In 1957, journalist Vance Packard published The Hidden Persuaders, a book dedicated to the tactics and techniques used in media during the postwar period. Advertisers, he argued, targeted eight hidden needs to compel purchases, rooted in emotional appeals and biological and social needs, rather than simply transactional value.
He identified those eight needs as emotional security, reassurance of worth, ego-gratification, creative outlets, love objects, sense of power, roots, and immortality. His idea was the beginning of what is now called emotional branding.
Today’s brands incorporate emotional branding strategies to break through the noise of the marketing landscape, push back against corporate culture’s homogenous ad campaigns, create relevance from life’s everyday moments, and foster genuine emotional connection with customers.
Read on to learn the key elements of emotional branding and how to use them to connect with your audience in a genuine way.
What is emotional branding?
Emotional branding builds long-lasting emotional connections between a brand and its customers by emphasizing feeling and emotion in design, messaging, and overall brand management.
Though Vance Packard’s book laid the groundwork, most modern marketers credit the term to Marc Gobe’s 2001 book, Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People, in which Gobe argues that brands looking to make deep connections with consumers must appeal to their values, aspirations, and greater emotions.
From a scientific perspective, this makes sense: successful emotional branding strategies are effective because human beings are often emotionally persuaded.
Key elements of emotional branding
Human emotions are complex. How and when you implement emotion into your brand strategy requires nuance and intentionality, but your success rests on three key pillars:
An emphasis on storytelling
The story of your brand and how well you tell it directly impacts whether or not a potential customer will connect emotionally. Neil Hoyne, chief measurement strategist at Google, says it can be tempting to deprioritize brand storytelling over more concrete marketing KPIs.
“A lot of retailers get into this mindset where they say they’re going to win the customer over with facts and data,” Neil says on an episode of Shopify Masters. Emphasize the data, he says, and customers will follow your lead—absorbing your brand through a data-driven lens and comparing your attributes against your competitor’s attributes. “But start telling a story about where the product was from and how the product was made, and they become a character in that story. They see themselves playing that role with that product, in those shoes, thinking about how it could fit into their life.”
That’s the power of storytelling in building emotional connections with your brand.
Intentional visual design
The look and feel of your brand’s visual design plays a major role in a strong emotional branding strategy. Everything from color choice to typography to graphic design and photography elicits specific reactions or assumptions from your audience; it only takes 90 seconds for a person to form an opinion about your product, and up to 90% of that opinion is based on colors alone. The visuals you choose prime your audience for the emotions you want them to feel: calm and comforted, excited and adventurous, or independent and rebellious.
Authenticity
Brand authenticity is the perception that a brand’s actions and messages align with its mission and beliefs. It comes across when a brand is infused with personality and perspective and consistently walks its talk. Authenticity empowers some brands to take big marketing risks: If the brand appears sincere, it’s more likely to elicit trust from customers.
Benefits of using an emotional branding strategy
Brands that use emotional marketing are more memorable, compelling, and fun to engage with—even if they move you to tears. Here are a few more of the benefits that come with emotionally driven branding:
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Strong customer relationships. Appealing to your customer base through positive emotions may help you score a purchase in the short term, but in the long term, it also drives customer loyalty and retention and referrals, and increases customer lifetime value (CLV).
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Differentiation in the marketplace. Done well, emotional branding places you in a category of one: No one else is telling your story. Emotional branding makes products feel like a part of the customer’s story, which is much harder to replicate or compete with.
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Greater creativity. Generating the ideas and creative assets around emotional branding often pulls on the combined strengths of a creative team. One way to bring authenticity to your brand is by incorporating your team’s unique inputs and experiences.
Examples of successful emotional branding strategies
Ready to see emotional branding in action? Here’s how a few successful companies utilize humor, inspiration, pain points, and human connection throughout their approach.
Liquid Death
Many brands might hope to be funny for funny’s sake, but at beverage brand Liquid Death, it’s a sign of emotional resonance: laughter, as Liquid Death vice president of creative Andy Pearson argues, “is an involuntary response to making a connection with somebody.”
“A lot of the stuff we do is a parody of marketing itself. It’s poking marketing in the eye,” he says on Shopify Masters. “The one thing that unites all people is that they are marketed to constantly. In some weird way, that is a cultural touchstone that we can always play off of.”
Pearson explains that the team uses that energy to fuel its brand awareness strategies and give back something positive—laughter. For the team, it’s a way to make peace with the extractive nature of the advertising industry at large, he says. “We want to make something that we think people are actually going to love, first and foremost. Then we can weave in things that we want you to understand about the beverage.”
This approach can be seen in collaborations like the one between the brand and e.l.f. Cosmetics, which skewers a classic made-for-TV promo by adding a musical number, the brand’s signature metal-infused embrace of macabre imagery, puppets, animations, and more.
While humor may be most noticeable in the brand’s marketing content, the emotionally driven strategy behind it defines the entire organization. “That’s why it feels real. It’s built from a bunch of people who have specific senses of humor and want to do interesting things,” Andy says. “That’s what guides the brand: all the people behind it, not a PDF of rules that have been decided on in a room somewhere.”
