Meet the Agency ‘Unleashing Brand Joy’
In the past year, the concept of ‘joy’ has become increasingly prominent in various forms of media. From social media posts to news articles, ads and entertainment. That simple but powerful three-letter word has been used to capture a range of emotions and experiences.
A recent high-profile example of the use of the word joy is Tim Walz, the Democratic Party's nominee for vice president, thanking his running mate Kamala Harris for ‘bringing back the joy’ at a rally in August. Platforms such as Yahoo! News proclaimed joy as the ‘word of the night’. Meanwhile, during the Olympics, Snoop Dogg shared numerous posts on social media describing moments of ‘Olympic joy’, Comcast launched its ‘Joy of The Games’ ad, and Celine Deon proclaimed her joy to be back in front of a crowd doing what she loved. Joy has also been resonating on social media - hashtags such as #joy, #purejoy, and #findjoy have trended, and on Instagram #joy has around 40 million posts associated with it.
With all of this in mind, New Orleans creative agency PETERMAYER recently announced the launch of its new positioning: ‘Unleashing Brand Joy’. As part of its commitment to becoming experts in the concept of joy, the agency’s intelligence department produced findings detailing the need for joy in people’s everyday lives and how that emotion can be a benefit to brands. In fact, PETERMAYER found that there is an 80% correlation between joy and purchase intent, and that 63% of purchasing intent is related to the joy that consumers experience via a brand’s marketing communications.
“I believe we are seeing a return of the assertion of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” says Laura Thomas, SVP, head of strategy at PETERMAYER. “People are sick and tired of being sick and tired. The culture in the US has always had hope and optimism as an underpinning, and we’ve stepped away from that for a handful of years given the pandemic, the persistent doom scrolls of the media landscape, and the negative overarching narratives. Joy is that one word that’s cut through the zeitgeist and crystallised what everyone desires and has been missing.”
Although PETERMAYER is in the initial stages of its research into joy and identifying causality between the use of the word ‘joy’ and increased joyfulness in the population, the agency knows that people are finding, noticing, and curating moments of joy - feeling amused, inspired, sentimental and awestruck. Those feelings, the team says, can be unleashed by a wide range of joyful moments, from macro concepts like religion and family to the simplicity of fresh-cut flowers to brand moments.
“In our proprietary research,” adds Laura, “we are studying how joy moves in response to stress. Logically, you might think that as stress increases, joy decreases, but that might not be the case. In 2024, we are seeing that in times of turmoil - political and economic - our efforts to seek joy may intensify and bolster our instinct to embrace it when we find it. The response to the Olympics was a notable example of this. This year might be a transitional period and seeking out joy may be the antidote.”
Michelle Edelman, CEO at PETERMAYER, says that in moving the agency forward to its new era, they wanted something that captured them from ‘the inside out’. She feels that the celebratory and ebullient nature of PETERMAYER’s internal culture spills out into its work and client relationships. “We knew this but – is that just a personality of ours, or is it truly the secret sauce behind the agency’s success?” she ponders. “We started with a hypothesis that positive psychology, when applied to brands, has the same effects as when it’s applied to human behavioural health. Positive psychology used in therapy helps people move beyond surviving life to flourishing. Feelings of joy happen multiple times throughout the day when we are reaching those moments where we are thriving.”
Michelle firmly believes that evoking joy is incredibly powerful and that many brands can benefit from finding and understanding their own ‘joy factor’ to create positive emotional outcomes for consumers. “The world needs less FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) factor,” says Michelle. That said, she believes that not all agencies can be credible in delivering work against this value. “Although the underpinnings of ‘brand joy’ are data-driven, it is a very human-forward endeavour,” she says. “So, analytics-heavy agencies might be a bit mechanical in this approach. It is a consumer-forward, emotion-focused positioning, placing a heavy emphasis on uncovering human truths versus analysing the industry.”
Laura, Michelle and the wider team have been happy to find a positive reaction from clients to the emotion behind ‘Unleashing Brand Joy’ and the data that backs it up. They say that most were ready to dive right in and explore the research to uncover what joy really meant for them - their brand and their consumer. “The platform really clicked when clients were able to see the business building results that joy could produce as a powerful brand modifier,” says Laura.
“The word ‘joy’, as it turns out, is profound,” adds Michelle. “When we tell people we unleash brand joy, they at once light up. People are hungry for that beacon of positivity. What we do is evoke positive emotional sparks and how we get there is unique to every client and every brand situation. We do it through uncovering the mode of joy that the brand can undertake. There are dozens of modes of joy – awe, understanding, connection, relief – connecting the right one to the business problem and consumer truth is key to unlocking the joy for that brand.”
All of the data informing PETERMAYER’s joyful approach to advertising is gathered and analysed by its ‘Brand Joy Lab’, an ‘always-on insights programme’, which launched back in 2023. It conducts ongoing high-volume qualitative research with American consumers and how they are experiencing joy in their lives and in their purchases. The agency wanted to put its all into this endeavour, so the team created PETERMAYER’s first ever intelligence division to house the Brand Joy Lab. This is run by director of intelligence Amy Hubbell.
“My career has been devoted to harnessing insights that shape strategies and strengthen consumer relationships,” says Amy. She adds that the intelligence department is the driving force of the Brand Joy Lab. “We are constantly learning and growing – from research into 5,000 consumer respondents to studying the writings of the Dalai Lama and the greatest minds of positive psychology and neuromarketing, plus exploring new AI-enabled neuroscience tools. We use this expertise to dig into our client’s audiences, uncovering and understanding how they feel about brands and their competitors, allowing us to find opportunities for joy elevation and to create new means of measuring success.”
In five years, adds Laura, PETERMAYER wants to be the known expert on joy.
Laura feels that a good example of all of this thinking in practice is PETERMAYER’s ‘No Is a Beautiful Thing’ campaign for Hancock Whitney Bank, which has picked up a number of national awards. The 125-year-old banking institution knew it needed to reach a growing gen z and millennial consumer to keep up with its competitors. “Through insights-based work, we discovered this was an audience that was used to hearing the word ‘no’ – especially from banks,” says Laura. “Because Hancock Whitney’s personal checking is unique in its lack of restrictions, we knew flipping the concept of ‘no’ into something joyful was our answer. So, the key and the modality of reaching this demographic became The Joy of Freedom, leading us to the award-winning ‘No Is a Beautiful Thing’ campaign.”
Moving forward, Michelle hopes that the ‘quest for joy’ becomes so widespread that her agency’s own positioning becomes eventually undifferentiated. But in the meantime, she thinks that they will find ways to extend beyond marketing communications to build brand joy with their clients. PETERMAYER now maps joy excess and deficit across the consumer journey and is constantly seeing opportunities through simple product enhancements or expressions that will refine the opportunities for joy. So, she says that she can see the agency developing product and retail competencies to embed the thinking throughout the product experience.
“As creative professionals, we can get worn out, bogged down and have inspiration ebb away,” adds Michelle. “My advice? Keep a ‘joy journal’. Understand what gives you that spark of inspiration in your daily life and feed that. Reconnecting with your own personal joys can keep that fire lit from the inside.”
“You are the creator of joy!” concludes Laura. “This year taught me to stop waiting for joy to find me, and intentionally build and curate my own joy. In our newly designed, proprietary brand briefs we ask the question ‘where is the joy lurking – waiting to be unleashed!?’ So, in turn I will ask that of Little Black Book readers… where is joy lurking in your life, brand, career, relationships?”
