Three Signals: Behaviours, Attitudes and Expressions

Understanding the role of each signal helps leaders make decisions with greater confidence and avoid waiting for perfect certainty

Stop measuring everything. Start prioritising what matters

CMOs have never had more data, and rarely had less confidence about what to do next. Find out which signal to trust, in what order, for which decision and how to act with confidence.

✓ What to do when signals disagree
✓ Why attitudes often predict behaviour before sales data can
✓ How human and machine-generated signals fit into the same framework
✓ Which signal matters most at each stage

THE PROBLEM

SIGNAL RICH. JUDGEMENT POOR.

Dashboards have multiplied. Metrics have proliferated. And still, when the CFO leans in, too many marketing leaders hesitate.

Marketing leaders have never had more data.

Behavioural data. Brand tracking. Social listening. Search trends. AI recommendations.

Yet when it's time to make a decision, many teams still hesitate.

"So what do we do?"

Which signal to trust? When to trust it? And what action to take?

THE THREE SIGNALS

One job each

Behaviours, Attitudes, Expressions. Knowing which one you’re looking at changes what you do next.

THE AUDIT TRAIL

Behaviours

What people actually did.

Complete, reliable, and always about the past. It confirms the decision you already made.

THE COMPASS

Attitudes

What people think and feel.

The strongest predictor of what they'll do next. It points where the market is heading, not where it's been.

THE SEISMOGRAPH

Expressions

What people say, search and share.

Picks up every tremor, instantly, without telling you which ones turn into earthquakes.

HUMAN AND MACHINE, SIDE BY SIDE

The signals map

The same three jobs, whether the signal comes from a person or a machine.

Signal	What people do, think and say	What technology captures
Behaviours	Purchases, subscriptions, footfall, repeat purchase, usage, switching.	Transaction data, platform conversions, clickstream analytics, e-commerce records and, increasingly, AI-agent-initiated purchases made with no human click involved.
Attitudes	Brand perceptions, predisposition, trust, perceived value, quality opinions, category attitudes, recommendation intent, tracked through metrics like Meaningful Difference and Future Power.	Not yet, not in the way humans hold them. But LLMs and AI agents already carry brand associations in their training data that shape which brands they surface and recommend.
Expressions	Search queries, social posts, reviews, word of mouth, likes, comments, shares, sentiment.	AI recommendations, algorithmic rankings, chatbot answers, generative and synthetic outputs: the emerging “machine web”.

Attitudes predict behaviour and we can prove it

Changes in how people think and feel about a brand reliably arrive before changes in what they do.

more likely to grow value share, for brands with high Future Power

Kantar Future Power

52%

of low Future Power brands were already losing share

Kantar Future Power

11 mths

of early warning on brand equity shifts, ahead of standard tracking

LINK+ • MASB certified

36%

of all new sales driven by brand equity, across six markets

Kantar meta-analysis

WHEN MODELS DISAGREE

What the short-term view misses

Where brand investment increased consistently, sales grew by as much as 40%. Where it was cut, equity eroded and sales stagnated, sometimes for years.

Adidas learned this the hard way, on the strength of dashboards that looked efficient (until the company ran the econometrics).

77%

of budget went to performance marketing

Where dashboards looked efficient, most spend chased short-term signals.

65%

of all sales were actually driven by brand

The econometrics told a different story once the models were run.

WHEN SIGNALS AGREE

Octopus Energy: growth compounds

In a category known for low satisfaction and high inertia, every signal reinforced the next, and it became the UK’s number one electricity supplier in six years.

01	Attitudes Built Meaningful Difference through service and green innovation.

02	Expressions Earned the strongest word of mouth in the sector.

03	Behaviours Switching followed. Number one UK electricity supplier in six years.

WHY THIS MATTERS

Agreement turns momentum into growth

A signal is most useful when its role is clear.

Attitudes point to future potential, expressions show where energy is gathering, and behaviours confirm what happened.

When they reinforce one another, confidence rises and action becomes easier to justify.

Which signal leads at each stage of a launch

Two in three new launches are dead or dying by their second year, not because the product was bad, but because the signals were read in isolation, or not read at all.

BEFORE THE PRODUCT EXISTS

Expressions

Where latent demand is forming

Only expressions are available: search patterns, cultural tension, early conversation.

PRE-LAUNCH

Expressions

Whether the market is ready

Campaign response and social buzz tell you if the ground has been prepared.

LAUNCH WEEK

Behaviours + Expressions

Who's buying, and what they say

Sales alone can mislead in either direction. Read them alongside what people are saying.

QUARTER 1 AND BEYOND

Attitudes + Behaviours + Expressions

Building the brand, or borrowing from it

Only once attitudes are tracked do you learn whether you built something lasting or just spiked and faded.