Graza
“There’s a sense of joy and playfulness that’s very inherent to our brand,” said Kali Shulklapper, brand director at Graza Olive Oil, at a 2025 Shopify panel discussion. “It’s in everything we do: our creative and our messaging. It’s about cooking and having fun in the kitchen. I think that feeling of joy and playfulness really resonates with people.” Emotional branding connects feelings and products.
That playfulness inspired a holiday turtleneck sweater for Graza’s bottles that sold out in four hours. It also speaks to the emotional driver of nostalgia, recalling ugly Christmas sweaters and the popular avocado green of the 1970s.
Fresh Sends
At gifting brand Fresh Sends, emotions provide the engine for the entire customer journey: sending gifts and flowers to remind people they’re “seen, known, and loved,” explains founder Ty Hiss on Shopify Masters. Fresh Sends exists to facilitate this emotional transaction between a sender and their recipient—and their branding choices follow suit, like the build-a-note feature.
Ty says she’s also made a practice of highlighting customer stories and impact with the broader team, to keep the authentic emotional power of the product top-of-mind internally. A brand devoted to encouraging and strengthening connections between people lives or dies based on how well it communicates that mission—how authentically it comes across to a potential customer. Infusing day-to-day operations with proof of those connections helps drive more of them, creating something of an emotional flywheel effect.
Jolie
Beauty wellness company Jolie, known for its filtering showerheads, tests the waters across the emotional spectrum, from sappy sweet Instagram ads in honor of Valentine’s Day to atmospheric odes to the shower and artful mini-docs like its YouTube series “Water &,” which explores the many ways we connect with water through the lens of a surfer, an artist, and an oyster farmer. In this example, emotional branding establishes a connection between a lifestyle and a value system.
“The shower is a space that doesn’t just clean us physically, but spiritually, mentally. It’s a great thinking session. We dance in the shower, sing in the shower, cry in the shower,” says cofounder Arjan Singh. Tapping into the experiences behind the behavior—taking a simple shower—allows Jolie to represent something larger to their customers.
Tips for implementing emotional branding
- Know your brand values and strengths
- Study your audience
- Curate your storytelling to customer touchpoints
- Apply long-term thinking to short-term goals
Emotional branding explores the motivations behind the decisions we make, whether it’s deciding to engage with a post on social media, purchase a product, or tell our friends and family to do the same. Emotional branding begins with the brand-building process and carries all the way through conversion. Here’s how to implement successful emotional branding strategies:
Know your brand values and strengths
As in most branding exercises, “know thyself” is paramount. Whether you discover this within a specific framework like a SWOT analysis that charts your brand’s strengths and weaknesses in the context of your competition or it’s something you feel out by instinct, understanding your own beliefs, brand values, personality, and strengths as a brand is key to creating an authentic representation of your product to your customers.
This includes your own hopes for the ideal customer experience: What do you want them to remember about your brand? What emotions should it make them feel—and how will they describe it to their friends? Do your internal practices and team workflows align with those takeaways?
Study your audience
A strong sense of your target audience’s core values and desires is equally important to emotional branding as understanding your brand’s values. Only by understanding customer pain points will you be able to present a compelling solution; only by understanding what your customers want—not just a product, but for their lives—can you generate a sense that it’s within reach through your brand.
This is how Allbirds creates a feeling of personal impact and responsibility through innovation and materials. What does your customer aspire to? Worry about? Love most about themselves?
Curate your storytelling to customer touchpoints
Map key touchpoints of the customer journey and tailor your storytelling to each. Curate your approach depending on how customers found your brand, whether they came to you directly or stumbled across your brand serendipitously. Tools like Shopify Messaging and Sidekick can help you craft emotionally resonant email campaigns in line with your brand identity that are more likely to appeal to your audience.
Apply long-term thinking to short-term goals
Embracing emotional resonance at the core of your brand enables emotional marketing, in which the same emotional branding techniques can be applied to short-term goals with measurable impacts on a campaign-by-campaign basis. Emotional marketing also allows you to experiment with emotional drivers, like individuality or FOMO (fear of missing out), without making them the dominant feeling behind your brand.
Emotional branding FAQ
What is an example of an emotional brand?
An emotional brand is one that prioritizes emotional connection with its customers at multiple touchpoints across the customer experience. Liquid Death is an example of a brand that uses unexpected humor and dissonant visuals to differentiate itself within the crowded beverage marketplace.
How does emotional branding work?
Emotional branding works by eliciting a feeling from an audience—whether laughter, desire, inspiration, or validation—and forming a connection that did not exist before. That connection, rooted in a customer’s identity and values (rather than your specific product’s selling points), drives purchasing behavior and brand loyalty.
What are the cons of emotional branding?
Emotional branding requires radical authenticity and an embrace of the risk that comes when stepping outside the mainstream, which can be challenging to accomplish. One of its cons is that, if not done well, your messaging can feel inauthentic or manipulative—both major red flags to customers.
