Over the past 2 decades, the emotional labor literature has intrinsically dealt with how employees, particularly service workers, adopt emotion regulation tactics during service encounters, with the view to exhibit feelings and emotions that are in compliance with organizational objectives and expectations for emotional display (Judge et al, 2009; Groth et al, 2009).
These self-regulatory processes on the part of employees have been found to profoundly influence the creation and sustenance of a brand, particularly in service settings (Brook, 2009). This section aims to identify, describe and analyze the emotional labor that goes into the creation and sustenance of the Guess brand.
In their mission statement, GUESS, the makers of GUESS handbags, states that they “…deliver products and services of uncompromising quality and integrity and consistent with [their] brand and image” (GUESS, n.d., para. 2).
In the context of this paper, this statement implies that the handbags are not only of high quality and integrity but are sold under the brand ‘GUESS’, which is committed to listening and responding to the needs of their customers, improving their lifestyles through a milieu of open communication, trust and respect, and honoring their individual values (GUESS, n.d.).
Emotional labor literature has primarily focused on two dimensions, namely “…deep acting (attempting to modify felt emotions so that a genuine emotional display follows) and surface acting (faking or amplifying emotions by displaying emotions not actually felt)” (Groth et al, 2009, p. 958).
These dimensions, as noted by the authors, represent two main approaches used by workers to comply with the demands and expectations of emotional display as set out by an organization in its mission statement, policy guidelines, objectives, and in other rules of compliance to emotional display.
In deep acting, which is believed to have been used by employees of GUESS to create the brand under analysis, workers endeavor to transform their felt emotions so that an authentic, organizationally preferred emotional display of a particular product, service or brand can follow (Groth et al, 2009).
It therefore follows that GUESS employees must have used the deep acting dimension of emotional labor to modify their felt emotions in their attempt to create an organizational preferred description of the company’s products – that of belonging to a GUESS community, quality and integrity, responding to customers’ needs, dedication to customers’ lifestyle improvements, and honoring customers’ values (GUESS, n.d.).
The exposition of these emotions, in my view, created the GUESS brand. It is important to note that the described tenets also inform emotional branding, and are basically intended to change the inner feelings and authenticate the emotions of employees so that they have the capacity to prevail upon the customers to commit to the brand (Jawahar & Maheswahiri, 2009).
A strand of existing literature (e.g., Groth et al, 2009; Smith, 2011) demonstrates that it is often a difficult task for employees to use the surface acting dimension of the emotional labor to create brands, primarily because the dimension only entails a shift in employees outward emotional display without necessarily and genuinely modifying how they actually feel for the product or service on offer.
Marketing and psychology literature demonstrates that employees’, particularly in service settings, not only influence customer decisions and customer service perceptions, but contribute to the attainment of memorable experiences about a product or service (Jawahar & Maheswahiri, 2009). These experiences form the basis for the creation of a brand, thus workers should not feign emotions and feelings in the process of brand creation.
As is the case with emotional branding, emotional labor employs the assets of building a brand community, dedication to personal improvements, and a genuine emotional understanding of the customers’ lifestyles, inspirations and aspirations, to sustain the brand (Judge, 2009).
This implies that service workers charged with the responsibility of selling the handbags under the brand ‘GUESS’ must be in the frontline in developing and internalizing norms and standards of behavior that will display to potential and actual customers what the brand is all about.
These emotional display rules will inarguably help in establishing relationships between the customers and the brand (Judge, 2009; Jawahar & Maheswahiri, 2009), and in establishing intangible, symbolic affections to the brand (Smith, 2011), ultimately succeeding in the process of sustaining the brand. The GUESS handbag therefore ceases to be depicted as a product by its customers, but as a series of consumer packaged experiences that arouses emotional feelings.
Brand Narrative and its Connections to Emotions of Customers
In recent years, the concept of ‘emotional branding’ has emerged as an exceedingly important brand management paradigm and a critical factor to marketing success (Thompson et al, 2006). As noted by these authors, “…emotional branding is a consumer-centric, relational, and story-driven approach to forging deep and enduring affective bonds between consumers and brands” (p. 50).
In terms of identifying, describing and analyzing the narrative of the brand and its connections with the emotions of potential and actual customers, it is imperative to note that advocates of emotional branding assert that the high degree of consumer passion brought about by the association between a particular brand name and customers’ emotions is seldom, if ever, nurtured through logical arguments concerning tangible benefits or even appeals to symbolic advantages, such as enhanced self esteem, identity or status.
