Emotional Branding Overview

Introduction

In an ever-changing and highly competitive market, fashion brands struggle to distinguish themselves to increasingly apathetic consumers. As press and department stores no longer dictate fashion sales, e-commerce has democratized fashion industry competition. Even with contemporary strategies, such as employing online platforms like Amazon and social media, fashion brands often suffer from stagnant sales. Moreover, customer loyalty is at its lowest levels due to lack of product diversity and high brand switching. In this retail environment, fashion brands need to develop new strategies to grab consumers' attention by speaking to their hearts.

To address this need, retailers employ emotional branding as a way to engage their customers, appealing to their needs, aspirations, dreams, and ego. This branding strategy addresses the growing trend of consumers' seeking emotional relationships with a brand. Although brand technicalities may be unmemorable, consumers do not forget how a brand makes them feel. As opposed to information such as product attributes, features, and facts, personal feelings and experiences better shape consumers' evaluations of brands. Hence, emotional branding seems to be a strategy that creates strong brand attachments between consumers and brands.

Emotional branding establishes itself as a critical factor in developing brand loyalty, which has been conceptualized as a long-term, committed, and affect-laden partnership devised to characterize consumer-brand bonds. Increased loyalty driven by emotional branding, in turn, leads to higher sales. For example, purchase intentions from television advertising are three times as likely to result from emotional responses as advertisement content. Overall, emotionally connected consumers are 52% more valuable to a brand than those who are just satisfied. Presumably, emotionally attached consumers are a brand's highly profitable market segment. Because fashion has traditionally been associated with experiential, symbolic, or hedonic products, emotional branding is likely a vital approach to directly speak to fashion consumers.

To this end, we define emotional branding as a brand's strategy that stimulates consumers' affective state, appealing to their feelings with the aim of increasing consumer loyalty toward the brand. Furthermore, we posit emotional branding is an essential strategic practice, especially to fashion brands, in a ruthless retail environment. As Morrison and Frederick suggested, creating emotional brand experiences and managing emotional branding strategies requires an integrated approach. First, we explore marketplace trends that support emotional branding defined by consumer experiences, authentic self, warm glow, and co-creation. Second, we propose a model for emotional branding strategies relevant to the fashion industry in terms of sensory branding, storytelling, cause branding, and empowerment. It is important to note that one or multiple marketplace trends are reflected in strategies discussed in this study. Hence, we recommend that retailers use any of these strategies, or a combination of them, to improve brand loyalty. Figure 1 illustrates the framework of emotional branding.

Fig. 1 Emotional branding