IN CLEAR FOCUS: Kevin Perlmutter, author of the new book, “Brand Desire,” returns to discuss emotional insights in brand strategy. Kevin shares his Limbic Sparks methodology, emphasizing a shift from “about us” to “for you” thinking. Learn how brands can uncover shared emotional motivations, craft compelling benefits, and design experiences that truly resonate. Discover how to avoid clichés, apply emotional intelligence, and lead with a customer-centric mindset for lasting brand evolution.
Episode Transcript
Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Kevin Perlmutter: When you’re more aware of how your brand makes people’s lives better and you’re more in tune with the needs and desires of the people who your brand serves, you can actually put your brand out there in a way that is more helpful to people, that is more intentional about serving the needs that people have. It’s ultimately more relevant and ultimately more desirable.
Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led, full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Bigeye’s Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. Today, successful brands understand that connecting with customers requires more than superior products or clever messaging. The most resonant brands tap into something deeper, the emotional motivations that drive human behavior. They recognize that people don’t just buy products, they seek experiences and connections that align with how they want to feel. This shift from rational persuasion to emotional alignment represents a fundamental evolution in brand strategy, one that challenges traditional approaches focused on features, benefits, and competitive positioning. Our returning guest today brings a unique framework to this challenge. Kevin Perlmutter is Chief Strategist and Founder of Limbic Brand Evolution, a brand strategy consultancy that puts emotional insight at the centre of how brands attract and retain customers. With over 30 years of experience in branding and customer engagement, including his time as Senior Director of Brand Strategy at Interbrand, Kevin has developed a unique approach called Limbic Sparks Brand Strategy, a methodology that aligns what people want to feel with what brands uniquely offer. Kevin first joined us on IN CLEAR FOCUS in May 2022. And since then, he’s crystallized his insights into a comprehensive guide for brand leaders. His new book, published by Kogan Page, is “Brand Desire: Spark Customer Interest Using Emotional Insights.” To discuss how brands can move beyond traditional strategy to create meaningful, emotional connections. I’m delighted that Kevin, who’s usually based near New York City, is joining us today from Vermont. Kevin, welcome back to IN CLEAR FOCUS!
Kevin Perlmutter: Thank you for having me back. It’s awesome to chat with you again.
Adrian Tennant: What inspired you to transform your Limbic Sparks methodology into a book?
Kevin Perlmutter: Oh man, so many things. You know, honestly, it’s a bit audacious. I’m here to change the status quo of brand strategy. For the most part, a lot of brand strategy work is still stuck in the persuasion era. It’s misguided by a lot of brand leaders jumping on the what’s our why bandwagon. And overall, it’s ignoring or under leveraging behavioral science understanding and emotional insights.
Adrian Tennant: You introduce the concept of Limbic Sparks as the core of your strategy. Can you explain what this means?
Kevin Perlmutter: Limbic Sparks are what you feel when emotional motivation meets brand desire. It’s what you feel when you encounter a brand that feels like it was designed with you in mind, that has you at “Hello,” that you want to bring into your life, that creates such great experiences for you throughout your use of it that you prefer not to live without it. When you’re feeling that in your daily interactions with a brand, you’re feeling what I call limbic sparks.
Adrian Tennant: Your book emphasizes shifting from an “about us” to a “for you” mindset. Kevin, why is this shift so critical for brands today?
Kevin Perlmutter: Well, historically, a lot of brand work is companies saying what they’re good at, rooted in the persuasion era, trying to sell you something and saying, “We do this” and “We do that.” And you know what? People don’t want to be sold to. And when you focus on selling and not solving, when you focus on sharing your “why” in the absence of understanding your “who,” it’s a half-baked bread strategy. So what Limbic Sparks Brand Strategy is all about is shifting the perspective from talking about yourself as a brand to addressing the emotional needs of the customers and sharing emotional benefits. And that’s what that shift is all about. Behavioral scientists will tell you that we gravitate toward things that make us feel good, and we avoid things that make us feel bad. So when you’re focused on the emotional benefits, the things that people care about in their life, they want to bring into their life, there’s more of an instinctive readiness to accept that and to start investigating, learning more, and moving toward your brand, as opposed to feeling like you want to move away because it’s not relevant.
