Marc Gobe - Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People

2009 Marc Gob

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Published by Allworth Press
An imprint of Allworth Communications
10 East 23rd Street, New York, NY 10010

Cover design by dg*, New York, NY

Page design by Phyllis Aragaki
Page composition/typography by Sharp Des!gns, Lansing, MI

ISBN: 978-1-58115-672-0
eBook ISBN 978-1-58115-737-6

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Gob, Marc.

Emotional branding : the new paradigm for connecting brands to people /
Marc Gob. Updated and rev. ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-58115-672-0

1. Branding (Marketing) 2. Consumers preferences.

3. Motivation research (Marketing) I. Title.

HD69.B7G62 2009

658.827dc22

2009037541

Printed in the United States of America

foreword

In the spring of 1993, Roberto Goizueta asked me to come back to The Coca-Cola Company as its first ever chief marketing officer.

I would be in charge of a worldwide budget that exceeded $5 billion, and the very first question that crossed my mind was, How am I going to be able to talk to consumers in an efficient way, while growing the business?

There were a lot of things that contributed to the success we ultimately experienced, or, should I say, to the success of the team that I assembled. I was able to hire the best marketing people in the world and also to get the best partners in the world. The only way that we were going to grow the business from nine billion to fifteen billion cases in only three short years was to bring together the very best in every area of the business.

Packaging, as a key component of brand design, had always attracted me. I believe that it is the most efficient way to talk to consumersand I also believe that it has been misused and mismanaged over the years.

In 1985, during my first tenure at The Coca-Cola Company, on the heels of the introduction of New Coke and at the beginning of the one-hundred-year anniversary of The Coca-Cola Company, I got a phone call from the corporate department of the company asking me to develop a new graphic design so we would have something to show the bottlers at the 1986 celebration of the anniversary. I was shocked at first because I believe that packaging should not be show-and-tell but an expression of identity that should really be put to work for the brand. But I lost the argument, and the packaging was redone. All of the brands of The Coca-Cola Company were reduced to a single design. It was a political design created for the wrong reasons, not for the right causes.

When I came back to the company that August (1993), after a seven-year hiatus, I immediately started looking for people who got it. In the design arena, I was introduced that fall to Marc Gob in Paris, and the very first two questions I asked Marc were, Do you get it? and, Can you help me?

• Do you understand the importance of graphic design as a selling tool?
• Can you help me take the incredible power of the design and the iconography of the logos of The Coca-Cola Company to help us sell more product?

Marc impressed me with his emotionalized approach to brand design, a concept ahead of its time. Over the next three years, the aid that Marc gave me was instrumental in helping us take the volume of The Coca-Cola Company from nine billion to fifteen billion cases a year. It was not only in the design of the graphics of the bottle or the can, which is what all graphic designers do, but more in Marcs great understanding of the role of hidden assets like the trucks and the uniforms and all of the visual expressions of a brand.

Millions and millions of Coca-Cola impressions are in the streets every day, as trucks, for example, travel up and down in front of consumers... and we had never spent any time really designing them to sell.

When I went to Paris, Marc and his people showed me the design they had done for the Olympics in Albertville and the design they had done for Boucheron perfume. It was remarkable right away how they had used colornot only the traditional colorsand how they had used designnot the traditional designsto really communicate the essence of products to connect emotionally with the consumers.

I have always believed that brand design in packaging is a critical part of marketing. It should translate the meaning of the brand for the consumers. Marc and his partner, Joel Desgrippes, understood very clearly that packaging could actually serve to translate the meaning of the brand to the consumers every day, on every shelf, in every aisle, on every truck, and in every vending machine all over the world. I could probably write a book about my experiences with Marc, about how much I learned from the color blue that Marc had used in creating a corporate identity for the Albertville Winter Olympics, for the Boucheron perfume bottle and store design, and later on in the redesign of Gillettes packaging. It was eventually a color that changed the refreshment appeal of Sprite.

I understood so much about the culture of The Coca-Cola Company and the brands connection to the color red (that piece of equity and iconography that was critical to the development of our sales). So, it wasnt only what the word Coke or Sprite or Fanta would do, it was about using all of the elements of the brandaggressively and with kick-ass creative.

I went with Marc to the fashion shows in Paris, and together we learned from the great designers of the world about how to use color, shape, and form to connect with consumers. At the time, I was probably one of the very few marketing executives from a consumer goods company who had bothered to go to a fashion show. Marc had assured me it would be time well spent; he was right.

In this book, Marc mentions briefly the 96 Olympics effort in Atlanta for Coca-Cola. Its mentioned in a modest way, but for us it was a significant change in managing something that traditionally had been done in a passive way, or rather, something that was done to sell the Olympics as opposed to selling Coca-Cola. Our brand presence at the Olympics ranged all the way from the Coca-Cola Olympic City design, to the package graphics themselves, to the uniforms, to what we put in the stadiums and what we put in the airport and train stations. As I write this, I have just returned from the Olympics in Sydney, and I appreciate even more how a proactive, purposeful design works to accent a marketing effort. In Sydney, it was obvious that many of the sponsors got lazy. It was a display of disconnected design that ignored an opportunity. Every day, I see in stores what I saw in Sydney: lazy design without vision.

What I learned from my work with Marc and Coca-Cola, more than anything else, was that imagination gives dimension to a brand; that its not about where your company is right now, but about where you eventually want to be. Every day, through Z Group Strategy Consulting, I preach that an integrated brand strategy is the key to reaching your destination. And an integrated brand strategy is at the heart of Emotional Branding.

Emotional Branding is about building relationships; it is about giving a brand and a product long-term value. It is about sensorial experiences: designs that make you feel the product, designs that make you taste the product, designs that make you buy the product.