Brand research tools
The Great Canadian Brand Index® (GCBI) is Brand Dummy’s flagship research tool for decoding symbolic strength and reputational resilience in Canadian brands. Built on behavioral insight and modular diagnostics, the GCBI evaluates how brands perform under emotional, ideological, and strategic pressure—ranking them not just by visibility or sentiment, but by their ability to hold trust, adapt messaging, and survive scrutiny. It’s designed for institutions, agencies, and founders who need more than metrics—they need meaning.
This is a diagnostic tool developed by Brand Dummy to help founders, marketers, and institutions assess the resilience of their brand messaging. It presents a series of 10 multiple-choice questions that probe clarity, modularity, emotional resonance, trust signals, and scrutiny survival—each grounded in behavioural insight and strategic framing. Designed as both a self-assessment and a teaching instrument, the quiz reveals where messaging holds and where it fractures, offering users a structured entry point into Brand Dummy’s pressure-testing methodology.
Thought leadership
BUSINESS EXPERT PRESS, 2025
This book delivers a strategic framework for surviving reputational threats with clarity, control, and resilience. It guides readers through the anatomy of a brand crisis—from early signals and stakeholder misalignment to narrative breakdown and emotional fallout—and offers modular tools for response. Drawing on behavioural insight and messaging architecture, it shows how to rebuild trust, recalibrate tone, and deploy defensible strategies under pressure. Ideal for founders, executives, and institutions facing scrutiny, it’s both a playbook and a pressure-testing manual.
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 2024
This book bridges the gap between behavioural theory and real-world strategy, offering marketers, founders, and students a hands-on guide to decoding how people think, feel, and choose. It translates academic insight into practical tools—covering heuristics, emotional triggers, and decision-making friction—so readers can design messaging, products, and experiences that resonate with actual human behaviour. Whether you're launching a brand, refining a campaign, or teaching consumer psychology, this book equips you to move beyond surface analytics and into behavioural precision.
CENGAGE LEARNING, 2021
The undergraduate text explores new examples of consumer behaviour using case studies, advertisements and brands from Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. The authors recognize the critical links to areas such as marketing, public policy and ethics, and cover the importance of online consumer behaviour with content on how social media and evolving technologies are changing the way marketers understand consumers. Examine marketing implications to learn how theoretical concepts are used in practice, and challenge yourself to think about how marketing decisions impact consumers as you begin to analyze consumer behaviour with cases featuring extensive Australian and international examples.
The resources and tools offered below are available by subscription or a per-access basis. You are more than welcome to learn more about the resources or tools before you decide to purchase a subscription or access.
Take a course
COURSE #74656
Learn how to craft brand messaging that holds up under scrutiny, backlash, and emotional volatility. This course introduces Brand Dummy’s Pressure-Test Grid and teaches you how to diagnose tone, trust signals, and ideological fit across high-stakes scenarios.
Explore the behavioural science behind trust erosion and recovery in brand communication. You’ll learn how to identify resistance triggers, recalibrate emotional tone, and rebuild credibility using diagnostic tools and real-world examples.
Pressure-test your sustainability and ESG messaging to ensure it’s credible, defensible, and emotionally-resonant. This course helps you avoid greenwashing pitfalls and align environmental claims with stakeholder expectations.
Learn how to align your brand’s values with audience belief systems—without performative spin or ideological backlash. This course teaches stakeholder mapping and tone calibration to help you communicate purpose with precision.
Discover how AI and automation disrupt consumer trust—and how to respond with clarity and empathy. You’ll learn to audit chatbot tone, diagnose automation fatigue, and build messaging that humanizes technology without triggering resistance.
