Count the beats of your heart not the fingers on your hand. How effective is emotional branding

The rise of the service sector in post-industrial Britain has brought with it a new requisite skill, namely, ‘emotional labour’ defined as ‘the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display; emotional labour is sold for a wage and therefore has an exchange value’ (Hochschild, 2003, p. 7). In this context, the financial service industries deal with our insecurities and anxieties; the travel industry our fantasies and dreams; the entertainment industries our routes of escapism. Service provision becomes foregrounded in advertising campaigns, store interactions and after-sales customer care, all of which concentrate on the management of the consumer’s emotions. This approach relies initially upon finding a point of access to the consumer’s heart and then building upon this connection through the increased personalisation of service provision. Managed successfully, it has an important value within the marketplace, namely, the generation of loyalty and trust. However, with every market sector proliferated by choice and intense competition, more brands are seeking to harness consumer constancy through access to and mobilisation of our emotions. That is to say, exploiting the capacity of the brand to make a particular emotional impact on the consumer through various points of interaction. Therefore, I would argue, a particular affective turn is now more widely recognisable within consumer culture and that the adoption of a psychosocial approach to promotional strategies will allow the examination of why some are more effective than others. In particular, such a theoretical stance is also more adept at focusing on not only on the degree to which marketers take into consideration a product’s contribution to emotional life in general, but more specifically, how promotional work might acknowledge the processes of the inner world and the irrational forces of the unconscious and apply such concepts to the pleasures of consuming and our relationships to the world of goods.