Adrian Tennant: Now in “Brand Desire,” you present readers with a framework, and in the ‘Focus’ section of that framework, you talk about discovering shared emotional motivation. How do brands uncover these kinds of emotional insights?
Kevin Perlmutter: Well, uncovering emotional insights happens through a lot of curiosity and questioning, and importantly, doing so not just within the walls of your company, but talking with your customers and understanding directly from customers why they appreciate your brand, what they’re looking for in their life in the absence of your brand. And doing the hard work of actually discovering what customers and potential customers care about is the big shift that I’m talking about. It happens often, but by and large it’s surface level and there really isn’t as much work getting to the customer as what I’m recommending in my approach. You mentioned the shared emotional motivation. That is a component of brand strategy that does not exist in traditional brand strategy. The shared emotional motivation is what the brand and the potential customer are trying to achieve individually and with each other. It’s the first bookend of brand strategy. And in order to invite someone into your brand, in order for them to feel like it was designed with them in mind and that it’ll instinctively make them feel like it has the benefits that they would love to achieve, you need to first understand their emotional motivations and you need to address those emotional motivations in your strategy. So the shared emotional motivation is the output of focus, the output of insights discovery that allows you to create strategy and connect the next phase of the process, which will actually resonate.
Adrian Tennant: Well, Kevin, in your experience, what are the most common mistakes brands make when trying to identify emotional connections with their customers?
Kevin Perlmutter: One of the things I learned from working with my behavioral science mentors, which led me to where I am today, is that human emotion requires different techniques. If you really want to understand what people are feeling and what people want to feel, asking overt questions and waiting for conscious answers is not going to get you the reliable answers that you’re hoping for. Scientifically, our emotions are instinctive. They happen in milliseconds. Most of them, the large majority of them, you aren’t even aware of. But still, they’re guiding your outward feelings, your perceptions, and your behaviors. If you’re just asking questions, or you’re using traditional research surveys with emojis and saying, “Click how this made you feel.” If you’re asking people questions like that, you’re not getting the reliable answers that you think you are. People are seconds or milliseconds beyond the initial instinct and they’re now post-rationalizing. They’re saying what they want people to hear, not necessarily what their instinctive feeling. So throughout “Brand Desire” and throughout the approaches that I recommend, I go through the types of questioning that you can ask in an interview. There’s a whole chapter dedicated to using behavioral science research techniques and how there are research techniques now readily available that are much more reliable for identifying emotions and how people want to feel than traditional research techniques that most brand leaders are currently using.
Adrian Tennant: Specifically, you outline five discovery activities in your Limbic Spark Strategy. Kevin, which ones tend to reveal the most surprising insights?
Kevin Perlmutter: Well, thanks for asking that. It’s a great question. And the steps that I suggest for insights discovery are steps that many brand consultants and leaders would be familiar with. Things like understanding the dynamics of the brand, conducting a competitive audit to understand the landscape of what’s out there, and what positioning territories are being well trotted. Category dynamics, understanding the things that are going to impact whether or not your message and your marketing approach lands, brand team and customer interviews, which I’m going to come back to, and then bringing in custom research studies. So first of all, custom research studies, when done with the right techniques, can yield tremendous insight. But you don’t always need that. Doing brand team and customer interviews is a wonderful step. And the customer interviews is the part that typically gets left out in traditional brand strategy. So often, we’re listening to our clients. We’re listening to the brand leaders. And we’re hearing them say, “This is what we want to tell people. These are the proof points. These are the reasons to believe. This is what our CEO wants to be sure we get through in this.” But so often, actually hearing from customers and asking them questions, asking them questions like, “What is the best thing that this brand does for you in your life? If this brand goes away, what would you miss the most? What are the biggest surprises when interacting with this brand? If this brand was a superhero, what would be its singular superpower? What are three words you use to describe how it makes you feel when interacting with this product?” And the most important thing that I figured out is that if you could understand why your customers, your current customers, keep coming back for more, what are the things that keep driving them back for more? First of all, it’s going to be different than what you anticipated. It’s not going to be the proof points and reasons to believe in the product features. It’s going to be the emotional benefits. It’s going to be how it makes them feel. And then you can turn that insight, those emotional insights, you can turn that into the messaging that you use to attract new customers. Because it’s most likely that there are other people out there who would want to feel that way. And if they knew you existed and they can find those feelings with your brand, they would be drawn in to investigate a bit more.
