1 Introduction

In the commercial world, the most valuable brands are those able to build a strong emotional connection with the consumers. In certain ways, the brand would like to build the emotional attachment with the consumer as ‘the best friends forever’. As in life, it is not an easy task to build a friendship in marketing. This relationship is formed by constant connections and engagement those provide memorable experiences. In early years, most studies explored the methods and techniques to bonding emotion to brands. Some scholars investigate the theories of psychology and sociology to understand the message procedures of consumers and how it would influence the feeling associated with the brand. Under the influence of digital technologies, channels for cement the relationships between brands and consumers are flourishing. People often need fast, two-way interaction to achieve emotional satisfaction. When safety and comfort of the design outcomes have been achieved, emphasis the design attributes were shifted toward to provide the purposes on decoration, emotion, and symbolic (Crilly et al. 2004). A successful design outcome must achieve the consumers’ emotional needs beside utility and quality (McLoone et al. 2012). Incorporating ‘feeling’ into design outcomes with emotional design experiences is the trend of design after the twenty-first century. The design outcomes took the role which connected designers and consumers; at the same times, design outcomes influence consumers with the recognised creativity of designer’s (Lin and Chang 2004). So, how would this influence the consumer’s expectation on brand experience? How this change would influence the emotional brand building and how would it influenced the brand building procedures? This study investigated how branding strategies newly developed to satisfy the consumer’s expectation on brand experience, and how would the specify brand building process would provide to creative in order to facilitate them to create the most effective emotional brand experience to the consumers.

After recognised the importance of design outcomes impressions, design scholars observed that there are changes of consumer attitudes toward brands. A marketing scholar, Roberts studied how brands attracted growing interest (Roberts 2004). One of his followers, Martin (2005) asserted that design should be no longer work as a part of brand strategy; instead, design outcomes shaped customer perceptions. Branding represented certain of meaning through its signs. Companies used brand identities (images, logos and insignia) to deliver messages (such as a concept of lifestyle) and create familiarity with a design outcome. Brand concept would be more abstracted and spiritual. It is the summary of consumer’s emotional response for design outcomes (Wang et al. 2008). It reflects consumers’ ‘mood’, ‘knowledge’, ‘attitudes’, and ‘behaviours’. Therefore, emotional characteristics of design outcomes and emotion of brand are crucial. A brand portrays a personality which attaches certain specific values and symbols in order to create the relationship between consumers and a brand. More and more studies explored the methods and techniques to bonding emotion to brands. Based on the studies those conducted by the pioneer, designers investigated the opinions consumer on the interactions between emotional design outcomes and brand emotion. They explored the contribution of emotion in the process of brand building and design outcomes through emotion and subjective evaluations.

2 The Development of Emotion Bonding to Brands

Before understanding how emotion bonding to brands, it is essential to understanding how emotion connected with visual communication. Scholars have found that emotions considerably influence individuals’ interpretation of their experiences (Zettl 2002; Beaudry and Pinsonneault 2010) Audiences respond to design through cognition. The emotional elements of design should be taken into account when considering the usability of design outcomes. Being applied in visual communication, visual design elements may affect audience emotions. It means that the functions of visual communication design—informing, persuading, and influencing—work with emotion to provide an experience to the audience. These findings are not only relevant to optimizing designs for ease of use, but for invoking emotional experiences such as happiness, involvement, trust, and satisfaction in users. Most research concerning emotion has been conducted while users were using products. Few studies have considered the user experience of visual communication because users’ emotional responses and reactions while consuming visual communication designs are too subtle to be easily measured or identified. However, emotion plays an important role in the examination of information and communication technology systems (Kim et al. 2003; Sun and Zhang 2006). Emotional responses and the reactions of audiences can be regarded as indicators of the usability of visual communication designs. These responses provide insights for further explorations of how to optimise visual communication design for audience needs. The main aspect to consider is how design elicits audience emotion, which mostly works within the persuasion process after the audience has been informed.

