A Response to: "Emotional Branding is here to Stay"

This is a response to Angela Cogliano’s post: “Emotional Branding is here to Stay”

Post can be found at: http://jesuschristthesuperstar.blogspot.com/

I think Angela did a great job illustrating how pervasive and powerful emotional branding is. Her example of Scotiabank’s recent advertising campaign worked well to demonstrate her argument (even though as a customer, I associate them with much more negative images of service charges, banking feels and non-stop bills). One thing that truly resonated with me while reading her post was when she mentioned how advertising has become less about the item and more about the consumer’s relationship to the brand. I believe emotional branding is a truly revolutionary development in marketing. To be honest, from a company’s perspective, placing more emphasis on the consumer-brand relationship would be a much more powerful way of increasing a profit base.

Take for example the following commercial:

If this video was stripped of all its Tim Horton’s logos, this would appear as a commercial advertising hockey as being a part of a greater “Canadian-ness” (which many people would say is already true). In this clip you can see how Tim’s attempts to do something more than just sell a cup of coffee; it attempts to sell a lifestyle. It isn’t an extravagant or luxurious one that we are familiar with seeing in other ad campaigns, but it is something that is familiar to many Canadians. In addition, having Sidney Crosby, who represents one of the most important moments in Canadian hockey history, reinforces their point. I think Tim’s is a corporation that has been hugely successful in employing emotional branding in this way. In my opinion, emotional branding is successful when the brand becomes a naturalized part of what they advertise to be. In this case, it is rare to see people in hockey stands or sitting around ice rinks without a double-double and a box of Timbits because it has become a natural part of our lifestyle.

In this sense, emotional branding not only plays with deeply personal emotions and sentiments but has the potential to completely alter how consumers interact with the brands that surround them.