Adrian Tennant: Love that you’re sharing this process with us. Moving now to the ‘Connect’ phase. Kevin, how do brands craft benefits that are emotionally compelling rather than just functional?
Kevin Perlmutter: It comes back to understanding what matters most to people. And when you use emotional benefits, you’re tapping into the way people want to feel in their situation, in their life, in the absence of your brand. If your brand exists or doesn’t exist, this is how they want to feel. And if your brand could authentically and actually deliver on those feelings, then you can elevate those to the top of the benefits that you offer. So let me give you a quick example. This is a chapter in the book. It’s a case study chapter in the book. I worked with a SaaS platform supply chain management company that helps inventory managers and companies accurately predict the amount of inventory they need for thousands of SKUs across multiple warehouses and seasonal variations and the whole thing. So if you’re a manager of this warehouse and your job is to predict inventory levels and stock the shelves, no matter how good you are at your job, you’re going to be wrong quite often, unless you have some software that helps you with predictive analytics for what’s going to sell and what’s not going to sell. And if you’re wrong, unfortunately, that means you’re tying up cash flow of the company with stuff on the shelf that’s not moving, or things are not in stock when you need to deliver them to a customer. And that’s a problem. So the shared emotional motivation between the company and its potential customers is very simply improving precision planning. This is what they both want to achieve individually and with each other. When you think about the benefits that they’re looking for, this company was originally saying things like “intelligent planning insights” and “integrated planning across your organization” and “continuity assurance.” And these are important things, but these are very functional. Once hearing from customers, once doing the interviews, once scouring reviews for sentiment analysis and what was driving positive sentiment, We understood that eliminating guesswork, maximizing inventory performance, and the unmatched partnership with real humans that this company offers is what’s keeping customers coming back for more. And we transformed their brand idea from a relatively generic, “We put you at the center of supply chain success,” to a very empowering, “Be supply chain invincible.” Be supply chain invincible is the brand benefit and invitation, and now their tagline, that lets them know if they want to feel invincible at work, they want to feel like they’re going to be accurate and eliminate guesswork, this is the place to go.
Adrian Tennant: In “Brand Desire,” you warn against meaningless brand benefits and clichés. What makes a brand benefit truly resonate emotionally?
Kevin Perlmutter: I’m going to start with the first part of your question, which is the clichés and the jargon that we see so often in marketing and things like “optimized potential” and “breakdown barriers” and “your success is our business.” These one-liners that keep appearing are inauthentic. I believe they create more distance between a brand and its customer because they’re instantly ignorable and sometimes off-putting. They reveal that the brand team has surface-level insights about what matters to their customers, and they reveal that the brand feels that these generic statements are going to attract people to their brand. It’s a bit of a shortcut, and it shows they didn’t do their homework, and it’s almost a bit insulting to their potential customers. So what helps a brand truly emotionally resonate is when it’s clear through the way the brand presents itself and the experiences that you have with it that the brand team actually did their homework. They understand what matters most to you and they’re using language and they’re creating experiences that feel like it was designed with you in mind.
