Brand Joy Lab
In 2024, PETERMAYER repositioned around a single conviction: that joy wasn't a soft creative outcome but a measurable driver of business results. The agency had been a strong regional shop but wanted a wider appeal. The repositioning — built around the idea of "unleashing brand joy" — was a chance to stake out a position in the market that no other agency could credibly own.
The Brand Joy Lab was a cornerstone piece of the new brand. The strategy department had built a proprietary research engine, surveying thousands of people on the relationship between brand experience, joy, and purchase behavior. The data was meticulous and the findings were real. The challenge was making it land.
Statistics don't change minds. Stories do. My job, working alongside the strategy team, was to figure out how to turn what we were learning into something people would actually read, share, and believe. That meant writing and editing white papers, shaping articles, and making sure every piece we published led with insight rather than self-promotion.
The inaugural Brand Joy Lab white paper launched in June 2024, timed to the agency rebrand and accompanied by a paid placement in ADWEEK that drove significant traffic. The core argument: joy correlates to purchase intent, and it's a deeper, more varied emotion than most brands give it credit for. Awe is joy. Belonging is joy. The paper made the business case, but the more important work was expanding what joy was allowed to mean.
From there, the Brand Joy Lab kept evolving. A year-end trend report. A Super Bowl moment built around the insight that rivalry and even hostility can be a form of brand joy — an idea that became an article, an Adweek piece, and a physical activation in the French Quarter. The 2026 "Year of the Fan" guide argued that fandom now rivaled religion and nationality as a primary identity marker for millions of people, and that brands needed to come to fans with genuine value rather than ad spend.
My contribution has been different on every piece. Sometimes editor, sometimes writer, sometimes narrative architect. That's been the consistent throughline of my own role: immersing in the research, and translating into story.
The Brand Joy Lab is a core pillar of PETERMAYER's brand and has grown into a beacon for intelligence. Some of the earliest content continues to drive downloads and shares. That kind of staying power comes from turning data into stories that people actually want to read.
