Science behind 23plusone by BR-ND People

The science behind 23plusone ‘We need scientific research to understand the emotive relation between brands and people and with your PhD, I bet you know how to do that.’ With this statement, the story of 23plusone started back in 2005 when Alexander Koene and Kim Cramer met for the first time. 23plusone began in branding, but today it covers many disciplines like marketing, innovation, coaching, recruitment and graphic design. How did this all come about? The short version: the research never stopped and around the world, people discovered new ways to use it. Because in the end, it’s all about humans, drives and behaviors.

How will this make me feel?

In the practice of branding, concepts like status, creativity, and freedom are known as brand values. Cramer and Koene’s provocative idea was that brands can’t have values. Brands only exist in our brains, as experiences form associative networks of meaning. Brands can trigger what people find important. Human emotions, motivations, and aspirations

- simply called ‘drives’ are the foundation upon which thought processes, decisions and actions are based. “Although people think that decision making about brands strongly depends on functional benefits, it all comes down to one question: how will this make me feel?”

Researching human drives

8,000 respondents were profiled and 195 brands in 23 product categories. The profiling was an inventory of 24 human drives, such as sexuality, freedom, materialism and creativity. These resulted from a deep dive in scien tific literature on philosophy, psychology, biology, sociology and neurology. All are to a certain degree important for all humans. They are coping strategies for people to pursue an integrated approach in order to a) secure the species. b) minimize feelings of inferiority. c) maximize feelings of satisfaction. Interrelated, they lead to happiness. Before these drives were ready for empirical research, they needed to be operationalized, and it became clear that measuring feelings with cog-

nitive concepts like words was problematic. To get closer to the subconscious brain, visual stimuli were created: each drive represented by a ‘card’ of four photos and two words. Visual information is processed more easily, more rapidly, and less rationally. The visual-verbal constructs seemed to work well and after qualitatively validating the cards and quantitatively calibrating them through several pilot studies, large scale research was done.

Five clusters

Factor analysis on the personal profiles of the respondents and the brand profiles revealed five clusters: Basics, Self development, Ambition, Vitality and Attraction. Basics stand for physical and social safety, the essential things in life, like structure, care, and connection. Self development stands for the child inside who wants to create, fantasize, and discover. Ambition is all about wanting to be the best, to score, to be proud and get recognition. Vitality stands for a healthy mind and body. For being flexible, energetic and fit. Attraction is about everything you can feel, taste, hear, see, and smell. All the sensory things, including sexuality.

The research gave interesting results that challenged the classic theory in brand positioning. Eventually, the research also has impact on personal development of people and on team and organization culture, as it was found that the same emotive dynamics apply to people’s happiness.

also researched 23plusone as a measurement for happiness. They compared it with the internationally recognized standards and found there was statistical consistency between the measurements. This confirmed that it can be used for branding and happiness.

The more a brand triggers fundamental human drives, the higher the brand appeal. The better a brand simultaneously triggers drives from the five clusters, the higher the brand appeal. Brand that trigger unexpected combinations of drives, deviating from category conformity increase in brand appeal.

23plusone is all about people and their individual and collective drives to create a vision, a concept, a brand, a team, a company. Aligning these individual and collective drives with strategic direction, bottom-up and top-down, is the key to a successful transformation. Both content and processes can be designed more efficient and effective by using the insights from the 23plusone study.

People who succeed in activating more drives in their lives are happier. Organization culture that activates more drives is more positive and more attractive. The more clusters people and cultures activate, the happier they are.

Over the years, more research and innovation was done to improve 23plusone. After the first literature study and the studies to create and validate the cards, design the empirical research and turn the data into knowledge, there were many more milestones:

So if the research back then was about brands, how come it says something about people’s happiness as well? The 24 drives originate from social sciences and not from branding. In 2016, Cramer and Koene

- Upgrade cards (10 languages) - Brain scanning validation - Upgrade of the cards (10 languages) - Brand scan Totta Research 1 & 2 - 2nd literature study - Upgrade of the cards (international set) - Research on cards as happiness metrics - Validation of the cards - Upgrade of the cards (without words)