Adrian Tennant: The ‘Evolve’ section of your book covers brand expression through visual identity, sonic identity, and messaging. How should these elements work together to address how people want to feel?
Kevin Perlmutter: Well, the brand strategy that you set in ‘Connect’ directly leads to the expression and experiences you create in ‘Evolve.’ And from what you gathered in insights discovery and what you’ve created in ‘Connect,’ you have so much information about the emotional insights of your customers that you can start creating those brand expression and brand experience touch points that feel like they were designed with you in mind. Charles Eames is a iconic designer of the Eames chair and other design artifacts and architecture and all types of things. And he had a quote that I absolutely love, which is, “The details are not the details. They make the design.” And I love that idea. And it’s all about this idea that you need to focus on the details and every brand interaction should feel thoughtfully designed to the people who experience it. It should address how they want to feel. And if you do that across touch points, you can have a cohesive brand experience rooted in how you want people to feel, how people actually want to feel in their lives. And you’re thinking through those things. A UX experience should not feel difficult to navigate. Brand messaging should not feel like it’s written in the third person to some abstract humans out in the world. It can be written in the first person. It can feel like they’re talking directly to you. Call centers that have music, when you have overhead playlists in a call center, you know, the music you use actually affects your mood. If it’s very chaotic and you’re waiting on hold for a long time, you’re going to feel anxiety. If it keeps looping over and over again, you’re going to sense how long it’s taking and how long you’re waiting. If it’s completely silent, you’re going to think they hung up on you. I mean, there are things that you can do, things you need to think about that you can use to create very specific experiences that address how people want to feel.
Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message.
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Kevin Perlmutter: Hello, I’m Kevin Perlmutter, author of Brand Desire: Spark Customer Interest Using Emotional Insights, published by Kogan Page.
My book introduces the Limbic Sparks Brand Strategy, a behavioral science-rooted approach that aligns what people want to feel with what your brand uniquely offers. Whether you’re a CEO, CMO, brand manager, or consultant, Brand Desire provides a practical approach for discovering emotional insights that help you set strategy, attract, and retain customers. You’ll learn how to shift brand messaging from “about us” to “for you,” craft emotionally compelling benefits, and design experiences that reflect how people want to feel. As an IN CLEAR FOCUS listener, you can save 25% on Brand Desire when you order directly from KoganPage.com. Use the exclusive promo code BIGEYE25 at checkout. Shipping is complimentary for customers in the US and the UK. Reading Brand Desire will help you ignite customer enthusiasm by discovering and addressing what matters most to the people your brand is for. |
Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Kevin Perlmutter, chief strategist and founder of Limbic Brand Evolution, and author of the Bigeye Book Club selection for September, “Brand Desire.” We know about emotional intelligence in relation to people. What separates emotionally intelligent brands from the rest?
Kevin Perlmutter: Yes, so I apply this principle of emotional intelligence, which traditionally relates to the relationship between people. I relate this to brand strategy, the relationship between brands and people. So when you’re more aware of how your brand makes people’s lives better, and you’re more in tune with the needs and desires of the people who your brand serves, You can actually put your brand out there in a way that is more helpful to people, that is more intentional about serving the needs that people have. It’s ultimately more relevant and ultimately more desirable. So what separates emotionally intelligent brands from the rest is that they’re the brands you want in your life because they feel like they get you.
Adrian Tennant: The ‘Lead’ section of your book focuses on sustaining brand evolution. How can brand leaders embrace what you call the ‘Limbic Sparks mindset’?