2.1 Emotion in Visual Communication

Before investigating how emotion is delivered by the elements of visual communication, it is necessary to understand how emotion influences the functions of visual communication design. After an audience obtains information, the process of influencing them through persuasion begins. Perloff (2010) proposed that persuasion is a process of communication requiring strong and clear messages to be delivered from one party to another. It involves a multitude of elements beyond words, such as aesthetics, interactions, and functions. Through persuasion, audience attitudes should be strengthened as it worked as a periodically reminder of the desired experience about the brand.

2.2 Elaboration Likelihood Model

According to the knowledge on how attitudes and behaviours can be shaped by persuasion, Petty and Cacioppo (1986) proposed the elaboration likelihood model (Fig. 1) for explaining the approaches of messages and how to maximise the influence of design outcomes on audience attitudes and behaviours.

Fig. 1.
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The model of elaboration likelihood (Petty and Cacioppo 1986)

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The study proposed that when an individual receives information, it is elaborated at varying levels. “Elaboration” refers to the level of effort applied with regard to evaluation, memory, and judgment (Petty and Cacioppo 1986). When people receive persuasive messages, they elaborate at two levels, namely central and peripheral route processing. The central route refers to the focus on the message during information processing; audiences pay more attention to strong, qualified messages. Attitudes that are shaped or developed in central route processing tend to endure and be resistant to counterarguments. By contrast, peripheral route processing is trickier to recognise. Audiences pay less attention to messages when they are being affected by other factors, such as visual appeal, the origin of the source, or presentation. Thus, the attitudes shaped or developed are less enduring and are easily influenced by counterarguments, requiring continual reinforcement. In this model, central route processing leads audiences to greater elaboration than peripheral route processing because the structure and content of messages are closely judged. However, audiences are also affected by message characteristics such as the strength, credibility, and relevance of the information. Audiences may be influenced if these other factors are effective, and this would simultaneously render the overall persuasive attempt more enduring and resilient to counterarguments.

2.3 Persuasion and Motivation

Designers must be aware of the negative side of the persuasion that accompanies messaging and design. Distractions can undermine designers’ persuasive techniques. Pop-ups, long loading times, or processes that are too complicated can annoy audiences and detract from relevant information. Such distractions, whether physical or intangible, are found throughout the elaboration process. Two paths of thinking support further investigations of how emotion functions in visual communication design. There are three elements to persuade audiences effectively according to the analysis presented in (Petty and Cacioppo 1986): (1) “Message” refers to “what’s being said, marketing efforts, content, and copy;” (2) “Design” refers to “visual hierarchy, navigation, and layout;” and (3) “Delivery” refers to “load time, user experience, rewards, and bells and whistles”. These elements provide designers with ways to understand the target audience, including what kind of information motivates them. This supports developing a list of questions to understand the values of audiences concerning their “fears, hopes, and dreams” and the “current challenges designers face in persuading them.”

Designers can also review previous research on persuasion to improve the effectiveness of their designs. Emotional branding is an approach which proposed consumer-centred, relational, and storytelling in the process of brand communication. It aims to build up in-depth and affective connections among consumers for brands. (Roberts 2004) Senses and emotions are the main channels involved to form an in-depth, long-lasting and emotional connection to the brand. In other words, brand transcends material satisfaction during the design consumption (Morrison and Crane 2007; Rahinel and Redden 2013). Emotional concerns attached brands able to enhance the potential of creativity and most of them are more sustainable (Lynch and De Chernatony 2004). The most obvious method of building an emotional brand is connecting the brand with certain ideological associations. It was found that brand or design outcome worked best with it reflected the consumers’ needs those based on the demographic information from the substantial research, sufficient knowledge on the consumers’ values or concepts those able to stimulate their emotional responses and connect to the brand. These values or concepts can be delivered into through graphics and language adopted by the brand. To illustrate this technique, Walt Disney World Ads is the example, which bonded the family values and essence of childhood.

