Feelings, Brands...and Profits

What Brands Are and Why They Matter

Brand Building: Foundations

Building Brands with Meaning

Brand Building in the Digital Era

Brand Building: Key Elements

Managing Your Brand

Branding Beyond the Obvious

My own opinion is that his excellent discussion of "Key Elements" should have been placed earlier in the book. In this chapter, he focuses on the power of the name, logos and other elements of style, advertising ("Telling the Brand story to Customers"), telling the brand story to other stakeholders, and integrated marketing ("There's No Better Time to Meet the Future than Now"). Throughout the book, Travis provides numerous insights which I found thought-provoking. For example:

* "A brand is more than a symbol. A brand, hopefully your brand, behaves like a guarantee."

* "Being a great listener who can hear between the lines is the secret to finding the great little sweet spots in customer wants and needs."

* "Businesses that fail to engage the eyes, ears, minds, and emotions of every individual will find themselves overrun by obsolescence or crushed by competition."

NOTE: I highly recommend three other books which provide invaluable insights directly relevant to the previous comment. They are Schmitt's Experiential Marketing, Pine & Gilmore's The Experience Economy, and Wolf's The Entertainment Economy.

* "A brand that wants to be a little of everything will eventually amount to a lot of nothing."

* "The fact is that as a leader, you don't have to have all the answers. You only have to know where to look for them."

* "It is important to react quickly to change. but it is better to create it. Staying ahead of the game is what powerful brands do, and they do it by listening."

Throughout my own extensive experience with corporate clients, helping them to solve various problems with branding, I have become convinced that the most powerful brands make and then keep only those promises which are most important to their customers. Unlike so many other subtitles of books I have read recently, the subtitle for this one makes a promise which is kept. Travis really does explain -- and explain brilliantly -- "how successful brands gain the irrational edge." So can yours.

8 of 8 found the following review helpful:


Evoke before you promote  Oct 30, 2000 By Louis H. Lafontaine
A great book for anyone who wants to be someone. For whether we want to or not, we carry our own brand, good or bad.

The book is witty, sagacious and some times irreverent in the spirit of that roué Harry. Fun to read yet thought provoking.

We learn that it is what we evoke, not what we promote that brands us. Learn how you can improve your brand, it is bound to pay-off.

Louis H. Lafontaine, Eng. Independent Business Owner

7 of 7 found the following review helpful:


Simple Truths In A Complex Economy  Nov 08, 2000
For today's manager, there seems to be no end to the learning curve in the new economy. We immerse ourselves in CRM, we model our companies and our web sites on being customer-led, we embrace the market segment of one and we look for ways in which to reach new prospects through interactive dialogue.

The customer is at the centre of every corporate universe. Relationships take on new meaning when the customer can talk back. We understand the idea of share-of-customer replacing share-of-market. But we are left with a feeling that there needs to be a glue somehow that can cement all these new wisdoms into a logical and totally comprehensible whole. "Emotional Branding" brings a refreshing and yet totally down to earth perspective to this world of new business.

Written in a narrative and light-hearted style, the book is full of anecdotes and illustrations from real life that emphasize the importance of branding in today's world.

But by far the greatest significance of this book is how it demonstrates the human side of branding as a competitive tool. It reveals that the real significance of web-enabled dialogue with our customers is that we can now start to understand and respond to them on an emotional (right brain) basis rather on a purely logical (or left brain) platform that characterized the old world of one-way communications.

The book's basic premise is that it is no good having a product or service unless your customers can relate to it. By describing the processes of how a brand is born, nurtured, communicated and fulfills its promise, "Emotional Branding" leads us on a voyage of delightfully written discovery into the hearts as well as the minds of our customers. The book makes its point that customers need to feel something, not just about a name but about the company behind it. These feelings are real and important. They are the key to what really motivates customer choice and customer loyalty.

The book quotes freely from a broad cross section of the most erudite business authors in the technologies, marketing and branding fields. A character in the book called Harry provides personality profiles of experience from the real world in an engaging way that makes you want to meet this man of insights. The author's own experience with major corporations and organizations ensures that this is a practical guide rather than an academic treatise.

It is tempting to fill a review of "Emotional Branding" with quote after quote to illustrate the practical perspective this book brings to an often confusing and contradictory subject. Let me use just one:

"Building a brand in the mass-marketing age was about building an image. Building a brand in the mass-customization age is about building a reputation".

A reputation starts deep within a company and real customer focus becomes all about creating a reputation that starts from within. A reputation is as much about feeling as fact. Learning how to turn simple truths like this into supreme competitive advantage is where the real return on investment in the new economy will be realized.

"Emotional Branding" is a `must read'. It covers all we need to know about designing, building and nurturing a brand for continued relevance. The internet has made companies transparent and has given the consumer the power of a very loud voice. "Emotional Branding" describes in human and practical terms how to harness that power and make it your ally.

5 of 5 found the following review helpful:


Wonderful!  Dec 03, 2000
In my business as a veterinarian, emotions strongly influence the behavior of my clients but this often seems overlooked in business literature. Emotional Branding is the first management book I've seen which tackles this critical issue to any business today... how your customers FEEL about your business.

This book helped me see how everything my clinic says and does influences by brand promise. I've shared the book with my staff and it has sparked us to make many simple changes to enhance our brand (and to stop doing some of the little things that were not true to our brand promise). We've already seen great results.

If you are looking for another typical college 101 academic text filled with positioning maps, SWOT diagrams and simplistic charts-then this book is NOT for you. But, if you want to see your business in a fresh light and feel like being inspired, then I highly recommend this lovely book.

9 of 12 found the following review helpful:


Emotional Branding  Nov 08, 2000 By Laura Johnston
This is a brave book that goes where many others don't dare ... into the realm of emotions. Daryl Travis gets it right when he says that the key question about a brand is, how does it make you feel?

This is a wonderful book with great anecdotes from Travis' years in advertising. It's sprinkled with lively banter from his friend Harry, making it a fun as well as interesting read.

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