10 Years of the Emotional Resonance Score

by: Grant Gooding

Read Time: 2 minutes

This month marks the tenth year since we launched the Emotional Resonance Score.

We built the ERS because we saw that most business decisions fail quietly. Not because teams are careless or under-resourced, but because they are confident about the wrong things. 

Teams often believe they understand how people experience their ideas, sales tactics, marketing, and advertising, when in reality they only understand how those ideas make sense internally.

PROOF’s research reflects how humans actually process and respond to information. When something resonates, people move. When it doesn’t, they hesitate, disengage, or stall without it being visible.

Thanks to our incredible clients and amazing partners, after a decade:

315,000 people have gone through the ERS system

390 organizations have used it to make smarter decisions with fewer surprises

4,855 strategic questions have been answered before becoming expensive assumptions

Every month, ERS measures thousands of real human responses to help businesses understand why people buy, why they don’t, and where connection breaks down. It replaces internal guessing with external truth.

Markets shift. Channels change. Tools come and go. But human emotional processing is relatively static and changes slowly. Systems built around how humans work tend to last, and tend to get copied.

The Emotional Resonance Score remains one of the most reliable ways to understand what drives human behavior. What we are releasing next goes further than we could have imagined ten years ago and breaks one of our longest-standing rules of research. ERS will now be available in ways that make human response visible earlier, clearer, and with a level of precision that would have been impossible when we started.

We’ll share more soon.

And when we do, it will change how people think about measuring humans all over again.