by Travis Luther

Created on: May 04, 2007

Emotional branding is defined in a 2006 American Marketing Association Journal of Marketing as "a consumer centric, relational and story-driven approach to forging deep and enduring affective bonds between consumers and brands (50)". In 1943, after leaving Roosevelt's Farm Security Administration, Roy Stryker took a job with Standard oil. His assignment was to document the benefits of oil on everyday life in the United States.

But Stryker wasn't just merely documenting everyday life with the over 100,000 photographic imagines, Stryker wanted to take the kind of photos that, from what he said, "can comprehend what a truck driver, or a farmer, or a driller or a housewife thinks and feels and translate those thoughts and feelings into pictures that can be similarly comprehended by anyone" (The Photographers). From 1943 to 1950, Stryker enlisted the skills of the best photographers of the time. Stryker made sure they were well-informed about their assigned area, its people, economy and even its politics.

He often gave his photographers books to read and would encourage them to look at assignments in new and different ways. Stryker felt that an educated, sensitive photographer would produce images that "would mirror both his understanding and his compassion." Through Roy Stryker, Standard Oil wasn't just collecting a socio-geographic portrait of the time; they were in fact building a consumer-centric, relational, and story-driven approach to forging deep and enduring affective bonds between consumers and their brand.

The term "emotional branding" officially arrived in the late 1990s. It was proclaimed the "corrective to the shortcomings of the conventional benefit-driven approach to branding" (AMA, 51). Specifically, emotional-branding challenged the benefit-driven approach's fundamental claim that brands must establish a clear, consistent, and distinctive benefit position in the mind of the consumer. Proponents of emotional branding claim that "benefit-driven positioning cannot provide an enduring competitive advantage because it is readily emulated, particularly when the benefits are tied to technological and product design features. Straightforward benefit appeals are unlikely to break through the clutter of a saturated marketing environment that a plethora of brands are fighting to claim distinctive associations" (AMA, 51). Emotional branding says that personal inspiration and passion derived from brand messages and instilled in the consumer will build more long

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