Our approach
Customers choose before they know they’ve chosen. Everything we do is built around that moment: making your brand the one the subconscious thinks of first and trusts most easily.
The science
Psychology and consumer research keep pointing the same way: buying is driven mostly by fast, automatic judgement, not careful deliberation.
Gerald Zaltman estimates that about 95% of thinking, including purchase decisions, happens in the subconscious. The reasons customers give are often explanations after the fact.
So we study customers’ associations, not just their survey answers.
Zaltman, How Customers Think, 2003
Kahneman separates thinking into System 1, automatic and effortless, and System 2, slow and effortful. Most everyday choices are made by System 1.
So we make brands understood at a glance, with no thinking required.
Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011
One study found people judge a web page’s visual appeal within about 50 milliseconds, and that judgement closely matches their view after looking for longer.
So we put the most important signal in the first glance.
Lindgaard et al., Behaviour & Information Technology, 2006
Robert Zajonc’s research on the mere-exposure effect showed people come to prefer things they have seen repeatedly, even when they don’t remember seeing them.
So we repeat the same symbol at every touchpoint.
Zajonc, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1968
Three levers
Our method brings together Trout and Ries’s positioning theory and the super-symbol method popularised by the Chinese consultancy Hua & Hua.
A new shape has to be learned. A symbol people already know is trusted on sight. We start from symbols that already live in the culture and make one of them yours.
“Quality, service, value” says nothing. The mind keeps one or two names per category, and one word per name. We find your word and turn it into a line customers will repeat.
One exposure is noise. A hundred consistent ones become memory. We put the same symbol and line on packaging, web, ads and search, and keep them there for years.
The Singula Method
Learn what customers’ subconscious links to you today, and which words competitors already hold.
Choose the word to own, and confirm customers care about it, competitors don’t own it, and you can deliver it.
Translate the word into signals the subconscious recognises directly.
Place the same signal wherever customers make decisions.
Check with data and customers’ own words that memory is deepening, and keep correcting course.
Principles
We only amplify strengths that are real. The subconscious can be attracted once, but only truth keeps it.
One clear word beats ten vague selling points. We will ask you to give some things up.
A brand isn’t a new outfit every season. Our job is to be remembered, not to surprise you.
We track search share, repeat purchase and customers’ own words, because clicks can’t tell you whether you’re remembered.