Research
How TRA reads the relationship between a person and a brand, and why it measures Trust and Desire.
Expression and encounter
Everything that exists expresses itself. A person, a brand, an idea, even a thing continuously gives out visible and invisible signals simply by being what it is. When these expressions encounter another entity, communication begins.
Meaning
Meaning is not fully "sent" by one side. It emerges in the encounter, shaped by the state, readiness and context of both sides. And that meaning need not remain connected to the original encounter.
A person may stub a toe on a rock, stumble, notice a patch of flowers, remember a loved one who adored flowers, and after years of estrangement decide to call them. The rock never contained that meaning. The encounter set off a chain from sensation to perception to memory to emotion to action. The invisible field through which such effects arise is what I call Relational Pheromones.
Preservation
Underlying these interactions is Preservation: the impulse of an entity not only to continue being, but also to enrich its way of being.
Trust and Desire
In a brand and human relationship, this preservation reading appears as Trust and Desire. Trust signals preservation safety: engagement is unlikely to diminish me. Desire signals preservation enrichment potential: engagement may offer pleasure, enhancement, growth or some better state of self.
TRA measures the two on its own matrices. The Brand Trust Matrix has 61 attributes under 10 behaviours, built over three years with psychologists, sociologists and communication experts. The Brand Desire Matrix has 12 behaviours, conscious and subconscious. Both have been in use since 2011.
Readiness for exchange
When Trust and Desire become sufficiently strong, they can create Buying Intent, a readiness for exchange. That readiness may result in purchase, inquiry, advocacy or other behaviour, or it may remain latent.
More importantly, every encounter can trigger effects far beyond the original relationship, altering memories, choices, relationships and subsequent expression. In that sense, brand and consumer relationships are not linear transactions. They are part of a wider recursive field: every encounter changes what expresses next, and sometimes changes something entirely elsewhere.
The fieldwork
Every report since 2011 comes from TRA's own interviews with peer influencers, the top tenth of brand-aware people, in 16 Indian cities, with the Indian Statistical Institute as method partner. Respondents are not paid. Across 29 reports TRA has collected 4 Cr data points and interviewed 200,000 peer influencers. Both figures grow with every report.