Those brands obtain strong brand loyalty from the consumers as they understand customers’ favourable attitudes and repurchasing behaviours (Wang et al. 2008). Bergkvist and Bech-Larsen (2010) proposed the understanding, emotional attachment and passion towards a brand were grouped as brand love as result. This brand love is the foundation for developing brand loyalty and active engagement. In other words, brand love is formed by positive emotional responses those generating brand loyalty. Park et al. (1986) pointed out that brand loyalty creates symbol and experience with all these elements and shapes consumer awareness. Carroll and Ahuvia (2006) revealed that the ‘consumers love’ is an emotion attributed to a particular brand. Themes and Symbols were used by some brands to create meaning for a consumer. Hence, ‘theme’ would be the big idea presented throughout advertisement; ‘symbol’ is the representative of the theme. Symbol represents the promise provided by the brand and consumers agree with this promise. He used the advertising of cosmetic products and services (i.e. design outcomes) as the example. He descripted that the cosmetic manufacturers sell hope instead of the products. Consumers buy vitality instead of oranges; and buy prestige instead of a car (Packard 1957). Bernay and Howard (1955) has similar concept with Packard, he analysed how the themes of influenced the effectiveness of the advertising in his book, The Engineering of Consent. He found that successful themes able to enhance the motivations of human. This motivation was built on the consumers’ subconscious desires for achieving certain goals. Bernays listed out the factors those are possible to drive motivation under the support of the ideological values or personal experience. Sometimes, they work with symbolism. Designers these factors in order to generate the theme for a specific point of view based on the brand concept. Bernays suggested that symbols (i.e. design elements) may represent various themes at the same period. He proposed ‘Hello Kitty’ as the example, a kitten (Hello Kitty) represents experience of ‘playfulness and comfort’. In other words, symbols (includes the styles of design, design elements) provide a promise for consumer satisfaction which associated with the brand concept. Packard highlighted eight potential needs those are most effective on motivating consumers to make purchasing decisions. The eight potential needs (Packard 1957) are: ‘Emotional security’, ‘Reassurance of worth’, ‘Ego-gratification’, ‘Creative outlets’, ‘Love objects’, ‘Sense of power’, ‘Sense of roots’ and ‘Immorality’. These needs are attached with affective (i.e. emotion) in a subconscious approach and work as the foundation of emotional branding. They inspired designers to generated a self-fulfilling prophesy for satisfying the needs of consumer needs. At the same time, the linkage of design outcomes and emotion was investigated. Yen (2005) and her team explored the relationships of brand and emotional responses stimulated by design outcomes through conducting a consumer-emotion survey. They found that the design outcomes provided by emotional-brands have emotional design characteristics, particularly about beauty. According to their study, emotional design characteristics influence the presentation of the consumers’ desired on emotion aspects, included repurchasing, recommending to others, attachment with the products, pleasing experience in the purchasing process. Also, most of the design outcomes under those emotional-brand with features like simple shapes, pure colours, and natural textures. These features involved various concerns from design, fashion and psychologist studies. The findings of Yen’s study supported the future development of emotional design. The methods of eliciting the emotional reaction were explored. Yen proposed music playing as one of the example of the building up emotional attachment by the brands. He suggested that music playing simultaneously and created enjoyment for enjoying the design outcomes. This example works best to evoke emotion. It created a connection to the design outcomes and the sadness or happiness (possible or negative emotion) of consumer’s. It is essential in life. Hence, it is an example of emotional branding.

