The Science Behind Brand Growth
Traction gives marketers and brand leaders a clear, actionable path to growth. Our platform provides a custom action plan tailored to your goals, fuelled by people’s real-time feelings and thoughts about your brand, your competitors and the category.
Funnel Metrics
We track real people as they move from awareness to advocacy – not just the steps they take, but the signals they send. It’s more than movement. It’s meaning.
Brand Sentiment Tracking
Traction captures how people feel about your brand in real time – so you can spot shifts early, understand what’s working, and act with confidence before your competitors do.
Asset Testing
We show you the emotional signals behind every creative choice – so you know what lands, what needs work, and what’s worth backing at scale.
Why Brand Monitoring Needs an Upgrade
In today’s world, brands are expected to do more than communicate. They’re expected to create genuine value in return for people’s attention, loyalty and spend. Brand relationships have become reciprocal, and the brands that thrive are the ones that understand this dynamic.
Traction’s platform continuously evaluates the performance of brands. In the last three months alone, we’ve assessed over 900 brands and collected more than 20,000,000 feelings and thoughts from people. Our AI interprets this intelligence and analyzes it to surface an action plan that shows you how to grow.
The 16 Drivers of Brand Relationships
Over the last decade, Traction has identified 16 Drivers that collectively define the strength of a brand’s relationship with people. These Drivers reveal where a brand is performing, where competitors are winning and where growth opportunities lie.
We organize the Drivers into four dimensions:
Proposition
How your brand’s character attracts people.
Activation
How your brand behaves in the world.
Emotional
How strongly your brand evokes feeling.
Rational
How strongly your brand delivers on practicality.
All 16 Brand Drivers
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Attraction How people respond to how your brand looks, feels and presents itself.
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Empathy Whether people believe your brand understands their wants and needs.
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Connection How relatable your brand’s behaviour is.
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Integrity Whether your brand is seen to have principles and do the right thing.
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Aspiration How special and desirable your brand is perceived to be.
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Innovation How original and forward-thinking your brand appears.
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Transparency How open your brand is about what it is and what it does.
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Popularity How prominent your brand is with the public.
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Clarity How easily people understand your brand’s role in their life.
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Relevance How well your brand meets people’s wants and needs.
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Consistency How reliably your brand delivers.
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Accessibility How easy it is for people to use your brand.
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Performance How well your brand fulfils its promise.
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Differentiation How much your brand stands out from alternatives.
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Value for Money How well your brand justifies its cost.
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Familiarity How well people feel they know your brand.
How Traction Captures Real Human Decision-Making
Neuroscience shows that most decisions begin as feelings (System 1) before being rationalized into thoughts (System 2).
System 1 — Feelings
Subconscious, fast, intuitive, automatic.
System 2 - Thoughts
Conscious, slow, deliberate, rule-governed.
Capturing people’s thoughts is relatively straightforward. Capturing real feelings is significantly harder. Traction uses Implicit Response Timing to measure the speed of reactions and understand how strongly people feel about specific attributes. Quick reactions indicate strong feeling, hesitation indicates uncertainty, and slower responses suggest conscious thought rather than instinct.
To capture detailed thoughts, we also ask follow-up questions that reveal conscious evaluations and reasoning.
This dual-system approach, combined with rigorous data quality coverage, gives you the most actionable understanding of what people feel and think about your brand every single day.