Rather, extant literature demonstrates that “…these potent consumer-brand linkages typically emerge when branding strategies use narratives and tactics that demonstrate an empathetic understanding of customers’ inspirations, aspirations, and life circumstances and that generate warm feelings of community among brand users” (Thompson et al, 2006 p. 50).
In this case, therefore, it can be argued that the brand name “Guess” works not by promising potential and actual customers that it has value for money or it can guarantee elevated self esteem or social status in society, but by employing story-lines and strategies that appeal to the customers’ deeper motivations and ambitions, and by generating warm feelings of belonging to a particular brand community.
From an emotional-branding point of view, it is generally felt that brand strategists and other stakeholders interested in the promotion of a brand must actually focus on telling stories (narratives) that not only inspire and captivate the emotions of potential and actual customers, but demonstrate a genuine comprehension of customers’ lifestyles, ambitions, dreams and objectives, not mentioning that they must also persuasively and eloquently represent how the brand can improve the customers’ lives (Thompson et al, 2006; Smith, 2011).
Gobe (2002) cited in Thompson et al (2007) acknowledged that in recent times, customers “…not only want to be romanced by the brands they choose to bring into their lives, they absolutely want to establish a multifaceted holistic relationship with that brand, and this means they expect the brand to play a positive proactive role in their lives” (p. 51).
Consequently, the strategic objective of interlinking the concept of ‘brand’ with that of ‘emotions’, as noted by these authors, is to build strong and significant affective relationships with customers and, in so doing, become an integral constituent of their life stories, recollections, and an essential link in their social networks.
Available literature demonstrates that the narrative of the brand attempts to engage a multiplicity of customers’ emotions in its attempt to fine-tune their perceptions into actively believing that a particular brand is a relationship partner that can assist them attain personal objectives and resolve dilemmas in their everyday lives (Judge, 2009).
As such, the narrative of the brand must have the capacity to engage the relational emotions of potential and actual customers, such as love and/or passion, self-connection, loyalty, commitment, trust, collaboration, and intimacy (Thompson et al 2007).
More important, the narrative of the brand attempts to engage these emotions by integrating the brand name into the lives and identity dimensions of actual and potential customers. Indeed, Smith (2011) acknowledges that in emotional branding, “…telling a good story well is what matters, more than just which particular good story it is” (p. 26).
Consequently, to be able to actively engage customers’ emotions into creating a close relationship with a particular brand, the brand story should be well interspersed, not only with relationship-inducing factors (e.g., participation, ambition, reciprocity, prestige, satisfaction), but also with non-relationship-inducing factors (e.g., income, savings, perceived need) (Smith, 2011).
To conclude, this discussion has demonstrated that both emotional labor and emotional branding are two sides of the same coin as they employ the same dynamics in drawing upon emotional experiences to create and sustain a brand.
The only difference noted is that while emotional labor predominantly relates to employees’ capacity to either modify or feign emotions, emotional branding to a large extent relates to consumer-centric, relational narrative purposefully aimed at guiding intense and affective relationships between customers and brands.
However, it has been demonstrated that both concepts employ similar orientations, such as the creation of a community of users, collaboration, dedication to personal improvements, commitment to individual values, and genuine understanding of customers’ lifestyles, ambitions, dreams and objectives (Thompson et al, 2007; Brook, 2009), to create and sustain brands.
Reference List
Brook, P. (2009). The alienated heart: Hochschild’s ‘emotional labor’ thesis and the anticapitalist politics of alienation. Capital & Class, 33(98), 7-31.
Groth, M., Hennig-Thurau, T., & Walsh, G. (2009). Customer reactions to emotional labor: The role of employee acting strategies and customer detection strategy. Academy of Management Journal, 52(5), 958-974.
GUESS. (n.d.). Mission statement. Web.
Jawahar, P.D., & Maheswahiri, R. (2009). Service perception: Emotional attachment as a mediation of the relationship between service performance and emotional brand. IFCAI Journal of Marketing Management, 8(2), 7-22.
Judge, T.A., Woolf, E.F., & Hurst, C. (2009). Is emotional labor more difficult for some than for others? A multilevel, experience-sampling study. Personnel Psychology, 62(1), 57-88.
Smith, T. (2011). Brand salience not brand science: A brand narrative approach to sustaining brand longevity. Marketing Review, 11(1), 25-40.
Thompson, C.J., Rindfleisch, A., & Arsel, Z. (2006). Emotional brand and the strategic value of the Doppelganger brand image. Journal of Marketing, 70(1) 50-64.