Emotional Branding. The Role of Emotions and Passions in Brand Discourse

This work explores the central role that emotions and passions play in contemporary brand communication, focusing on how brands construct meaningful relationships with their audiences through affective and sensory strategies. In recent decades, the increasing complexity of consumer culture and the progressive symbolicization of consumption have transformed brands into powerful systems of meaning. No longer limited to conveying functional benefits or product performance, brands now operate as narrative and symbolic devices capable of generating values, identities, and emotional experiences. Within this framework, branding must be understood as a communicative process through which brands build coherent symbolic worlds and establish lasting emotional bonds with consumers. Drawing on semiotic approaches, particularly the semiotics of passions, this study examines how brand discourse mobilizes emotional configurations to produce engagement, identification, and a sense of belonging.