ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the positive advertising and brands with conscience to generate engagement with the consumer. In recent years, it has been observed how brands are developing though their advertising and marketing strategies, positive messages in which the brand is placed close to the consumer according to their interests and lifestyles. Brands, products, and services offer happiness as the main buying advantage, either implicitly or explicitly, to thrill, to reach to the consumer´s heart, to get involved with their expectations of life or to working values according to the happiness as well-being, security, or optimism.
However, it is not the same kind of happiness that we see in brand strategies. On the one hand, there are a range of advertising discourses that follow the hedonistic happiness paradigm. This is, advertising strategies in which to choose the product or service increases the happiness of the consumer. This has been the traditional and abundant current in advertising and many authors have called the “advertising of happiness,” where it seeks to generate a positive association between feeling good and consumption of products, to have or long for what we want.
But on the other hand, there is another current way of treating happiness and it is when there are positive brand discourses that transmit positive values following the eudaimonic happiness paradigm. In this case we are before a positive advertising, which it is working values such as well-being in society, security, calm, sharing with others, possibilities, or personal strengths. In this way, brands are like people, with their own identity and conscience, very far from the individual sphere focused on hedonism and the success that promoted advertising strategies in the past.
For that very reason, the main objective of this chapter is to research the positive brand communication from the two paradigms using a sample of advertising speeches of different brands and with the methodology of content analysis.
