Think about the last time you walked into a store or landed on a website and something just felt right. You didn't question why. Instinctively, you just knew.
This is what every brand is trying to create. But very few understand how the right kind of emotions for their brand are actually constructed, or how to reliably create the conditions for them.
“Brands don’t trigger emotions. They shape the conditions from which the brain constructs emotional meaning.”
What most people outside of branding believe about investing in their brand is pretty much this: pick someone who can design a logo, select some colours, choose the typography, create the messaging, apply this everywhere and everything will fall into place. The audience will feel what you intended, and just like that, the brand is done.
But this belief misses the most important part: what actually happens in the mind of someone when they encounter your brand.
Brands don’t trigger emotion. They shape the conditions from which the brain constructs emotional meaning.
I call this 'the point of inception', it's what happens in the moment sensory information enters your brain. Your brain shapes this information based on everything you already know, associate with, and predict about the world. In turn, this is what shapes how you feel about what you're experiencing.
“The gap isn’t in strategy or design. It’s what happens between them, the part many people refer to as where the 'magic' happens.”
Identity design is most commonly experienced visually, but brands can reach people through sound, scent, taste and touch. Every sensory touchpoint contributes to what the brain constructs.
If the thinking behind a brand doesn’t account for this process, the outcome, regardless of how considered or polished it appears, will miss the mark. The result is wasted time, wasted money and missed opportunities to establish trust with the very customers you're trying to reach.
This is the gap that nearly all branding processes don't address. It sits in the transition between brand strategy and design. It's the moment where emotional precision should be shaping creative decisions, but rarely does.
Some attempt to bridge this gap through mood boards and visual references as a way of translating strategy into feeling. But without a scientific framework for how emotions are actually constructed, the thinking rarely survives the transition from strategy to design with any real precision intact.
That's the gap this approach closes. And for businesses willing to work at this level, the difference in how their brand connects with people is significant.
Strategists and designers have long worked this way intuitively. But its practical application to brand identity design remains underdeveloped in most commercial branding processes, particularly during the transition from strategy through to design.
Let’s dig a little deeper so you can understand what’s going on.
Lisa Feldman Barrett is a neuroscientist and professor at Northeastern University (US) who has spent decades studying how emotions work.
Her Theory of Constructed Emotion argues that emotions are not hardwired reactions waiting to be triggered. They are constructed in the moment by the brain, drawing on bodily sensations, past experience, learned concepts and cultural context to create emotional meaning as it happens.
In other words, our emotions aren't reactions. The brain constructs them. Every time you encounter something (a brand, a person, a room and so on) your brain reaches into everything it already knows to make sense of it. Your memories, your associations, the context you're in right now. And from all of that, it shapes how you feel about what you're experiencing.
For brands: This has a direct commercial implication. The brain constructs an emotional experience from the very first encounter and this construction happens instantly, below conscious awareness, before the person has had time to think. Get the first contact wrong and you're not just missing an opportunity, you're actively constructing the wrong emotional experience. One that the brain will use as the reference point for every encounter that follows. Rebuilding this takes significant time, money and effort. First impressions don't just count in branding, they compound.
“Reality for us is what we can sense with our sensory surfaces and what we can make sense of with the signals in our brain.” - Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made
You are not a passive receiver of the world around you. You are an active constructor of your own emotional experiences.
In her book, How Emotions Are Made (2017), Barrett puts it like this: “Reality for us is what we can sense with our sensory surfaces and what we can make sense of with the signals in our brain.”
Your audience isn't passively receiving your brand. They're interpreting it through everything they already know. The brand that works hardest to understand that prior knowledge is the one that connects most deeply.
This has a profound implication. No two people will construct exactly the same emotional experience when they encounter your brand, because no two people bring the same history, context or associations to that moment. You can't control what gets constructed. But you can shape the conditions that make the right emotional outcome more likely and this is where the real work of branding lives - in these decisions.
Brand strategist and author Marty Neumeier famously said: “Your brand isn't what you say it is—it's what they say it is.” (The Brand Gap 2003)
He was right (and ahead of the curve). Barrett's research shows us why that's true at a neurological level. This is what's happening every time someone encounters your brand. The emotion isn't contained in what's been created, but what has been created is responsible for shaping the conditions from which that emotion is constructed.
