Ingredient 01
Relevant
Emotional
Associations
“For a brand to prosper you have to ensure that it has the right weapons in the form of emotions.”
Relevant emotional associations make the first ingredient that creates your brand story. For a brand to prosper you have to ensure that it has the right weapons in the form of emotions.
Brands with relevant meaning will be remembered long after a discount or product feature is forgotten. Whenever you think of a well-crafted brand, it gives you an emotion, something that makes it come alive. And brands that make us feel will always be more powerful than those that don't.
Harley Davidson — Freedom
The motorcycle brand represents freedom — liberation from daily stressors like work obligations, traffic, and financial concerns. This is not about the engine or the chrome. It is about what it feels like to ride. The shared experience among riders only intensifies the emotional connection, turning ownership into belonging.
Jellyfish Restaurant
A Zagreb restaurant’s branding combined art deco design with jellyfish imagery inspired by NASA’s 1960s space programme experiments. Unexpected parallels — between the deep sea and outer space, between delicacy and science — sparked associations that no competitor could replicate.
Uroni — “The scent you can feel”
Four founders sought memorable branding for scented candles. The Croatian word “Uroni” means immersion — capturing the full sensory experience of the product. Their slogan, “The scent you can feel,” conveys the idea of enveloping comfort. The name became the emotion.
Sladonia Sugar — The taste of home
This regional product differentiated itself through emotional associations with homemade baking and lush countryside imagery, rather than competing on purity or functionality. The brand created desire for delicious creations rather than desire for sugar itself.
The principle
“Great brands are supposed to be inspirational and create new, exciting meaning.”