Colin Moyer - Insight And Marketing Consultant Rethinking How People Experience Brands

What if some of the assumptions behind modern marketing and market research are fundamentally wrong? For Colin Moyer, his background in anthropology, archaeology and Buddhist theory offers a different perspective on how people make decisions. Colin sees striking parallels between these ideas and findings from modern neuroscience, challenging some conventional assumptions about consumers as stable individuals with fixed preferences. Instead, he argues that people are constantly shaped by context and previous experience – with important implications for how marketers build brands and how researchers understand the people behind them.

Consumers are not as fixed as we think

Much of marketing and market research starts from the assumption that people possess relatively stable identities. We build personas, create people-based segmentations and ask consumers to describe who they are and what they want. Colin questions how useful that assumption really is. Drawing on Buddhist thinking, he describes the self not so much as a fixed entity, but as a collection of constantly changing processes influenced by context, experience and circumstance.

“We like to think there is an independent, unchanging core,” Colin explains. “We call it our personality, or say: this is the way I am. But it’s not really like that.” The same person can behave differently at work and at home, while life stages, relationships, responsibilities and experiences can change how someone sees themselves over time. A good example is code switching – the practice of changing one's language, dialect, accent, or behaviour to fit into different social, cultural, or professional contexts.  As a Canadian in the UK, Colin doesn’t sound very “foreign,” but when he speaks to his brother on the phone, his accent and Canadian idioms come out. In a research context, Colin saw this directly in a segmentation study where the same consumers were interviewed repeatedly. Across waves, a significant proportion moved between segments. The people had not changed physically, but their circumstances, moods and behaviours had. It does beg the question – if our selves are not fixed – are AI personas and consumer twins built on a false premise and therefore how reliable are they in reflecting human decision making?

That does not make segmentation useless. Rather, Colin argues that marketers and researchers should be careful about treating segments as permanent truths. Occasion- and context-based approaches can often get closer to how decisions actually happen because they acknowledge that behaviour changes with circumstances. Our “self”, Colin argues, is often a linguistic and mental construct we use to interpret and explain events and contexts, and to guide how we react to them. “Context, situations, life stages – everything is constantly in flux.” Instead of only asking who the consumer is, the more useful question may be: what is happening when they make the decision?

“We like to think there is an independent, unchanging core. We call it our personality, or say: this is the way I am. But it’s not really like that.”

Brands don't exist - only Experiences do

This brings Colin to his second key idea: we don’t simply perceive the world around us objectively. Our minds actively shape what we experience. Drawing on Eastern philosophy and modern neuroscience, he argues that perception does not simply work from the outside in. Our brains continuously use previous experiences and existing mental representations to interpret what we encounter. Building on the work of neuroscientists such as Anil Seth, Colin describes the brain as a “hallucination engine”: much of what we experience is effectively the brain’s best guess at what is out there, based on partial information. This is also part of what allows us to make intuitive decisions so quickly.

For marketers, brands provide a powerful example. Consumers do not simply store a logo, positioning statement or list of brand attributes in their heads. Their understanding of a brand consists of accumulated experiences, associations, memories, emotions and sensory cues. Heinz Ketchup, for example, might evoke its red colour, distinctive bottle and shield logo, but also its taste, childhood memories, hot dogs at a theme park or chips after a night out. “I once met a brand consultant who said that brands don’t exist, only experiences,” Colin recalls. “What we think of as a brand lives in the consumer’s mind through these representations.”

This also means that marketers cannot simply decide what their brand means. They can own the logo and create the advertising, but ultimately consumers construct the brand through what they experience. Marketing can influence that experience, but it cannot fully control it. The opportunity is therefore to create greater alignment between the experience marketers intend and the representations already held in consumers’ minds. Rather than asking only, “What do we want consumers to think?”, marketers should also be asking, “What do we want consumers to experience – and how does that connect with everything they have experienced from us before?”

“What’s in consumers’ minds about the brand? Not what’s in the marketers’ mind about the brand.”