When I first read Barrett’s book How Emotions Are Made, something stopped me in my tracks.
For as long as I can remember, I’d been working with intuition (like many designers) that I couldn’t fully explain. The brands that connected most deeply with audiences weren’t always the ones that people associated with the ‘best’ design. Something else was at work. I could see it in other brands and with client after client in my own work, and although I had my own definition, I didn’t have the science to back this up.
Barrett’s work gave me this. It was truly a watershed moment for me and an emotional one. Everything I'd been working on, for over a decade, suddenly had the science to back it up.
Her research didn’t just validate my intuition, it explained it. It confirmed something I’d felt strongly enough about to build a business around. This is why I came up with the name Sensation Creative for my business in 2012: because we experience the world first through our senses, and then we make sense of this information with our brain. In this respect, Sensation has never just been a name, it's the entire philosophy of what I do.
This is what's happening every time someone encounters your brand. The emotion isn't in what has been created. It's being constructed in the mind of the person experiencing it.
So what does this mean for your brand?
It means the goal of branding isn’t to pick the right emotion and signal it through your design. It’s more deliberate than that.
Think of it like setting a stage. You can't control how an audience responds when the curtain goes up. But you can control the lighting, the music, the atmosphere and the story. Get all of that working together in the right way and you can shape the conditions from which the intended emotion is constructed.
“You can’t control what people feel. You can only shape the conditions that make the right emotional experience more likely.”
Put simply: a brand exists to deliberately shape the conditions for an intended emotional experience. Everything else, all the elements chosen without this thinking behind them, is just surface level stuff.
The question isn't: “how should our brand make people feel?” It's: “what conditions does our brand need to create for the right emotional experience to emerge naturally?”
For businesses, this settles the question of whether branding really matters. It's not just cosmetic. It's the architecture you build: every single touchpoint is doing something. The question is whether it's doing what you intended.
Most branding processes focus on the elements: the colours, typography, messaging, imagery and so on, and treat them as the answer. But those elements are only part of what the brain uses to construct an emotional experience. They work alongside everything the audience already brings to the encounter. As we've touched on: their associations, their context, their prior experiences including with your brand and brands like yours.
“The emotion was never in your brand. It was always in your audience.”
The problem isn’t the elements themselves. It’s the applied thinking, or lack of it, that determines how those elements are chosen. When the thinking doesn’t account for how emotional experiences are actually constructed in the brain, design can’t do the job it's supposed to do. It might look right, but it won’t feel right. And feeling right is the entire point.
There’s a useful way to see the difference.
Signalling says: we want people to feel excitement, so we'll use red and write in an energetic tone.
Constructing says: what does our specific audience already associate with the type of excitement we'd like them to feel? What's going on in their world when they come across us? What does every touchpoint need to feel like, coherently and consistently, for excitement to be the natural emotional outcome?
One works on the surface. The other works on the level of how the brain constructs emotional experiences.
When I work with people on their brand, we don’t start the design phase with colours, logos and so on. We start with the emotional experience we’re trying to construct, and we define it with real precision.
Not: “we want to feel trustworthy.” But: what kind of trust? The quiet confidence of an expert who doesn’t need to shout about it. The warm reassurance of someone who genuinely has your back. The calm authority of someone who has seen this before and knows exactly what to do?
These aren’t just different words. They lead to creating completely different brands.
Once the emotional experience is defined with this type of precision, every design decision that follows becomes purposeful. Every typographic choice, every use of space, every word works as part of a coherent system. One that gives the brain what it needs to construct the intended emotional experience as consistently as possible, everywhere your brand shows up.
If you’re investing in your brand, stop asking “how should our brand make people feel?”
Ask this instead: “what conditions does our brand need to create, consistently across every touchpoint, for the right emotional experience to emerge naturally in the people we most want to reach?”
It's a harder question. It demands more rigour. But it’s the one that separates branding that looks right from branding that genuinely connects.
The emotion was never in your brand. It was always in your audience.
Understanding this is the first step. Applying it with precision is where the real work begins and where real results follow.
Simon
Simon Bell is the Director of Sensation Creative and the author of The Creative Resonance Formula™, a scientifically informed framework that bridges the gap between brand strategy and design, ensuring the right emotional experience is constructed at every touchpoint. SensationCreative.com
