F&B as an Emotional Vector for Branding Strategy

Marketing has spent the last decade chasing "experience." Retail theatre, immersive pop-ups, sensory branding, all of it in pursuit of the same warm and simple goal: a deeper, more lasting emotional bond with the people we are trying to reach. This has drown interestet toward one of the oldest, most universal emotional triggers, which has flourished in strategy rooms: food. This article looks at why food speaks so directly to our emotions, what a brand really is once you strip away the logo, and how the two come together beautifully. With Café Dior and Prada Caffè as illustrations of what happens when a fashion house decides to open a kitchen.

Food and emotions: a bond formed before memory

Think about your last vacation. What are the top 3 elements you remember? I could bet that local food is part of it. As food is such a a powerful tool for creating lasting memories. And this starts way before you can even have a seat on the airplane.

Food is no longer simply a means of survival. It has become something far more intimate: a vehicle for exchange, comfort, and connection between people.

The bond begins before we can even remember it. From birth, an infant feeds out of physiological necessity, hunger prompts the search for food, and fullness brings it to a close. But tucked inside that very first, primitive routine, something tender is already taking shape: the emotional bond between the nurturing mother, or any other caregiver, and the child. This is the earliest thread tying food to attachment, long before words enter the picture.

That thread only grows stronger once a child starts eating independently. Adults gently condition food on behavior: "If you're good, I'll give you a piece of cake." And in the same breath, food becomes a source of comfort: "Don't cry, I'll give you a candy." Almost always, it's something sweet that gets offered, so sweetness quietly becomes wired to two very specific feelings: being rewarded, and being soothed.

That wiring never really switches off. Well into adulthood, these same foods continue to reassure, comfort, or reward us. On some unconscious level, they come to stand in for a parent's attention (even their affection) and often quietly fill the space left by emotional absence or emptiness. The reverse holds true too: anger and sadness tend to dull our appetite, while joy pulls us toward celebration and sharing, drawing us back to the table with people we love.

Over the course of a lifetime, each of us builds a private, largely unconscious map linking specific emotions to specific foods. It is like a pre-installed emotional operating system living inside every consumer, one that marketing can either quietly ignore, or thoughtfully engage...

What is a brand, really?

At its heart, a brand is the feeling a product evokes. It is trust. It is the reason we are happy to pay more for one product over a nearly identical competitor. A brand is the proprietary visual, emotional, and rational image a consumer associates with a company or product — and when that association is a positive one, it makes the choice feel easier, and makes the product feel more valuable and satisfying to own.

This emotional relationship is exactly what gives brands their power. Brand strength isn't manufactured in a single clever campaign; its meaning is patiently built through consumer experience over time. Everything people have seen, felt, and heard, one touchpoint after another. Over the past several decades, brands have quietly become genuine intangible assets, generating real, measurable value for the businesses that nurture them.

That value shows up, in financial terms, as consumer equity: the extra cash flow a business earns because consumers choose to buy its brand over a cheaper, equally available alternative. We do this not because the product is objectively better, but because of the beliefs and bonds a brand has built in our minds over time, through the way it has been marketed to us. Put simply: brand equity is stored emotion, and it is remarkably good at converting into revenue.

Food as a tool of persuasion

Bring these two ideas together and the opportunity becomes wonderfully clear. If food is a direct line to our emotions, one wired since infancy and reinforced every day of our lives, and if a brand's entire value rests on the emotions it stirs in us, then food is one of the most direct and human tools a brand has for shaping how it iss felt, not just how it is seen.

This is far from a new idea in the world of diplomacy. Nations have long understood that culinary influence is a gentle but effective form of soft power. The art of winning hearts through attraction rather than persuasion by force. The practice even has its own name: gastrodiplomacy, or cultural diplomacy conducted through food. The term has been in use since the early 2000s and was popularized by public diplomacy scholars. It has been widely used in Thailand to attract tourism, as well as punctual example such as a very recent example last June where the French President E. Macron invited D. Trump for a prestigious (and polemical) diner at the Château de Versailles.

F&B experiences as a lever for brand value

This is where the whole picture comes together. Brand equity, as we have seen, is built from the web of associations a consumer carries in their mind. So if a brand can create a warm, memorable experience using food, it has a wonderfully direct way to enrich that web with lasting, emotionally anchored memories. Unlike an advertisement, more passive, a meal is lived, tasted, and shared with others -> it draws on several senses at once, and for that reason, it tends to stay with us.

