Childhood as a promise: targeting parents through the emotional communication of luxury brands

Abstract

This article examines the emotional communication of luxury brands, particularly through the staging of childhood and the parent-child relationship. The study aims to deconstruct the semiotic strategies deployed to simultaneously influence parents and children in a context where emotional marketing now targets the youngest as both prescribers and future consumers. The central research question addresses the modalities of mobilization and staging of emotions related to childhood, as well as the historical evolution of these persuasive devices.

The methodology is based on content analysis, applied to a diachronic corpus of French advertising posters (early 20th–21st century) and to a synchronic corpus of recent campaigns by Chanel, Dior and Yves Saint Laurent (2022–2023). This dual temporal approach captures the transformation of childhood representations, from the dominant figures of innocence and parental dependence at the end of the 19th century to contemporary stereotypes of precocious autonomy.

The results reveal a major strategic bifurcation: unlike traditional sectors (food, care) that exploit parental guilt, luxury brands tend to construct and normalize a commercial vision of parental love based on generational bonding, serenity, and social status. The analysis distinguishes three distinct registers: responsible ethics and social status (Dior), mythic narration and early attachment (Chanel), and projection toward adulthood along with the extension of parental personality (YSL). This typology reveals that emotional marketing operates according to a dual dimension (staged emotions versus targeted emotions in the audience), which leads to questioning the analytical relevance of the very notion of "emotional marketing," insofar as all communication necessarily entails an emotional dimension in its interpretive aspect.