarantonello’s 2009 study, ‘Brand Experience: What Is It? How Is It Measured? Does It Affect Loyalty?’, published in the Journal of Marketing. The paper remains widely cited in behavioral economics and marketing research today.