Why Brand Consistency beats Constant Reinvention

These accumulated representations also help explain why brand perceptions can be so slow to change. Familiar colours, shapes, sounds and other distinctive assets allow people to recognise brands quickly, sometimes from surprisingly incomplete information. In a supermarket, consumers may recognise a product several metres away and at an angle because only a few cues are needed to activate an existing representation (or in other words a ‘’hallucination’’).

For Colin, this makes consistency more than a question of following brand guidelines. Every interaction reinforces, adjusts or potentially disrupts what people already experience. Sudden changes in packaging, positioning or personality can therefore create friction. “You can’t jump to a whole new brand personality overnight and go: this is a new brand,” he says. “You have to take people on a journey.” If marketers want to change a brand, they need to understand that existing mental representations have often been built over years and cannot simply be overwritten by a new campaign.

The same principle applies to innovation. Truly new ideas often become easier to understand when they contain something recognisable. Colin points to Gü puddings: their glass ramekins cue a premium restaurant or homemade dessert experience, while their reusability continues the brand experience beyond consumption. Gü’s ability to cue an instantly recognisable premium context in an FMCG product has been integral to their

brand success.  Similar cues exist across snacking, where bold colours can immediately signal what consumers should expect – from black, red and yellow for stronger or spicier flavours to greens for milder ones. “It’s mostly consistent but with some surprise,” Colin explains. “Anchor it in what’s familiar and then change it a little bit.” Innovation still needs distinctiveness, but unfamiliarity for its own sake can make a product harder rather than easier to process.

“You can’t jump to a whole new brand personality overnight and go: this is a new brand. You have to take people on a journey.”

From Researching Opinions to Understanding Experiences

If consumers are context-dependent and perception is shaped by accumulated experience, there are important implications for market research too. Traditional surveys and focus groups frequently rely on what Colin calls the “interpreter” – our tendency to create explanations and stories about why we behave as we do. The problem is that these explanations are usually rationalisations created after the event rather than accurate descriptions of what drove the decision.

That does not mean surveys and discussion guides have no value. Instead, Colin argues for moving away from asking people to explain their behaviour and further towards observation, context and describing experiences, particularly when the objective is understanding decision-making. Researchers might explore what sensations, emotions, colours, sounds or memories a brand evokes before moving to predefined attributes. Projective techniques can also help by taking the respondent’s own identity partly out of the equation: asking what kind of person a brand would be, for example, rather than immediately asking someone what they personally would do.

Colin playfully describes this potential direction as “Zen research”: trying to understand experience before interpretation and recognising the mental projections respondents bring with them. “Many brand studies still go: here’s a brand logo, do you agree or disagree with the following words?” he says. “They’re still very much trying to map to the brand plan or brand manifesto, rather than really unpicking what a brand is to people.” He does not claim to have designed the perfect alternative methodology, but sees observational research, neuroscience, contextual research and experiential qualitative techniques as steps towards a richer understanding.

“Many brand studies are still very much trying to map to the brand plan or brand manifesto, rather than really unpicking what a brand is to people.”

A Different Starting Point for Brand Growth

Interestingly, many of the practical conclusions are not entirely unfamiliar. Marketers already recognise the importance of consistency, distinctive assets and emotional responses, while researchers have become increasingly cautious about stated intent and more attentive to the role of context. What Colin adds is a different explanation for why these principles work – one that connects ideas developed centuries ago in Eastern philosophical traditions with findings from modern neuroscience.

That different starting point matters because many older assumptions remain deeply embedded in everyday practice. Marketers still feel pressure to reinvent brands rather than build on what is already established. Researchers still ask consumers to rationalise behaviour or reduce rich brand experiences to predefined attributes. And organisations still

treat consumers as relatively stable groups despite knowing how strongly context can affect behaviour. “If our starting point about how the mind works was different,” Colin asks, “would we come up with a different method?”

Perhaps that is the most useful challenge from the conversation. It is not about declaring Western thinking wrong or Eastern philosophy right, nor about abandoning the research methods marketers use today. It is an invitation to reconsider the assumptions underneath them. If people are dynamic, context-dependent and actively constructing meaning from everything they have experienced before, the future of brand growth may depend less on finding better ways to tell consumers what a brand means – and more on developing better ways to understand and shape how they actually experience it.

“If our starting point about how the mind works was different, would we come up with a different method?”