What is ‘Brand Excitement’ and how do you measure it?
Brand excitement is that electric feeling people get when they think about you. It is the difference between being “a brand we use” and “a brand we tell our mates about without being asked”. Excitement shows up in the way people talk, share, react and lean in when your name appears in their feed or inbox.
It is not just about loud colours or shouty campaigns. Brand excitement is the emotional charge created when three things line up: a clear point of view, a distinctive visual and verbal identity, and experiences that actually live up to the promise. When those elements sync, your brand feels alive, relevant and slightly ahead of the curve. When they don’t, even clever design can feel flat.
So how do you know if your brand is genuinely exciting, rather than just busy and noisy?
1. Listen to how people talk about you.
Excited brands trigger specific language: “can’t wait”, “finally”, “you’ve got to see this”, “this is exactly what I needed”. You can pick this up in social comments, support tickets, sales calls and community spaces. If most of the conversation around you is purely functional or price-led, you probably have awareness, but not excitement.
2. Look at engagement intensity, not just raw numbers.
Clicks and impressions are hygiene. Excitement lives in saves, shares, replies, DMs, people tagging friends and coming back without being nudged. On your website, this looks like people exploring more than one page, interacting with tools, or spending time in your case studies rather than bouncing off the homepage.
3. Track momentum.
Are more people choosing you, talking about you and searching for you this month than last? Exciting brands tend to build compounding interest: small spikes that become a steady upward trend. Tools like branded search volume, waitlist growth, inbound enquiries and organic press mentions are good proxies here.
4. Measure emotional response directly.
Short, well-designed surveys can ask people how your brand makes them feel using simple scales or word lists: excited, curious, indifferent, confused. This does not need to be heavy research. A quick pulse with the right questions, embedded into existing touchpoints, can be enough to spot whether your design and messaging are creating the emotional effect you intended.
5. Use qualitative depth.
Interviews, customer calls and even informal conversations will tell you what the numbers cannot. Ask people why they chose you, what nearly put them off, and what they would miss if you disappeared tomorrow. Genuine brand excitement usually comes with surprisingly specific answers.
At Hiatus Design, we treat brand excitement as a design outcome, not an accident. The goal is simple: build brands that people are curious about today and still talking about six months from now.
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