Emotional Branding: How Successful Brands Gain the Emotional Edge

Citation

Lafferty, B.A. (2001), "Emotional Branding: How Successful Brands Gain the Emotional Edge", Journal of Product & Brand Management, Vol. 10 No. 7, pp. 466-469. https://doi.org/10.1108/jpbm.2001.10.7.466.2

As I browsed in the bookstore and discovered Gobé’s book titled Emotional Branding, I also found another book with the same title by Daryl Travis. Intrigued, I decided to see how the two books compared and if they both had the same vision for what is emotional branding.

To begin with, Travis’s book is written in a very different style than Gobé’s book. Gobé gets right to the point in an easy‐to‐read, professional approach to the topic. Travis takes more of an informal, less professional approach to his writing and attempts to interject humor using his friend, Harry, as an example throughout the book. Gobé is succinct without sacrificing meaning and clarity. Travis, on the other hand, can get a bit verbose sometimes, becoming redundant as he makes his point or tries to be humorous. For example, when he talks about customers who are not worth keeping, he states, “you have to have the guts to ask him or her to ever‐so‐politely take a hike, to please blow‐your‐pop‐stand, to head for a happier horizon.” (p. 64). Or when he speaks about values and states:

… fostering beliefs and actions from well‐conceived values isn’t a pointless exercise in navel gazing; rather, it’s very much of this earth. It’s muscular ethics. It’s brawny basics. It’s practical purity (p. 91).

Again, stylistically this is quite different from Gobé.

On a more substantive level, Gobé and Travis also differ. Gobé clearly defines emotional branding at the very beginning of the book and structures his book around the dimensions or components of emotional branding. Travis never really gives a clear definition of emotional branding. He alludes to emotional connections and building customer loyalty, but never clearly defines emotional branding. This lack of a clear focus at the outset prevents Travis from having a book with an organized structure. The author covers a lot of topics in the book’s 31 chapters related to branding, such as customer service, brand loyalty, relationship building, values, leadership, customization, and one‐to‐one communications, but he does not tie them back to emotional branding in any concrete way. Unlike Gobé, who cues in on the sensorial experiences that bring a brand to life and inspire emotional connections, Travis only briefly mentions logos, the power in a brand name, and other style elements. Both authors use many good examples to illustrate their points, but Gobé’s examples are more specific to illustrating emotional branding. Gobé’s book also contains advertisements, photos, and diagrams to illustrate key points, while Travis’ book is devoid of these aids. Both books contain ample recent citations, but Travis leans toward popular press books and magazines almost exclusively, while Gobé incorporates popular press as well as recent academic journals. Both books also contain a comprehensive index.

Travis does cover many good points related to effective brand strategy, but they lack cohesion. He also brings up some interesting branding strategies such as branding cities, countries, and yourself, but again how they connect to emotional branding is not clear. As I pondered the differences between the two books on emotional branding, I tried to put my finger on what it was that did not sit well with me regarding Travis’s book, stylistic differences aside. Then I realized that my biggest problem with it was the title. This book really did not strike me as a book about emotional branding per se. It is a book about the importance of branding and everything that influences brand strategy. Perhaps a better title would be All About Branding or Managing People through Branding. If the reader is interested in emotional branding specifically, Gobé develops the concept in a more definitive fashion and clearly differentiates it from typical brand strategy. If a broader, more general book about branding is of interest, then Travis’ book is an option. In spite of a few similarities in the texts, if I had to choose a book that is specifically tailored to emotional branding, I would lean strongly toward Gobé’s.