After integrating the perspectives of previous studies, there are various techniques were investigated for achieving emotional response of consumers to a brand. However, influenced by the development of new media, the interactions between consumers and brands are more frequency. The information procedures are more complicated. Consumers have more channels to get the promotional message about the brands (Davis 2010). The emotional attachment of the brands could not be built through single media but multimedia with a clear approach (Whyte 1997). The brand communication through multimedia, involved many touch points to connect consumers included its technology platforms, their vendor market, their services and applications. Behind the variety touch points, how would the brand build up the bonding between brands and consumers (i.e. how to sense, reason, and feel)? According to Whyte (1997), we understand that people often need fast, two-way interaction to achieve emotional satisfaction, (some scholars described as in achieving empathy.)

One of the effective methods is inviting consumers to share and co-create the branded content. This can be done by encouraging consumers’ input, for example, photos, Tweets, videos, etc. from consumers (Richard 2004). Also, the brands cooperate with content providers such as publishers, entertainment companies, etc. to offer exclusive experiences. Richard emphasised the effort of customer services and supporting the activities those engaged consumers on improving brand’s capability on blending successful engagements (i.e. ‘fans’) in social networking. They later can be grouped as communities of members (i.e. ‘followers’) or even will to process direct interaction (i.e. ‘consumers’) and relationships (i.e. ‘super fans’) with the brand. Richard summarised several key trends:

  • Brand strategies being developed based on integrated mobile and location-based marketing,

  • Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter driving the executions of customer service,

  • Branded membership concepts and reward programs would extend the brand as a big consumer brands

  • Real-time personalising will be ensuring to increase the connections to the consumers.

How the creative team would build the emotional satisfaction under this new trend? If the different touch point or approaches were set, how would the creative team manipulate the design procedures? In order to have a more in-depth knowledge on how the emotional branding build up the bonding between brands and consumers, there is a need to categories the types of emotional branding according to the approaches that the brands adopted to build the bonding with the consumers. Afterwards, the specific design procedures of each category would be identified in order to provide the hints to build emotional bonding with consumers.

3 The New Perspective on the Types of Emotional Branding: 4 Types of Emotional Branding

3.1 Personalities-Driven Emotional Brand

The original business concept is developed to satisfy the specific emotional needs of the consumers. The positioning, vision and mission, etc. are set to interpret the ideology of the brands. This type of emotional branding emphasised the importance of the positioning of the brands. According to Abbing and Gessel (2008), branding drives the sustainable growth of the business. This type of brands explores how innovative design outcomes leading the brand to achieve their promise by providing ‘meaningful manifestations’, ‘interactions and experiences’. These build up the bridge in between the business and consumers for a relatively durable relationship. They also releveled that design management work out the important role in connecting branding and innovative design outcomes by providing the consumers with storytelling to facilitate this relationship started from the mission and vision of the business. A concept first started in Japan, The Home Maid Café is a brand which is a typical example. It targeted the niche market of the cosplay lovers. In order to satisfy the emotional needs of the consumers those suffered from the huge living pressure. The brand concept of maid café indeed is simple. It’s a café for consumers enjoying drinks and snacks. The café was decorated as the Princess Peach. As described by Abbing and Gessel (2008), the waitresses in the café dressed up like a French Maid, with lace. They appear with a lot of cute pose throughout the meal. The consumers are treated as if they are a ‘master’ and the waitresses (i.e. the maid) are their servants. Once consumers entering the café, the waitress say ‘okaerinasaimase goshujin sama’ which means ‘welcome home master’ with a high-pitched voice… (When the waitress serves consumer a drink,) she will do some magic tricks when they delivering the dishes to make it more attractive. Their tricks include magic words, special poses and clapping. They also invite consumers’ participation by repeating after them. The consumers would reject the social pressure those exerted on them by their society to work hard and have a productive career, also, provide the consumers a space for refusing to grow up.

