Brandjam: Humanizing Brands Through Emotional Design by Marc Gobe

Marc Gobe’s book, Brandjam: Humanizing Brands Through Emotional Design, claims that design has the power to shape how customers feel towards a brand and urges businesses to become more emotionally aware of their brands’ impacts. In this book, Gobe outlines ways that businesses can get ahead through effective emotional design in order to have successful and long-lasting relationships with their customers.

Brand identity is the foundation for any business’s success. It’s important for a brand to make a strong first impression and create an emotional connection with consumers. This can be accomplished through effective design of the brand’s logo, website, and other marketing materials. However, Gobe stresses that it takes more than a catchy logo to build a sustainable brand. He argues that a successful brand goes beyond the visual elements. It’s about the story behind a product or service and the emotions it creates for customers.

Gobe has coined the term “emotional branding”--the act of focusing on the user’s feelings towards the brand and striving to create a positive experience that ushers users through the decision-making process. As part of this concept, Gobe outlines three main steps for successful emotional branding: understand, connect and engage.

During the “understand” phase, businesses must first understand the target audience and their specific needs in order to craft an appropriate message or “brand promise.” In this step, Gobe stresses the importance of researching customer preferences, the market, and the competition. Once a brand promise has been decided upon, it’s then time to move on to the “connect” phase.

The “connect” phase involves communicating the brand promise through the visuals of the brand. This can include everything from designing the logo to designing a website. During this phase, businesses are also urged by Gobe to focus on creating connections with customers through storytelling, as this will help to emotionally and visually engage them.

The final phase--”engage”--is all about putting the brand promise into practice. This means not only implementing the strategies from the “connect” phase, but also going above and beyond by creating an emotional bond with customers. This can be done through offering customer service and loyalty programs or using social media in order to keep the brand fresh in customers’ minds.

In his book, Gobe encourages businesses to use design to create connections with customers. By using concepts such as empathy and storytelling, businesses can have a deeper level of engagement with consumers that in turn leads to greater brand loyalty. By understanding their customers’ emotions, businesses can create innovative designs that meet user needs and build more meaningful relationships.