From Marketing to Emotional Branding

An Approach from the Symbolic, Affect and Lacanian Psychoanalytic Theory

Abstract

This article examines branding as an essential strategy in contemporary brand management, integrating a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective that allows understanding the brand as a symbolic device within the framework of capitalist discourse. Based on a transdisciplinary theoretical approach, marketing concepts are articulated with fundamental categories of psychoanalysis: the divided subject, the Symbolic, the Imaginary, the Real, and the theory of discourses. The analysis reveals that branding operates as a master signifier inscribed in the consumer's unconscious, generating emotional bonds that transcend the utilitarian function of the product. It is proposed that the contemporary consumer, in their condition as divided subject, seeks to obturate their lack-of-being through the symbolic consumption of brands that promise completeness. The research concludes that branding, analyzed from the Lacanian Master's discourse, constitutes a device of capitalism that appropriates the consumer's knowledge to produce surplus jouissance, keeping hidden the truth of subjective division through ideological mechanisms operating in the imaginary register.