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Emotional Branding: The New
Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People
By Marc Gobé
Allworth Press, 2001, 352pp.
Reviewed by Michael McPherson
Coca-Cola, Ann Taylor, Gillette, Victoria's Secret, and Godiva
are among the many prestigious clients of Marc Gobé's design and
consulting firm d/g* worldwide, so his book will find an eager audience
among designers, brand managers, and marketing strategists. Emotional
Branding is about the role brands play in our enjoyment of consuming—and
the importance of great design in creating those experiences. As
the son of clothing retailers in a small town in France, Gobé learned
early in life that the selection of products goes way beyond objective
features. It requires a deep resonance with the customer and a knack
for knowing how to tell a good story. For Gobé, the most effective
brands begin with sharing enthusiasm person-to-person.
The book begins rather slowly with a discussion of demographic
trends and contains broad generalizations about the preferences
of Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, gays, women, and so on. The topic is important
and the writing is dutiful but never transcends the journalistic.
The pace picks up considerably in the second section, "Sensorial
Experiences," in which Gobé makes the case for using all the senses
to involve customers with brands. He gives numerous examples of
successful branding efforts involving touch, taste, smell, and sound.
The final chapter of this section even tells how some retailers
have created zones of (branded) quiet for their over-stimulated
customers.
The third section—"Imagination"—is the heart of the book.
It is an inspiring collection of case studies showing the importance
of design for building brands that resonate with people. "The eternal
question of whether design is about art or commerce is clearly answered
by today's designers," Gobé writes. "It is about people and our
role in making people's lives more fulfilling through beauty."
The final section, misleadingly entitled "Vision," is a motley
collection: a chapter on branding on the Web, a chapter on d/g*
worldwide's proprietary branding methodologies, and some "for-what-it's-worth"
theories about future trends. The Web chapter betrays a rather distant
acquaintance with the medium, and I suspect this whole section slipped
by with only superficial editorial attention. (The Internet is a
"medium," not a "media," and the enterprise-software company is
SAP, not Sap.) Throughout the book, the writing slips back and forth
between Gobé's enthusiastic personal voice (and overuse of exclamation
points) and annoying "brandspeak": "It is obvious that branded presence
allows a product to rise above the competition by bringing a visual
and experiential realm of the brand to life." Please.
In spite of the book's flaws, we can be grateful that an intelligent
and visionary designer has shared his experiences and his passion
about a topic that is at the center of his creative life. Emotional
Branding is worth more than a whole shelf of business books
on brand strategy, because it cuts to the core of why we care so
much about brands and why they give us so much pleasure.
Michael McPherson is a partner with Corey
McPherson Nash.
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