Based on the featured methods for this type of brand to drive deeper consumer engagement, the specify brand building process (Fig. 2) would be proposed as the followings:

Fig. 2.
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Specify brand building process for personalities-driven emotional brand

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  • Screening the social needs

  • Target consumers’ extraction

  • Branding Story Development

3.2 Appeal-Driven Emotional Brand

The emotional bonding is developed through a unique brand identity. This unique style of the brand identity presents the personality of the brand to hit the consumers’ heart. This type of emotional branding was developed base on the exploration on how emotional design characteristics influence the emotional responses and reactions include repurchasing, recommendation, attachment and passion of consumers. For example, the logo of H&M is detonated by two red letters ‘H’ and ‘M’, both are in red, with a ‘&’ sign in between them. The small space between two letters, ‘H’ and ‘M’, are equal; both left side of the two letters are thinner than their right sides. They are in rounded forms yet straight, slant toward the right. Thicker line and thinner lines appears to be asymmetry of the letters. This logo presented as an artistic symbol. Consumer described their points of view about the logo: ‘initials’, ‘handwriting style’, ‘pop art painting’, ‘simple and fashionable’, ‘affordable luxury’,’ rebellious’, ‘humanity’, ‘peace, neutrality, love’.

Based on the featured methods for this type of brand to drive deeper consumer engagement, the specify brand building process (Fig. 3) would be proposed as the followings:

Fig. 3.
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Specify brand building process for appeal-driven emotional brand

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  • Mood fitting

  • Visualise

  • Systematise

  • Execution

  • Identity Management

3.3 Sensory-Driven Emotional Brand

The emotional bonding with consumers was built by the senses. The physical touch of the designs or the environment where the services those are designed for satisfying the consumers’ emotional needs. The design outcomes (include design and services) of an emotional brand involves attractiveness, beauty, and creativity characteristics. Sensory-driven emotional brand emphasised the emotion al interaction within the consumption process. This type of brand delighted the design and service up-to-standard in order to get the leading role in the industry.

Starbuck, brand by ‘bringing people together’, is the example to explain how a brand create connections with consumers through sensory. Frist, from the ‘free Wi-Fi service’ to ‘the music played instore’, ‘the large tables with room for groups and meetings’ all set up and installation of the stores are designed to encourage the inter-actions between customers. Sweet (2008) described how its business is happening and people are sharing, ‘Go into any Starbucks…Everything in there is about connection, discovery, inspiration and creation.’ The interior design was embodied a trendy style decoration which is comfortable: The café uses loft style, bright spaces with inspired furniture. Also, in order to create the contemporary respite, fabrics are adopted. The setting separates a corner from the fast-paced culturally world.

Based on the featured methods for this type of brand to drive deeper consumer engagement, the specify brand building process (Fig. 4) would be proposed as the followings:

Fig. 4.
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Specify brand building process for sensory-driven emotional brand

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  • User experience and interaction map

  • Material allocation

  • Prototype testing

  • User feedback analysis

  • Design modification

3.4 Navigation-Driven Emotional Brand

This type of brand would be easily found in social media, like Facebook, a consistency would be found. It emphasised the relationships in-between content, audience and engagement. The emotional bonding is built by the leading paths that provide by brand to the consumers. By well planning advertising campaigns and media plans, the emotional feature of the brand would provide great impact to the consumers’ heart. In order to provide an integrated and long-term content solution for the brands, designer have to adopt alternative perspectives in the process of sourcing, curating, publishing, and managing content actively. These methods were similar to the activities proposed by Sweet (2008):

  • Directly communicating with the consumers by using text, email, apps for providing in-time surprise and updated information

  • Encouraging the social interactions among the consumers for increasing viral promotion.

  • Obtaining more ‘status-oriented rewards’ those included the recognition from the publics by taking the roles of trend leader, specialist, etc.

  • Launching services in right locations during campaigns for generating the brand engagement which provide the experiences and sales in the real connections.

  • Increasing the replying speed and viral uptake towards the consumers by adopting creative ideas those reflecting the brand’s authenticity.

