The Brand Instinct® Monitor Tracks 100+ Unconscious Associations, Giving Marketers a Predictive Layer of Brand Health that Traditional Trackers Miss Entirely
NEW YORK (JULY 9, 2026) — Triggers®, the behavioral science-based brand growth strategy firm, today announced the launch of the Brand Instinct® Monitor (BIM), the first system designed to measure the instinctive associations that drive brand preference and business performance, and how they shift over time. Unlike traditional brand trackers that map what consumers consciously say about a brand, the BIM captures what they actually feel at the moment of choice.
The launch comes as frustration with conventional brand measurement reaches a boiling point. According to Gartner, roughly four in five brand leaders believe their tracking data is not sufficiently actionable for daily decision-making. Traditional trackers rely on explicit surveys and rational attributes that pull from the conscious mind, creating a lag that leaves marketers chasing sentiment shifts rather than anticipating them. Nearly 80% of CMOs describe tracking data as directional at best, and too surface-level to guide action.
Research has established that 95 percent of brand purchases are driven by the subconscious mind; yet every major brand tracker on the market monitors only the five percent that is conscious. The BIM closes that gap by tracking 100+ implicit verbal and visual associations – compared to the 15-20 measured in traditional trackers – offering marketers a dynamic, predictive model of brand choice rather than a static list of metrics. Its visual association tracking is an industry first, tracking the images and symbols that automatically activate brand meaning, before they register in rational thought.
“Traditional brand metrics rarely move because they’re not sensitive to the effects of marketing communications,” says Leslie Zane, Founder & CEO of Triggers®. “It can take years for the impact of what you do to show up in your brand tracker—and by the time it does, it’s already appearing in your sales results. At that point, it’s too late.”
The Brand Instinct Monitor completely changes how companies understand and manage brand growth. Because associations change more rapidly than attributes do, brands can now see—and shape—the drivers of consumer choice before they influence purchase.
The speed advantage is fundamental. Subconscious brand associations form in milliseconds, while conscious evaluations require deliberative processing that unfolds 200,000 times slower. This agility is what makes the BIM actionable in ways traditional tools are not: brands can see the impact of a marketing campaign on instinctive associations long before they show up in their traditional brand tracker.
The BIM is designed to complement traditional trackers to create a complete picture: instinctive associations as a leading indicator, and self-reported attributes as a lagging one. One of the most striking findings that the BIM reveals is the dramatic difference between what consumers consciously report and what implicitly drives their decisions. In one client engagement, price was cited as a barrier 17% of the time in conscious survey responses – but only 7% implicitly. Brands solving for the wrong problem are wasting time and investment, while also missing the actual levers of growth.
“Tapping into consumers’ instinctive associations is at the core of our branding and marketing approach at Kraft Heinz,” said Doug Healy, Head of Consumer Insights at Kraft Heinz. “We utilize the Triggers’ definition of a brand: the cumulative memories and associations that get ‘glued’ to a brand over time. For a company like Kraft Heinz, with iconic brands such as Kraft Mac & Cheese, Capri Sun, and Lunchables, which have been part of consumers’ lives for generations, this construct is especially meaningful. These deeply rooted associations often trace back to childhood, creating lasting connections that continue to influence consumer behavior today.”
The BIM is built on Triggers®’ proprietary Brand Connectome® framework, the mapped network of cumulative verbal and visual memories and associations living in a consumer’s unconscious mind. To learn more about Triggers® and the Brand Instinct Monitor, please visit triggers.com
As featured in AdExchanger.
