There’s a reason why people liken moods to the weather. Generally, sunny days make people more upbeat and receptive. In contrast, a rainy day makes people more sluggish and moody. What if the correlation between the two also subconsciously dictates how we perceive marketing that leads us to buy a product? The Weather Company and Neuro-Insight collaborated to conduct a study called Wired for Weather. This study aims to determine if there’s a direct link between weather conditions and consumer emotional responses.
Weathering emotions
Best known for The Weather Channel platform, The Weather Company’s goal is to help people make informed decisions in light of the challenges brought about by the weather. Meanwhile, Neuro-Insight is a neuromarketing and neuroanalytics company that uses brain imaging to study consumer behavior. With expertise from both companies, the results from the Wired for Weather research unlocked a powerful way for brands to boost ad effectiveness.
In conducting the Wired for Weather research, Neuro-Insight provided its unique approach called Steady-State Topography (SST). This methodology is used to study the brain’s electrical activity and psychological processes. With the industry know-how from The Weather Company, the collaboration found that the information can result in a return on investment by up to 18%.
Marketing in rain or shine
But how does this work? While the study involves 182 participants, it is unlike traditional market research methods that involve elements like surveys and focus groups that are tinged with certain biases. For the Wired for Weather study, researchers used the SST methodology to provide a deeper, more accurate result. This helped measure the speed of the brain’s response time for certain stimuli — in this case, different kinds of advertising.
The specialized tools they used record brain activity 13 times per second using a lightweight pair of goggles and a skull cap. This then comes back to them as four metrics:
- Memory: measures future behavior, purchase intent, and recall
- Relevance: indicates the intensity of attention and emotional investment
- Emotional Intensity: measures the strength of the emotion
- Lean In/Out: measures the direction of the emotion, whether it’s leaning towards or away.
As a result of this method and collaboration, The Weather Company has identified four distinct weather-driven mindsets and behaviors: creating, relishing, enduring, and cocooning. Each focuses on different kinds of brain activity and behavior. With this, the Wired for Weather research showed that advertising aligned to the immediate forecast resonated more deeply with consumers. Marketing messages that were delivered right after the consumer checks the weather are more powerful and influential. According to the company, forecast-aligned messaging can drive up to 10% engagement and 12% detail memory during sunny days, and up to 29% engagement and 22% detail memory during rainy days. What’s more, Gen Z participants showed even stronger neural responses to weather changes.
Real-life applications
The conclusion of the Wired for Weather research conducted in April 2025 is that the weather does affect emotional and cognitive signals that affect marketing. With the results from the research, companies can be more informed of how to understand their target audience and what they feel to maximize their advertisements. They can now target consumers using emotional intelligence thanks to accurate weather data.
If you’ve ever felt like walking around town during a sunny day reminded you of a certain fashion advertisement with a scene at the beach, it may not have been a coincidence. This emerging field of “weather-driven marketing” is allowing brands to connect with consumers on a deeper, more subconscious level, making advertising more impactful and memorable.
Photo credits: The feature image is symbolic and has been taken by Lucky Octavia. The infographic in the body of the article is owned by The Weather Company and has been provided for press usage.
Sources: PR Newswire / Lobna Ben Nasr (Academia)
