In this episode, we interviewed Andreas Schurek - DACH region lead at Hotspex, a behavioural-science-based brand strategy and insights consultancy helping brands find the one emotional position they can genuinely own
Andreas combines 30 years in market research with hands-on brand strategy consulting, operating in German, English and French - he has led the European rollout of Hotspex's Brand Singularity framework and plays a significant role in developing its AI Brand Coach, anchored to 20+ years of human motivation data and over a million consumer interviews
His core argument: the layers that actually drive choice sit below conscious awareness - so measure emotion with the same discipline as the rational layer, and anchor AI to real human truths or it will tell you what you want to hear
Key takeaways:
Emotion deserves engineering-grade measurement - DACH brands apply rigour to awareness and rational benefits, but choice is driven by feelings, archetypes and values that never show up on standard questionnaires
Coherence converts to revenue - clear brands achieve around 70% higher brand contribution to sales, and consistent presentation alone is linked to gains of 23% to 33%
Synthetic audiences split into flattery and truth - models trained on scraped text echo what the brand team already believes, so every answer must trace back to real consumer data
Brand consistency is becoming governance - he predicts a global top ten FMCG company will make AI brand-consistency checks mandatory within 12 months, with $3.5 trillion of internal brand erosion at stake
🔗 Connect with Andreas
Who are you and what do you do?
I'm Andreas Schurek, and I lead the DACH region for Hotspex, a behavioural-science-based brand strategy and insights consultancy. My job is to help brands find the one emotional position they can genuinely own, and then make sure it survives contact with hundreds of daily decisions, increasingly with the help of an AI Brand Coach trained on 20+ years of human motivation data.
You've led Hotspex across the DACH region since late 2024 - what have you learned about how German, Austrian and Swiss brands approach measurement, and where do they differ from the rest of the market?
DACH brands bring an engineering mindset to brand measurement. They want validation, sample sizes, significance levels, and they are rightly skeptical of black boxes. That rigour is a strength: once a DACH client is convinced, they commit for years, not quarters. The blind spot is that the same rigour pulls measurement towards what is easiest to quantify: awareness, claimed attributes, and rational benefits. German brands don't buy stories; they buy evidence. The irony is that their consumers buy stories with emotion driving choice, but rational reasons coming afterwards. The brands winning in the region right now are the ones measuring emotion with the same discipline they've always applied to the rational layer.
German brands don't buy stories; they buy evidence.
Brand Singularity claims coherence gains translate into real revenue - walk us through one concrete example of a brand moving from average to strong, and what actually changed
Take a global hygiene and health company we've now completed seven projects with across Europe. The strategy on paper was strong, but the problem was coherence. Packaging, campaigns, and local-market executions had each drifted a few degrees from the intended emotional territory. No single decision was wrong, per se. But taken together, the brand began to blur. We mapped its actual emotional position against the full competitive set, defined the right space, and pulled every touchpoint back onto one red thread. Through this, we strengthened the brand’s discipline without needing to shift strategy. This is critical because data confirms that brands with high levels of clarity achieve around 70% higher brand contribution to sales. Consistent presentation alone is linked to revenue gains of between 23% and 33%.
What's the most common thing senior leaders get wrong about measuring brand strength?
Often, senior leaders measure brand strength based on what people say about a brand. Choice, though, is also driven by how people feel. In our view, emotion is a far better indicator of whether a brand can truly differentiate itself on shelf. That’s because awareness, claimed attributes, and message recall are all surface-level issues easy to replicate across brands. The layers that actually drive conversion, including emotions, personality archetypes, and values, are held below conscious awareness and don't typically show up on standard questionnaires. That makes it very difficult to see brand damage until it’s too late. It also complicates brand tracking because what’s being measured only tells part of the story. Instead of a strategic coaching tool, tracking gets relegated to a flawed post-mortem analysis.
No single decision was wrong, per se. But taken together, the brand began to blur.
What's in your AI stack? What is the one AI tool or workflow you personally rely on every week?
Claude is my daily working partner. I operate across German, English, and French languages with clients from Munich to Geneva. My weekly non-negotiable workflow is turning raw research outputs into client-ready strategic narratives, taking data tables and fieldwork findings to pressure-test narratives before they make it into a deck. It has compressed work that took days into hours. The tool that changed how I think, though, is our own AI Brand Coach. We’ve created a network of specialist agents anchored to the Hotspex motivation framework, so every answer is validated against the brand's right space before it reaches the user. Using it internally first taught us exactly where AI guidance helps and where human judgement remains essential. Since we are an AI-centric organisation, we apply AI-based workflows to all our processes. This makes Hotspex more efficient and better every day.
Hotspex is built on behavioural science and human motivation, yet AI now lets you model consumers and generate synthetic audiences at scale - what does that unlock for brand measurement, and where does it risk telling brands what they want to hear rather than the truth?
The unlock is a very real point. We can now access an always-on consumer voice in every decision, early screening of territories and ideas at a speed and cost no fieldwork provider can match, and research that goes from passive to strategically active. The risk is just as real. Synthetic consumers are only as honest as the human truths underneath them. A model trained on scraped text pattern-matches what sounds right, and what sounds right is usually what the brand team already believes. That's why we anchor everything to a proprietary framework built on over a million real consumer interviews and 20+ years of motivation measurement. Every answer must trace back to real people or the research will be largely worthless. Brands don’t need an agency to simply agree with them. They need a strategic advisor.
Where is your field in 12 months - one specific prediction you'd put money on
Within 12 months, at least one global top ten FMCG company will make it mandatory that every creative brief passes an AI brand-consistency check before it goes to an agency. This will sit squarely within the governance function of a business, much like legal reviews do today. We know the economics make this imperative. Interbrand puts the value lost to internal brand erosion at $3.5 trillion. More research won’t fix this erosion. It comes down to making existing strategy enforceable at every decision point across an organisation. I’d also predict that synthetic audiences will split into two large segments: cheap generic panels; and, premium panels grounded in proprietary human data. The gap in decision quality between the two will become increasingly glaring.
Where should readers find you, and what's the first thing they should join or read?
Interested readers can find me on LinkedIn. I share what we're learning about brand coherence and AI in research (sometimes in three languages depending on the day!). They can also start with the Brand Singularity material on our website, www.hotspex.com. It succinctly explains why brands lose value from within and what a red thread actually looks like in practice. And if they’re more visual learners, I’m happy to walk them through our AI Brand Coach. If they’re like me, fifteen minutes with a live human being is worth far more than reading through any deck.
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