In this highly competitive market, fashion brands struggle to distinguish themselves to increasingly apathetic consumers. To become more competitive, fashion retailers employ emotional branding as a way to engage their customers, addressing the growing trend of consumers’ seeking emotional relationships with a brand. Although brand technicalities such as product attributes, features, and facts may be unmemorable, personal feelings and experiences better shape consumers’ evaluations of brands. This study illustrates why emotional branding is essential, especially to fashion brands, when developing brand strategies in a volatile marketplace. Trends that support a need for these strategies include consumers’ desires for positive experiences, expressing authentic self, achieving warm glow from helping others, and co-creating design or ideas with the brand. We propose a model for emotional branding strategies that focuses on sensory branding, storytelling, cause branding, and empowerment. The case studies we provide for each strategy describe how fashion brands can engage customers through emotional branding.

Purpose: This paper aims to examine, building upon affect balance theory, whether the two modes of luxury consumption, conspicuous consumption (CC) and style consumption (SC), trigger consumers’ mixed emotions of pleasure and guilt and whether the mixed emotions interactively as well as independently influence consumer loyalty to repurchase luxury. Design/methodology/approach: Using an online survey and seemingly unrelated regressions (SUR) analysis, the authors test the hypotheses and assess the parallel (double) mediation effects of pleasure and guilt on the relationships between luxury consumption and repurchase intention. Findings: The authors confirm the relationships between CC and pleasure (+), between SC and pleasure (+), between CC and guilt (+) and between SC and guilt (−); the independent effects of pleasure (+) and guilt (−) on repurchase intention (RI); and the interaction effect of pleasure and guilt on RI (+). The authors further demonstrate that both pleasure and guilt mediate the relationship between CC and RI, whereas only pleasure mediates the relationship between SC and RI. Research limitations/implications: Future researchers may consider possible mixed emotions other than pleasure and guilt and further explore the dynamics between mixed consumer emotions and consumer loyalty in diverse consumption contexts. Practical implications: The authors suggest luxury marketers to reduce consumer guilt by promoting SC and by maximizing consumer pleasure, which will lead to greater repurchase intention. Originality/value: Prior research focused on either the positive or negative side of consumer emotion. The authors fill in the research void by examining whether mixed emotions coexist in luxury consumption and how they interplay and influence consumer loyalty.