Mapping Mindsets & Meaning
A Psychology-Based Framework for Understanding Consumers
July 1, 2025
Marketers today have more consumer data than ever, but real insight does not come from endless data, it comes from understanding what truly moves people.
Clicks, likes, heatmaps, and purchase paths create an increasingly complete behavioral picture. AI tools and social listening platforms excel at tracking what consumers do. However, this wealth of behavioral data often misses what drives those actions: the underlying mindsets, emotions, and cultural stories.
The Mapping Mindsets & Meaning (MMM) framework addresses this gap by bringing psychological depth and structural clarity to consumer research. It reflects years of experience working across public health and brand strategy projects, where I identified opportunities to apply psychological principles with more nuance than standard research approaches typically allow.
Why This Framework Was Created
The MMM framework grew from recognizing two distinct needs in the research landscape. First, marketing research clients needed a structured way to think about consumers with greater psychological depth and cultural context. Second, I needed to integrate diverse psychological methods and models into a coherent research system that could adapt to different project types, whether helping a brand connect with fragmented audiences or supporting a nonprofit campaign aimed at behavior change.
Standard research methods excel at capturing behavioral patterns and stated preferences, but they often miss the underlying psychological structures like emotions, beliefs, and motivations that connect these surface-level indicators. The result is data-rich but insight-poor research that struggles to predict how consumers will actually respond to new messages, products, or campaigns.
Three Dimensions of Understanding
Drawing from a range of psychological theories and models, the MMM framework maps how people perceive, interpret, and respond to their environment. This includes your brand, message, product, or social cause. It is a flexible approach with three interconnected dimensions:
The Mindset Dimension: What’s going on inside the individual?
The Meaning Dimension: How do they interpret and make sense of what they encounter?
The Context Dimension: What surrounds and shapes their perceptions and choices?
1. Mindset: The Internal Architecture
“Mindset” refers to stable and enduring traits, like personality, that guide how people engage with the world. This dimension also encompasses semi-stable psychological systems such as:
Emotional disposition and self-regulation — How people process stress, manage uncertainty, and maintain emotional equilibrium
Core beliefs and interpretive filters – The underlying assumptions that shape information processing
Motivational patterns and personal values – The internal priorities that guide behavior and decisions
Aspirational identities and imagined futures – How people envision themselves and the paths they hope to follow
Why it matters: You can deliver the exact same experience to two people and get completely different reactions. Understanding how people are psychologically wired helps you anticipate those differences and plan accordingly.
2. Meaning: The Interpretative Bridge
“Meaning” connects individual experiences to larger systems of identity and value. Meaning-making is simultaneously personal and culturally influenced, encompassing:
Group identity and social positioning — How choices communicate membership, status, and belonging
Symbolic associations and cultural meanings — The layered significance that products or brands carry
Personal narratives and life story integration — How consumption becomes part of someone’s identity
Transformative goals and self-directed purpose — What people hope to achieve or become through their choices
Why it matters: Meaning isn't universal. The same message can be read as empowering or patronizing, clever or confusing, depending on the cultural and personal lens through which it's interpreted.
3. Context: The Situational and Cultural Forces
This dimension examines the external forces shaping perception and behavior. It focuses on patterns and contextual analysis involving:
Social ecosystems and cultural influences — The norms, communities, and traditions that shape behavior
Competitive landscape and market positioning — How other brands and messages shape perception
Environmental cues and situational triggers — The immediate conditions that influence decision-making
Decision paths and behavioral disruptions — The non-linear, often unpredictable ways context shapes choices
Why it matters: You can't always change the context, but you can understand how it influences the choices people make. This is especially critical for public health and social impact campaigns, where contextual factors often constrain individual behavior more than personal motivation.
From Insight To Action
Through systematic mapping across the three dimensions, complex research findings translate into structured outputs like consumer profiles, journey maps, perception landscapes, or annotated behavioral models. These visual formats help teams see the broader psychological picture so they can develop strategies with greater precision and confidence.
