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ICDS Insights Consumer Behaviour
Lost in the Relay: What Buyers Pass On About Your Brand
Between what a brand says and what its audience ends up believing, there is now a layer of people who retell the brand in their own words. Two ICDS studies show what they pass on and what they quietly drop.
VM
Vadim Matyushkin Behavioral Scientist & Sociologist · ICDS
Marketers have known about the gap for a long time. A brand describes itself one way; ask its audience, and they describe it another. Surveys have documented this distance between a brand’s projected identity and its perceived image for decades. Most brands treat it as an unavoidable loss in transmission: some of the message always fails to arrive, and the job is to keep the loss small.
That picture assumes the message travels more or less directly, from the brand’s own channels to the audience. Today a large part of it does not.
The People in Between
Many buyers now meet a brand partly through other buyers: the people who write publicly about what they bought, in reviews, on forums, in personal blogs. We call them carriers. They take what the brand put out, run it through their own experience, and pass a version of it on.
Carriers differ from the ambassadors brands are used to working with. An ambassador has a contract, a brief and talking points. A carrier has none of these. Nobody tells them which claim to repeat, and they owe the brand nothing. That is exactly why their version is worth reading: it shows which parts of a brand’s message survive when nobody is paid to keep them.
The carriers’ version is also something surveys do not see directly. A survey asks people what they think. Reviews show what people choose to say to strangers about a purchase. We read the second. We cannot tell from it what is in the audience’s mind; we can tell what reaches the audience by this route.
Two ICDS studies read carriers closely. One coded 1,000 randomly drawn positive skincare reviews on Amazon, sentence by sentence. The other read 78 buyer accounts of three brands whose makers say the bottle is central to the brand: Absolut vodka with Halston fragrance, the perfume house Amouage, and the Japanese whisky Hibiki.
Skincare: The Result Arrives, the Reason Drops Out
Skincare brands tend to lead with what is inside the product: named active ingredients, dermatologist involvement, formulas described by what they leave out. The carriers pass on something else. When reviewers describe the product itself, they describe the senses and the price.
37%mention its scent
34%its texture
21%its price
<2%named ingredients & dermatologists together
And each time a reviewer in our sample mentioned a dermatologist, it was their own doctor who had recommended the product, not the brand’s claim of dermatologist involvement.
Carriers also pass on the result: the skin looks better, feels softer, did not react. What they almost never pass on is the reason. Only about one sentence in five that names a property of the product also names an effect on the skin, and where the two meet, they are usually listed rather than linked:
“I love the smell of this lotion and it makes my skin so soft and moisturized.”
The chain the brand built, from ingredient to result, reaches the audience with its first link missing.
The Bottle: Praised, Then Set Aside
The second study took three brands whose makers tie their success to the bottle itself. Halston held his flacon to be beyond discussion. Amouage calls its bottle central to the brand’s image. Suntory describes the Hibiki bottle as an embodiment of Japanese art.
Carriers do mention the bottle, and they often like it. But in all three brands only a minority name it as a reason for the purchase, and almost none as the deciding one. The one way of talking about the bottle that appears in all three brands is the pleasant extra: the bottle praised on top of a product the buyer already liked. “The bottle? So simple yet so artful,” writes one Halston reviewer, and moves straight on to the scent. With Amouage, whose flacon carries Omani symbolism, the bottle comes up in 4 of 20 reviews and the scent in 12; in reviews written in Arabic, the bottle appears once in eight.
Hibiki shows the gap from another side. The same whisky is sold in a standard bottle and in a design edition. Carriers barely compare the two in words, yet the design edition resells for several times the price. The bottle clearly matters to someone, but what it is worth is expressed in money at resale, and carriers rarely put it into words.
Packaging is the clearest thing lost in the relay across both studies. In skincare reviews, packaging is mentioned without any effect on the skin in over nine cases out of ten. With premium bottles, it is admired and then set aside. In both cases carriers notice it and do not pass it on as a reason to buy.
What Survives the Relay
| What the brand leads with | What carriers pass on |
|---|---|
| Ingredients, dermatologists, formula | Scent, texture, price |
| The ingredient as the reason for the result | The result on its own |
| Packaging as part of the product story | Packaging as an object, apart from any result |
Listening Back
The relay can also run the other way. Some brands have heard how their users actually talk about the product and changed their own words to match. A well-known case is Febreze: launched as a way to eliminate odours, it sold poorly until research showed that people used it as a pleasant finishing touch after cleaning, and the brand was repositioned around that use.
Carriers’ language is a cheap and continuous source for this kind of listening, and in our two studies it points to concrete adjustments.
1
Make the link yourself.
Carriers report the result and the sensation and leave out the ingredient. A brand that wants its ingredient story to travel can tell it in the carriers’ terms: what the ingredient does that a buyer will notice, in the words buyers already use for scent, texture and how the skin feels afterwards.
2
Present the bottle as what carriers say it is.
For most buyers the bottle is a pleasure on top of a product they like. A brand can speak about it that way, as the reward that comes with the product, rather than asking the bottle to carry the reason for the purchase.
3
Listen for the one thing carriers say about themselves.
In skincare reviews, the only statement buyers make about themselves rather than the product is that their search is over: “This is the holy grail for my skin.” It appeared in 23 of 1,000 reviews. It is the closest thing to loyalty that reviews show, and a brand can track it.
Integration Now Includes the Carriers
Adjusting the brand’s own words is a different thing from managing what carriers write. Scripted or paid-for reviews damage trust and are increasingly regulated. The point of listening is to make the brand easier to repeat in good faith.
Integrated marketing communications taught brands to say the same thing across every channel they control: advertising, packaging, the website, the shop floor. The carrier layer is a channel the brand does not control, and for many buyers it is the one they trust most. A message can be perfectly consistent across the brand’s own channels and still lose its central claim on the way through carriers.
The further test
So integration has a further test: whether the brand’s key words survive when people who owe it nothing retell it.
1
Which of our claims do carriers repeat, and in which words?
2
Which of our claims drop out on the way, and is the one that drops out the one we spend most on?
3
Is there something carriers say that would make us easier to understand if we said it too?
What this rests on
Evidence & limits
The skincare study read 1,000 positive Amazon reviews; the bottle study read 78 buyer accounts across three brands. Both are small and describe these samples, and both read what carriers say in public, which is a different thing from what the wider audience thinks. Both were coded by an AI reader under written rules and checked by a second, independent AI reading rather than by human coders. The directions they show are consistent with each other and worth testing on your own brand.
Sources. ICDS, Buyers Talk About How It Smells and Feels. Brands Talk About What’s Inside (aspect analysis, congruence line, article 1). ICDS, Where Buyers Talk Loudest About Premium Design: From the Gulf to the Islands (aspect analysis, design line).
VM
About the author
Behavioral Scientist & Sociologist · ICDS
Vadim Matyushkin is a psychologist and sociologist with close to twenty years of research into digital behavior, trust, and information dynamics, and a researcher behind the Institute of Communication and Data Science (ICDS). His work has supported organizations including Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Mars, Danone, Nestlé, and Bayer in moving from self-reported survey data toward direct behavioral evidence.
ICDS — Institute of Communication and Data Science is an independent research institute focused on understanding how trust, behavior, and reputation are formed in digital environments. ICDS operates as an intellectual institution — not an agency, not a platform, and not an educational provider.