In recent years, some of the most iconic luxury houses have understood this beautifully, and have moved deliberately into food and beverage, not as a side business, but as a genuine branding tool.

Dior, for instance, has repeatedly turned its presence in several cities into a piece of culinary storytelling. Its pop-up Café in Harrods drew directly on the house's own heritage: the menu took its inspiration from Christian Dior's own 1972 recipe book, La Cuisine Cousu-Main, transforming the founder's personal culinary tastes as a black truffle omelette, a lobster club sandwich, a foie gras terrine, into edible extensions of the house's codes. There is also a strong focus in Asia and particularly in Japan, sublimed by the passion and fine expertise of the Cheffe Anne Sophie Pic, where cakes become harmonious pieces of art that always reflect the flowers, dear to Christian Dior. Some little but well thought details also help in personnalizing the experience, such as baristas offering to choose which Dior iconic design the guest would prefer for their capuccino.

Prada is also using food as a genuine branding channel. One of its many projects is the Prada Caffè concept. A pop-up opened at Harrods in London in 2023, its interiors drawing directly on the house's historic 1913 Milan boutique: the black-and-white chequered floor, the signature "Prada green," the delicate floral bas-reliefs. Designed as an immersive brand experience and thought right down to its custom Celadon-inspired porcelain and Prada-triangle crystal glassware. What began as a short-term activation, originally planned to run only until the end of 2023, resonated so warmly with visitors that Harrods and Prada have kept extending it with bookings still open through last month, June 2026, turning what was meant to be a fleeting moment into a to-do for the fashionistas coming to enjoy the London retail landscape. And the idea has since travelled to Asia too. In 2025, Prada opened its first regional Caffè inside on Orchard Road, Singapore, carrying over the same sensory language: the mint-green palette, the chequered marble, the Celadon-style porcelain, the panoramic glass façade traced with the house's triangle motif. The Singapore menu leans warmly into the ritual of Italian aperitivo, anchored by a "Signature Negroni Ritual" offering a playful, modern take on the classic cocktail, alongside an Aperol Spritz and a Caviar Ritual meant to be savoured slowly and with style...the Italian way.

What both examples show us, quite consistently, is a strategic pattern:

• Heritage is served, not just told. Rather than describing a house's founding story in a brand book somewhere, the founder's own recipes or the brand's very first boutique are made edible, tactile, and real

• Sensory consistency reinforces recognition. Every material choice, the porcelain, the color on the walls, the shape of a glass echoes the same visual codes a consumer already associates with the brand's ready-to-wear or leather goods, gently carrying equity from one world into another

• Scarcity and ritual deepen the emotional imprint. A pop-up café, or a cocktail presented as a "ritual," signals occasion rather than routine, precisely the register in which food leaves its strongest, most lasting mark on us

• Country-of-origin savoir-faire becomes something you can taste. Italian or French culinary codes aren't incidental details; they're offered as proof of authenticity and craftsmanship, extending the "Made in" story from the product to the plate.

What we can take away from this phenomenon is that food is not only a peripheral activation or a nice retail amenity, it is here to drive and uplift bran value. One of the few marketing tools able to speak directly to a consumer's existing emotional wiring, gently bypassing the more rational, comparison-driven side of a purchase decision. A well-crafted F&B experience helps leaving a lasting, sensory memory inside a brand's web of associations, the very foundation consumer equity is built on. The brands leading the way here (Prada, Dior, and a growing circle of peers) aren't stepping outside their core business by opening cafés. They're simply choosing a more human language to say what their advertising has always tried to say: this is who we are, and this is how we'd like you to feel.

To write this article, I have read:

• De Mooij, M. (2019). Global Marketing and Advertising: Understanding Cultural Paradoxes (5th ed.). SAGE Publications

• Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review, 98(2), 224–253.

• C. Courtois (2019). Quelle est la relation entre alimentation et émotions ? Psychologue.net

• Consulted : Dior Café and Prada Caffè websites and their F&B menus.

For more insights, example of concrete actions to take and talk about this topic, feel free to contact me at lamya@lvsacrosscultures.com or connect with me on LinkedIn here!

Thank you for reading,

Lamya

LVS *AC

Cross-cultural Guest Experience Research & Consulting

contact

lamya@lvsacrosscultures.com

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