Seven Ways to Use the MMM Framework in Practice
Each category represents a different angle for studying your audience. These research applications provide the raw material for mapping the internal and external factors that drive your target audience. They aren't meant to be rigid silos or used all at once. Guided by study objectives, the approach maintains a top-down focus on the categories that are most relevant, while also monitoring patterns that emerge across all categories.
Metaphor Snapshot: What Each Mapping Type Reveals
Affect & Personality
Maps dispositional patterns that shape engagement, response, and aesthetic or emotional alignment.
Cognition
Maps belief systems and mental frameworks that filter information and shape interpretation.
Emotional Landscape
Maps the shifting emotional terrain across a journey, experience, or context.
Storyframe
Maps narrative structures and archetypes people use to organize meaning and self-understanding.
Cultural Code
Maps shared symbols, group logic, and identity-signaling systems embedded in culture.
Desire Path Mapping
Maps intuitive, aspirational routes people take toward identity, fulfillment, and internal coherence.
Behavioral Journey Mapping
Maps the dynamic interplay of context, motivation, and emotion that shapes movement from awareness to action.
1. Affect & Personality
Focus: Primary emotional traits, personality structures, and self-regulation styles shaping attention and response.
Application: For an upscale home décor brand, psychological profiling uncovered that customers' design preferences reflected deeper traits. A segmentation study incorporated validated personality measures and indicators of design sensibility into the research process. This revealed a high-value segment whose emotional and aesthetic dispositions aligned tightly with the brand's elevated visual identity. Unlike other groups, this segment viewed product aesthetics as central rather than merely decorative, responding more strongly to sensory and symbolic cues. Including personality profiling in the study made it possible to pinpoint the psychological makeup of high-value customers and speak directly to them, thereby strengthening the brand's targeting strategy.
2. Cognition
Focus: Belief systems, mental frameworks, and information-processing styles guiding judgment and evaluation.
Application: A statewide qualitative study explored how individuals formed attitudes toward the Covid-19 vaccine. Participants evaluated safety and necessity through personal logic, social cues, and comparisons to other vaccines, often prioritizing these over statistics (e.g., 95% efficacy) and expert guidance. Their reasoning reflected deeply held belief systems. Some anchored their reasoning in institutional skepticism, others in health-related experiences or religious frameworks. These mental models shaped both snap judgments and careful deliberations. Cognitive Mapping revealed how people filter new information through existing interpretive lenses, offering critical insight into how they assess credibility, risk, and relevance, particularly when facing uncertainty.
3. Emotional Landscape
Focus: Emotional entry points, transitional feeling states, and lingering after-effects that shape perception across experiences.
Application: A qualitative study explored the diverse and emotionally layered responses teens had to vaping, not just whether they used, but how it felt to use. Many described an initial appeal driven by sensory enjoyment: sweet smells, fruity flavors, smooth feeling in the throat, and colorful customizable devices that felt more like fun accessories than nicotine products. Some took pleasure in the sense of secrecy and excitement of rebellion, feeling clever for hiding their vape at school or from parents, which gave them a sense of control or thrill. Others expressed frustration at how often they reached for it, or regret when noticing signs of dependence, as they reassured themselves that vaping “wasn’t as bad” as smoking. Even non-users described social discomfort in vape-heavy environments like school bathrooms or parties. The study uncovered more than a single emotional journey; it revealed a layered, often conflicting landscape shaped by stress, identity, peer pressure, and physical sensations. Mapping these shifts revealed emotional touchpoints, allowing for more resonant prevention messages and support strategies.
4. Storyframe
Focus: Story structures, metaphorical thinking, and archetypal patterns consumers use to organize experience.
Application: A Las Vegas casino brand tested a new brand promise using mixed-methods research. Findings showed that positioning the brand through the 'Everyman' archetype, highlighting how it felt welcoming, familiar, and emotionally grounding, resonated deeply with local audiences. Participants connected with messaging that reflected their own stories: the regular who felt recognized by name, the retiree who found community at the slots, the local who saw the casino as a neighborhood anchor rather than a tourist destination. Narrative clarity, rooted in audience mindset, helped the brand stake out a distinct emotional space in a crowded market. The study illustrated how aligning with story structures that mirror lived experience can strengthen emotional resonance and sharpen brand identity.