Took reference from the experience of the flagship brands those are success in social media. The conversations with consumers are key channels to engage fans. These channels enable the brand to truly connect with its followers and consumers thus build a relationship which ‘leading long-term brand development’, ‘heading to the value for the company’ as the result. LEGO Club Magazine is one of the best examples to illustrate the concept of navigation-driven emotional brand. In the 1980s to 1990s, there was a tremendous threat to LEGO from the field of competing construction toys. The company understood it had to build a powerful brand. It adopted integrated marketing approach to go up against the other construction toys competitors. Contributed by the incredible branding and emotional-attached marketing efforts through LEGO Club Magazine, LEGO is customised for subscribers with specified market and age. The LEGO Club Magazine allows kids to obtain emotional content which relevant to them in funny and creative approaches. The LEGO Club which worked as ‘one of the biggest and most popular children’s member clubs in the world, extended its offering, to improve its magazine (i.e. the design outcome) with more cartoon (called LEGO bricks in action) from the version of 2011. These stories with better integration of customer photos.

Based on the featured methods for this type of brand to drive deeper consumer engagement, the specify brand building process (Fig. 5) would be proposed as the followings:

Fig. 5.
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Specify brand building process for navigation-driven emotional brand

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  • Media and communication strategy development

  • Message and Communication path organisation

  • Production management

  • Procurement management

  • Message distribution

  • Sustainability management in Brand Communication

4 A Field Experiment on the Effectiveness of Emotional Branding Experience Optimising the Brand Design Process

A field experiment was adopted to examine the methods. Fifteen brand designers were invited to participate in the experiment. They were divided into two groups, group A followed the proposed brand design process and the group B did not follow. Each designer randomly chose a brand project and recorded their process of the brand design. The branding process and the design outcomes were compared. The resulted reflected how would the specify brand building process would provide to creative. It helped to optimise the branding design process in order to facilitate them to create the most effective emotional brand experience to the consumers. This study is the preliminary discussion on the new development of the emotional branding by integrated the studies of design, psychology, socialist, marketing and business and how would the brand strengthen the emotional attachment with the consumer.

4.1 Research Process

There were two parts of the study were conducted; stage 1 was the field observations. It aimed to observe the manipulating of branding process with or without emotional branding strategies. Ten designers for the field observation and fifty consumers for the assessment of communication design, through an interview, were invited to participate in this study. The field observation was under video-recording. The ten designers were separated into two groups, Design Team A and Design Team B. Design Team A got a lecture on the manipulation of emotion extraction system in information retrieval. The skills of emotion recognising and recording emotional changes during the design research were taught. Design Team B worked without any information about emotion extraction system in information retrieval. In stage 1, every designer was asked to set up the consumers’ portfolio after their research. In stage 2, the brand experience consumed by consumers was recorded. The feedbacks of consumers were analysed and discovered whether the professionals’ design would prove better design experience to the consumers. Some questions about the designers’ feedback in design research process were asked in stage 1 as the following:

  • Please set up the consumers’ portfolio.

  • Which element you obtain in your research is the most insightful to your design?

Also, in order to collect the feedback of consumers in stage 2, some questions about the user experience were asked in the assessment of branding experience. The questions were listed in the following:

  • On a scale of 1–100, how close was the design can provide you with the best assistance in your branding experience?

  • On a scale of 1–100, how close was the consumers’ portfolio successfully described your situation?

  • Here are some keywords (the keywords were exerted from the stage 1 answer of designers in question 2) about your branding experience. Which of them you think it is mostly related to your branding experience?

  • On a scale of 1–100, how much do you agree that the following kinds of design element are able to provide you design experience of the brand?

