Emotional Branding Through Celebrity Endorsements

Emotional branding is an effective way to create a long-lasting relationship with the customers. The recent shift in brand strategy is towards gaining an emotional share of consumers and understanding the symbolic, emotional features that generate socio-psychological associations in their minds. Use of celebrities through celebrity advertising can act as effective tools to develop a strong emotive tie with a consumer, which can overtime, culminate into long-term brand equity and an emotional connect with the brand. In this chapter, we develop an understanding of various aspects of celebrity endorsement and explain how these can be used to connect emotionally with consumers. We also illustrate situations where use of celebrities has had a positive effect on emotional branding and where it has failed miserably.

Emotional Branding as a Strategy in Promoting Customer Loyalty

In the past decade, emotional branding has been emerged as an extremely influential brand management paradigm and is widely heralded as a key dimension to marketing success. Branding of emotions focuses upon the consumer and not the product at the very forefront; it examines how brands can communicate with consumers in a more rational and humanitarian manner and affect people deeply at the varying degree of the feelings and senses. Due to the steadily growing competition in the international market, brands have become an important component. Therefore, the objective of marketers is to understand the people's emotional desires and increase the consonance of the brand personality for their brands with the self-image of their target customers. The purpose of the chapter is to recognize the potential nature of emotions in creating strong brand attachments between consumers and brands, and promote active participation as it leads to customer loyalty. It also articulates the effects of interactive features that enhance emotional branding elements in a virtual community.

Understanding Doppelgänger Brand Image

With ubiquitous digital growth in the last two decades, consumers' belief of authenticity has become robust. Empowered consumers voice their opinion boldly through internet medium. Antibrand activists, bloggers and loosely organized network of consumers continuously monitor the activities of deceitful marketers and one insidious tactic turns the emotional image to doppelgänger brand image (DBI) - disparaging images and stories about a brand. This article helps in giving insights about the concept of DBI and show the paradoxical side of emotional branding. The concept has been explained with illustrations and recent issues like net neutrality in India, Maggi ban, etc. In addition, the chapter also covers the motivations to create DBI, brands susceptible to DBI and location of such images. The work puts across the schemes where managers could turn this threat of DBI into an opportunity to tell a new brand story, thereby regaining the emotional appeal for the brand. Understanding the concept of DBI would help the readers appreciate the area of emotional branding in better light.

Emotional Branding and Social Media

Emotional branding is increasingly being used by marketers to win customers for their products or services. And, social media has become a growing and popular forum where marketers use emotional branding. This paper/chapter explores the concept of emotional branding and the role of emotional branding in marketing contexts such as in social media. Positive and negative emotions are explored with practical examples of advertisements that use emotional appeals. The paper provides a literature review on emotions and emotional branding and offers theoretical perspectives on the emotional branding concept. The paper also provides a brief discussion on the theoretical and practical implications of emotional branding in the realm of marketing.

The Emotional Branding Process

This chapter aims to provide insights into the various facets of building brands with the use of emotions. Today, technology is playing an intrusive but imperative role in our lives and has made it fast paced. This leaves people with little time to decide on the products and services they want to buy. It is tending to a decision based more on learning about the attributes of the product from a utility perspective alone. The part where customers feel about products and services and then pay attention to attributes, irrespective of they being high-involvement or low-involvement products is slowly reducing. Purchase decisions are being taken more by the head than by the heart. The necessity to consider building strong brands as an essential strategy in order to succeed in an ever-growing highly competitive environment has taken significant proportions today. Customer experience management has been adopted as the process for establishing brands using emotions.

Influence of Marketing Mix Decisions on Emotional Branding and Its Effect on Customer Appeal

Emotional branding has become a necessity for most brands today. Brand loyalty can be developed by brands only when there is an emotional connection between the brand and its consumers. This chapter deals with the nuances and meaning of emotional branding and how it appeals to consumers. There is also a lot of discussion on how the elements of the marketing mix (4Ps) help the brands to attract and retain consumer loyalty over a long period of time. Marketing mix decisions are part of the overall marketing strategy of the firm as well as the brand, and more often than not - considerable changes have to be made in order to establish an emotional connection with the consumers. Research shows that today's consumers are more experience-oriented and hence, a positive experience motivates the customer towards repeat purchase and ultimately brand loyalty. The marketing mix should then be geared to provide a great product/service/brand experience to its consumers.

Consumer-Brand Relations

This research adapted Stemberg's (2003) triangular theory of hate to explore consumer brand relationships. Authors discussed that the protean character of Consumer brand relations (CBRs) in negative way has not been explored by prior conceptualizations in consumer research. The study conceptual scheme, in conformity with Stemberg's theory, was centred on the view that three psychological processes such as motivation, cognition, and emotion interact in several combinations to govern the nature of consumers' relations with brands. Authors' conceptualized eight kinds of CBRs by considering every combination of the three underlying psychological components. Authors have adopted the scale of hate from interpersonal relationship literature and tested it in context of consumer brand relationship. The managerial and theoretical implications, limitations, and future research directions are discussed in detail.

Brand Revitalization

Brand revitalization may be defined as putting a new lease of life to a dying brand. Revitalizing a brand is first of all a task of creating innovative products in line with the tastes of today's new customers, not those of yesterday's. Even when the brand may be very old, it should leave in the memory some traces, then only it would be fruitful to revamp the declining brand. The chapter discusses the meaning of brand revitalization, its causes and symptoms. The concept has been explained from the Indian perspective giving various examples from India. The chapter further discusses the various ways in which a dying brand may be given a new lease of life. The chapter discusses the role of emotional connect of the customers with the brand in particular. There is a detailed analysis of how Cinthol, a leading brand of soap in 1980's lost market in 1990's and how it revived itself by reconnecting with youth 2000 onwards. This chapter would add to the knowledge of the reader in the following ways: understanding the concept of brand revitalization and the rationale for reviving a brand; understanding the reasons why a successful brand loses its relevance and the indicators of the downfall; and understanding the linkages between emotional connect with the target audience and brand revitalization

A Consumer-Based Branding Process

The branding process can be classified as business- and consumer-based branding. The current study introduces a model proposal to the consumer-based branding process. The model focuses on identifying and analyzing the process between consumers' perceptual benefits and emotional brand attachment. The related process focuses on the relationship between product performance, brand preference, subjective brand knowledge, self-based brand engagement and emotional brand attachment factors. The basic assumption of the model is that a consumer first benefits on the basis of brand performance, this benefit triggers brand preference, then this preference turns into subjective brand knowledge, brand knowledge supports consumer's self-based brand engagement, and eventually leads to emotional brand attachment. The analysis is based on the assumption that the consumer performs five main factors modeled in branding perception in the chain / sequential order.

Building Emotional Brand Personalities

Brands are one of the most important assets for companies since they serve as a differentiator. They have personalities like people, which makes them reach consumers emotionally. Therefore, in their efforts put in branding, firms began to give more importance to developing a brand personality. The personification of brands is a form of anthropomorphism. There are various ways to build an anthropomorphic brand. Brand personality models are based on human personality theories in psychology. These models help managers to build a strong and anthropomorphic brand. In this chapter, the authors make a comprehensive explanation regarding the brand personality with benefits, brand personality models, and anthropomorphism and explain the relationship between anthropomorphic brands and marketing communication by presenting some examples.