5. Cultural Code
Focus: Shared symbols, cultural logic, and group-level meaning systems influencing perception and belonging.
Application: In preparation for a city’s bicentennial, residents described their city as a place of deep pride, cultural richness, and stark contradictions. It is a symbolic ecosystem, where pride in food, music, and community reflects deeper cultural codes rooted in family, hospitality, and shared struggle. These expressions act as anchors for core values like resilience and a sense of legacy. At the same time, residents acknowledged ongoing challenges, including crime, neglect, and persistent negative perceptions. By using shared metaphors such as circles for continuity and homecoming, stars for local heroes and hopeful futures, and soul food to express cultural identity, they conveyed pride and differentiated the city's self-image from how outsiders perceive it. The city emerged in their narratives as both a beloved family member and a struggling hero. Mapping these cultural codes helped clarify what makes the city feel like home. Emotional responses to proposed bicentennial logos revealed tensions between pride and fear, as well as tradition and change. Ultimately, these insights steered bicentennial planning, branding, and events toward a deeper alignment with what truly resonates at a cultural level.
6. Desire Path
Focus: Latent motivations, aspirational identities, and emotionally charged pursuits that drive behavior.
Application: Through secondary research, an exploratory review of Gen Z skincare preferences reveals a subtle but significant redefinition of luxury. Rather than pursuing traditional markers like status, exclusivity, or heritage, younger consumers gravitate toward brands that foster emotional connection and self-expression, including those that resonate with personal values such as sustainability, inclusivity, and authenticity. For Gen Z, luxury is less about signaling prestige and more about how it feels: how it nurtures rituals of self-care, cultivates a sense of control, or shapes everyday identity-building. Applying serums, emulating influencer routines, or curating a skincare shelf becomes an intimate practice, blending wellness with performance, shaped by deeply felt needs for internal affirmation and comfort. These behaviors, influenced by price points and regionally varied priorities, reflect desire paths that defy conventional models of consumer status or rational choice. For Gen Z, luxury is a dynamic tool for emotional navigation and self-definition, often amplified by social media’s role in personalizing these experiences. Brands seeking relevance with this group must engage these emerging identity scripts, where a product’s meaning lies in how it supports who someone feels they are becoming, not how it appears to others.
7. Behavioral Journey
Focus: Situational pressures, internal conditions, and motivational barriers that shape movement from awareness to action.
Application: In a study on food choices among low-income mothers and caregivers, Behavioral Journey Mapping uncovered a recurring cycle of intention, effort, and fallback in the pursuit of healthier eating. Many had tried to limit soda, replace fried foods, or incorporate vegetables, but often reverted to old habits in response to stress, cravings, convenience, or family preferences. Emotional states cycled alongside behaviors, from pride and motivation to guilt and frustration. Participants expressed knowing what to do but feeling unable to sustain it, which created tension and resignation. Beliefs about affordability and confusion over contradictory nutrition advice also played a role. Some felt hopeful, while others described a sense of fatalism, as if change might not be worth the struggle. The findings showed that real progress required not only education, but emotional, cognitive, and practical support at each step of the behavioral journey.
Why Psychological Depth Matters Now
In an era of AI-generated content and algorithmic targeting, understanding the full psychological and cultural context behind behavior is more important than ever. Technology excels at identifying patterns; however, human complexity demands analytical frameworks that reach beyond the surface.
The Mapping Mindsets & Meaning (MMM) framework reintroduces psychological depth into consumer research. It helps organizations move past generic assumptions toward strategies that are emotionally resonant, culturally aware, and psychologically grounded.
When paired with modern analytics, this framework provides richer insight, stronger strategic alignment, and ultimately, more meaningful outcomes.
Moving Beyond Surface Data
If your current research maps behavior without context, the MMM framework offers a way forward. Whether you’re developing campaigns, refining messages, or exploring new audiences, this approach makes it possible to understand how people perceive, interpret, and act on their own terms.
Rooted in established psychological theories and designed for real-world marketing application, the MMM framework offers depth over buzzwords, substance over trend-chasing, and real understanding over hollow metrics.
Evette Joyce, PsyD
Consumer Psychology & Marketing Research Consultant