4.2 Research Result

The fifty invited consumers consumed the ten design outcomes and provided the score one by one (100 marks as the highest and 1 mark as the lowest). The score obtained by Design Team A was higher than Design Team B on the satisfaction of consumers (shown in Fig. 6). The consumers’ portfolio developed by Design Team A got a higher level of appreciation than the Design Team B (shown in Fig. 7). Compared the keywords those were exerted from the stage 1 answer of designers in question 2 and the keywords selected by consumers in the question 3 of stages 2. The keywords selected by the designers in Design Team A more than Design Team B. The comparison of the percentage of accuracy was shown in Fig. 8. There are some highlights feedbacks provided by the consumers. They pointed out that the design solutions which supported by the emotional branding strategies were much more creative. The presentations of visual, audio elements were much more able to satisfy their needs. The field observation on the design process of the design teams also showed that the Team A which adopted emotional branding strategies is much more effective for them to generate creative branding design.

Fig. 6.
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The average scores of the consumers’ satisfaction

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Fig. 7.
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The level of appreciation of consumers’ portfolio

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Fig. 8.
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The designers’ recognition on consumers’ need

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5 Discussion on the Findings

According to the finding from question 3, it was found that the feedback of participants examined the investigation on the relationship between design elements and emotion. They recosnised that the colour, shape and typography as the tools to provide brand experience to the consumers (shown in Fig. 9). The Design is a process of continuous improvement in which every new interaction involves a new learning curve. The research in (Ho and Siu 2012), which focused on emotion and design, provides valuable insight into how various aspects of design connect with audiences, particularly regarding perception and emotion. There is a science to designing engaging content. Colors, shapes, typefaces, and space create interactions and associations, and a skilled designer can use each of these design elements effectively. The key lies in understanding the emotions of a particular audience and introducing to them the appropriate characteristics of a brand thus audiences have distinct perceptions.

Fig. 9.
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The levels of recognition on design element can provide design experience of the brand

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5.1 Informed Use of Shapes

Shape, as a portion of two-dimensional space, it has special meanings, it also worked as the foundational components of the grammar of visual thinking. Circular graphics convey positive emotions, and tend to connote community, friendship, love, and unity. Rings are the universal symbol of relationships and are associated with marriage and partnership, depicting strength and resolution. Curves are associated with femininity, suggesting flexibility, adaptability, and compliance. Straight-edged shapes imply stability and consistency in a more concrete sense and can also be used to indicate balance. Triangles are regarded as the symbols of authority and rational; at the same time, they are found in religious firms. Vertical lines represent power, toleration, and hostility while horizontal lines represent cooperative, stable and silent. Deliberate asymmetric spaces can make designs livelier. The default space between characters and design elements can also convey meaning or tone.

5.2 The Language of Colors

Color is a subjective element in design. The reactions it stimulates in one audience may differ considerably from those evoked in other audiences. This may be due to cultural background, personal preference, and numerous other factors. Designers should seek to understand the diverse effects of colors on a variety of people.

5.3 The Emotion of Typefaces

Fonts tell distinct stories. Typography plays a crucial role in developing a strong identity and a solid first impression, because a design can set the mood with typography. Serifs create a sense of authority, tradition, respect, and grandeur, whereas clean sans serif fonts invoke the modern, objective, stable, and universal. The style and appearance of text signals to readers what to expect. A well-considered typeface combined with quality images in an advertisement or other instance of visual communication can have a considerable impact on an audience. Emotion influences an audience’s feelings towards the message delivered, and this emotion can be influenced by the design elements of visual communication. Designers must therefore consider how design can influence the emotions of an audience, so that they can affect audiences’ feelings through visual communication design by organizing the feelings stimulated by design elements.

6 Conclusion

Based on the above analysis on the development of emotional design and how it is influenced by new media, the changes of consumer’s communication are understood. As the brands need to keep up-to-day with the consumers in order to keep the close relationship with the consumers, their methods to provide emotional experience to the consumers were changed. In this study, the featured communication way of four types of emotional branding was analysed and the corresponding brand development procedures were suggested. This is the preliminary discussion on the new development of the emotional branding by integrated the studies of design, psychology, socialist, marketing and business and how would the brand strengthen the emotional attachment with the consumer. Further research on how the emotional attachment influence their purchasing decision making is necessary.