brand_and_strategy_march06
Emotional Branding
Marc Gobé on how to create brands people truly love—through the power of emotions.Quotables from Emotional Branding—the New Paradigm for Connecting
Brands to People .
“This means that understanding people’s emotional needs and desires is really now more than
ever,the key to success.”Emotional Branding ,p. XIV
“Emotional Branding comes from partnership and communication.Building the right emotion is the most important investment you can make in a brand.It is the promise you make to consumers,giving them permission to enjoy
the world of the brand.”Emotional Branding ,p. XXIII “Service is selling.Relationship is acknowledgment.Who does not feel special when someone in a store or restaurant welcomes you
by your own name! Service
involves a basic level of efficiency in a commercial exchange.It is what allows or prevents a sale from taking place.But relation-ship means that the brand repre-sentatives really seek to
understand and appreciate who
their customers are.”Emotional Branding ,p. XXXI “The biggest misconception about branding is that it does not
need to evolve.”Emotional Branding ,p. 306“To get people interested in a long-term relationship,keep your ear to the ground and always be ready for any market changes.Change is good,but predicting change is better—the answer is
within people’s hearts.”Emotional Branding ,p. 306
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March 2006
Invisible Branding
The power of emotions in a post-modern,personal world.An interview with Marc Gobé.
M
arc Gobé is the Chairman & CEO of Desgrippes Gobé Group and author of Emotional Branding – The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People (https://www.wendangku.net/doc/0a15651982.html,) and Citizen Brand . CZ Marketing president
Dave Goetz recently interviewed Gobé on how to create brands people truly love through the power of emotions.
Emotional Branding has become a business classic. How do you approach the topic?
Marc Gobé:I read a work by Antonio Damasio, the world famous neurologist, who
scientifically proved we make decisions based on our intuitions and emotions more than logic. More often our emotions over-ride any other decision-making processes.He also scientifically expressed that people buy products based not on what those prod-ucts are but what they mean. Based on the experience I had creating products and branding programs for the fashion and fra-grance industry, in which there’s nothing to sell except an emotion, I found his argu-ment was right.
There’s a tendency in the branding
world to find some kind of dogma that does not account for the world of emotion. In
reality, the world of emotion is constantly evolving, because people emotionally are reacting to their environment or living their life based on outside circumstances. For instance, living in a state of fear, as we are right now, impacts how we see products,how we see others, and even how we manage our lives.
How does the constant evolution of emotion affect marketing?Marc Gobé:Only 50 percent of what we know about people can be probed by
traditional research. The other 50 percent we don’t know and we’ll never discover through any research or formula. The marketing industry needs to enter the door of the 50 percent we don’t know about—the door of our imag-ination. The only way you can really enter and understand that world is not through logic or a process but through the imaginative process.
Can you describe a marketing campaign that successfully engaged this imaginative process?Marc Gobé:The most successful brands in the marketplace
are always products of imagination. They are always the prod-uct of things that are revealed to people and are at the same time revealing something about the person that we did not know. Nobody needed another pair of sneakers until Nike
arrived. Nobody needed another bottle of vodka until Absolute
B&S INTERVIEW
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came along. Nobody needed more coffee or more Coke for energy until Red Bull entered the market. Nobody needed another air-line until Virgin arrived. Most of those concepts were turned on by traditional research. However, they also engaged the invisible and the non-rational.
Why are we moving towards products of imagination? Marc Gobé:We’re experiencing a shift from a modern socie-ty, which was dogmatic, to a personal society, in which individu-als are intimate decision makers. Emotional branding
celebrates individuals in their own lives, through their own identities, and in their search for self-realization.
What happens if you neglect the emotional identity of the individual?
Marc Gobé:If you don’t understand the emotional relation-ship that people have with what’s meaningful for them in life--what it is that they are really searching for in order to fill some kind of void in their lives or bring some kind of meaning to it—then you can’t communicate with them.
When Apple started, its mantra was, “We’re going to give power back to people through technology.” And if you look at Nike, it emerged not as a dogmatic brand but a social brand. These brands are based on a clear understanding of their con-sumers’ emotional needs and what that brand can bring to them.
When it comes to emotional branding, is there a difference between service branding and product branding?
Marc Gobé:I think that is what’s believed, but it’s all about people and their interaction. You can’t be in the service busi-ness if people don’t trust you. Take Arthur Anderson, for exam-ple. In a world of complete logic, we would have said, "Anderson only had one bad office. Surely there are thousands across the world that had nothing to do with Enron."
But they didn’t have
a brand; nobody cared
about them because they
failed to build any kind
of connection with people.
This is the complete
opposite of Apple. Ten
years ago they were
going under. I remem-
ber saying, “If the com-
pany goes bankrupt,
what are we going to do?
We should look for
another vendor.” Our
technology guy said,
“Absolutely not. They’re
going to make it.”
Nobody walked out on them, because everyone wanted the company to survive. That’s the kind of profound connection they had with people.
Companies like Boeing, though they don’t have much com-petition, need to get the public to understand what they’re doing. Presently, they are doing a consumer-driven advertis-ing campaign—completely changing the way they communi-cate to everyone.
Why do people go to any university? Sometimes they base decisions on practical issues (a reputation and the value), but they also base their decisions on what kind of emotional experi-ence they want to have and the meaning that it carries.
You seem to have been influenced by the French Deconstructionists, such as Jacque Derrida—and post-modern thinking in general. How have they influenced your thinking?
Marc Gobé:One of Derrida’s thoughts is that as something moves, then what’s left behind disappears. Things can’t stay
the same forever at the same place. As things are constantly transforming themselves, then what’s left behind is changed forever. It’s amazing to see that in context of how some people see their brands. There’s a natural tendency to always believe that things can be fixed and can’t evolve.
Yet things are always changing. More importantly, when things change, people are affected by it. You can’t live in a bubble and stay in that bubble forever.
Do you see any danger of controlling people with emotional branding?
Marc Gobé:Some people say consumers are buying Nike because they are being brainwashed. Except if you look at the data you see that people are getting tired of advertising. They’re migrating to an advertising-free environment; they are com-pletely going to avoid it.
I think we are really living in a consumer democracy. I believe people are buying what they want and not buying what they don’t want.
Are there any trends to watch as it relates to the new consumer democracy?
Marc Gobé:One is the idea of customization, in terms of craftsmanship for instance. What Target has done with design
is a perfect example. People want to avoid commodities or prod-ucts that don’t have any meaning or that are processed and industrialized. There is a need to connect with a more human side of brands.
If, when you buy a product there is something special about it, then it immediately has a lot more appeal. If something is redesigned in a shape that’s pleasing, for instance, then people are going to gravitate to that. I think that’s what Apple and Nike did.
The big trend is people are realizing brands and society are one and the same thing. Society’s brands are a manifestation of who we are, and each one has a responsibility to make the other successful.
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Brand & Strategy
Publisher: CZ Marketing
Editor: Dave Goetz
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