The Joy Score: Measuring Joy and Its Impact on Business

Think of the last time you couldn’t help but smile. The last time you laughed out loud, were overwhelmed by beauty or felt truly connected to the world around you. Now, when was the last time that feeling was brought on by a brand?

Here’s what some of my colleagues said when our CEO, Michelle Edelman, kicked around that question in our agency Slack channel:

• “There’s a specific sweet smell of Krispy Kreme when they’re making them, and a very light mouthfeel when you bite into a hot fresh one.”
• “Every morning my wife is making her coffee with Oatly creamer, and we both shout ‘Wow, no cow!’ which appears on their products.”
• “I love the accomplished feeling of putting together something from IKEA.”

Brands often bring people moments of joy through their products and experiences—most wouldn’t be in business if they didn’t—but at the same time, these interactions are often taken for granted. After all, you cannot measure a sweet smell, an inside joke, or an accomplished feeling.

Or, can you?

The last few years have been rough. Our social media feeds are nonstop doom and gloom – climate crises, wars, contentious politics, corporate scandals. We lack trust in our leaders, in institutions, in each other. It can be exhausting and depressing, and left us wondering:

What if we could focus on creating joy rather than just selling things? Better yet, what if we could prove that we could sell more things by creating joy, by making marketing more joyful, making customer experiences more joyful?

Here at PETERMAYER, I was tasked with probing these questions through research, and I’m happy to say that we have some promising answers.

Introducing the Joy Score

In 2023 we sought to find out whether tapping into, and unleashing, a brand’s inherent joy—what we call Brand Joy—could elevate its impact in the marketplace.

We developed a new metric called the Joy Score, which rates a product, experience, category or brand on a scale of 1 to 100. We track these scores in an ongoing survey of people across the United States. 

Using the Joy Score, we can compare categories, offerings and brands through the way consumers find joy within them. We can see how categories compare in terms of joy delivery, see the relative joy delivered by different brands within a category, and how those joy scores move over time. It’s like a thermometer of joy, a joy-o-metre!

But none of this would matter if there wasn’t a larger case for unleashing joy in the marketplace. We have good news there, too.

At the same time we were tracking joy across categories and brands, we measured purchase intent and – in the case of travel destinations – intent-to-visit. Immediately it was clear that there is a tight correlation between brand joy and purchase intent (an 80 percent correlation, to be exact). Brands’ joy scores and purchase intent move in sync over time, suggesting that the more brands work to create joyful experiences, the more consumers will purchase from them. 

We saw this working firsthand, based on our work on behalf of a client (who, for now, shall remain unnamed). A joy-forward marketing strategy and campaign drove this U.S. travel destination from #5 of six competitors in both Joy Score and intent-to-visit to #1 in Joy Score and #2 in intent-to-visit, close behind the long-term tourism leader.

Surprises Along the Way

This journey into joy brought a lot of surprises. As we began our research, we hypothesised that there are joyful categories (such as travel and tourism) and joyless categories (such as banking, insurance and high-speed Internet). As it turns out, consumers often recognize the joy delivered by basic products and services that are part of their everyday lives.

Who knew that having high-speed Internet at home brings almost as much joy (Joy Score = 73) as taking a vacation (79)? Or that having a financial plan in place (62) brings more joy than eating candy (61)?

There may be no such thing as a joyless category! But there are joyless brands, even within joy-inducing categories – including high-speed Internet. Most Internet service providers are flat-out failing to unleash the joy potential within the services they deliver.

• Having high-speed Internet at home, Joy Score = 73
• Leading Internet service providers, average Joy Score = 43

In banking, there are indeed joyless services, but there are also highly joy-inducing services. Unfortunately, much of bank marketing focuses on the joyless offerings. For example:

• Having a financial plan in place, Joy Score = 62
• Paying bills online, Joy Score = 42
• Investing in stocks, bonds or other investments, Joy Score = 38
• Borrowing money from a bank, Joy Score = 5

Digging in to where the joy lies enables us to amplify the joy in marketing, zeroing in on the aspects of our clients’ offerings that are most joy-inducing and to create marketing strategies and campaigns that maximise joy potential.

Unleashing Brand Joy

Armed with this evidence that joy is as good for business as it is for people, we sought to change what PETERMAYER does on a fundamental level. We unleash Brand Joy.

As director of intelligence here at the agency, I will continue digging into this data every month, looking for signals to see where brands and consumers are responding to joy. Stay tuned to see what we find.