Kevin Perlmutter: Yeah, so “Brand Desire” is a 13-chapter book with five sections and it goes through a tremendous amount of detail for any brand leader or student or consultant who wants to learn the specific steps that I take when helping a brand evolve with emotional insight. The lead section is about bringing this all together, and it also emphasizes that you don’t have to go through a full-on, robust brand strategy engagement to apply these principles. And embracing Limbic Sparks mindset is all about keeping three questions in mind. One is: “What are people’s frustrations, unmet needs, and motivations?” And the second one is: “How do they want to feel?” And the third one is: “What should your brand say and do to make people’s lives better?” So if you keep those three questions in mind, whether you’re embarking on a huge brand evolution, or you’re just focusing on fine tuning one touch point, or you’re in a conference room, listening to your agency present ideas to you, and you’re asking these questions, well, do we really understand people’s frustrations on nit means and motivations? Do we really understand how they want to feel? And is the work that I’m looking at or what we’re currently developing or designing, is it addressing how they want to feel to make their lives better? What should we say and do? So if you keep those three questions in mind, you can embrace that limbic sparks mindset and bring this thinking into anything you’re doing at any time.
Adrian Tennant: Well, for brand leaders who aren’t embarking on a complete brand evolution, how can they still apply these principles day to day?
Kevin Perlmutter: I think there’s two things. One goes back to the last question-and-answer, which is embracing this Limbic Sparks mindset. But the second thing is that brand leaders can recognize that they are in a unique position to drive success. They’re in a unique position to drive success in their organization and for their customers, and in turn, those reinforce each other. When a brand leader becomes a champion of customer centricity and a champion of customer insight, those customer insights could help align people internally. They can align the people developing products and services. They can align people developing the brand experiences at all touch points. They can align all the marketing expression to address how people want to feel and what their products and services can do to make their lives better. And when that is then brought out to the customer experience, and people start to experiencing that, customers start to buy your products and services, and they see that they feel these limbic sparks that it was designed with them in mind, and they wanna bring it into their life. This is a cycle that can continue. So the point is, brand leaders are in a unique position. Customer insights can help them drive success internally, with customers, and that continues to reinforce, and everybody’s objectives are aligned.
Adrian Tennant: Kevin, how has the rise of AI and automation affected the way brands should think about emotional connection?
Kevin Perlmutter: Well, I have a lot of opinions about the use of AI that we’re not going to have time to talk about, but I will share this one thing that I think is super important for brand leaders to recognize. AI is going to be part of our lives and part of our businesses. AI is going to continually change and hopefully improve the way we’re able to use it for positive effect. But there is a line, there is what I call the do not cross line. And the do not cross line is the line in which AI usage or misusage degrades the customer experience. And you can apply this line to any situation. If you are a brand leader and you’re listening to this, your job when it comes to AI is to not allow your organization to cross the do not cross line. That line will continue to move, but if it’s going to degrade the humanity, the way people feel when they experience your brand, then you’re on guard. That’s how I feel about AI.
Adrian Tennant: Got it. Are you using AI in your own insights work?
Kevin Perlmutter: I am, but I’m using it only for enhanced desktop research. I’ve always used Google. I’ve always said as a solopreneur that one of my few employees or freelancers is thesaurus.com. I use the resources around me to gather insights. But when I use AI to gather information, not customer insights, but information about a topic, I use it skeptically. I make sure that anything I’m referencing has sources and it doesn’t lead to 404 pages, which often happens. If I’m using it as an enhanced thesaurus, I’ll throw in a word or a phrase and I’ll ask for alternative ways to say it, or I’ll ask what the possible interpretations are of that phrase so I have some greater context than what I know in my brain about the ways it could be interpreted. But I’m having too much fun writing brand strategy and writing brand messaging and writing articles and writing my book to let any AI take over that for me. Because honestly, I don’t think it could do it better and it wouldn’t have my values and my perspective as uniquely woven in. So that’s how I’m using and not using AI.
Adrian Tennant: How can business-to-business brands, which often focus on rational benefits, apply emotional insights effectively?
Kevin Perlmutter: Well, everything I talked about here is 100% applicable to business-to-business brands and most of my clients are business-to-business brands. What we need to recognize is that businesses aren’t selling to businesses. People are buying from people who work at companies. And people, whether you’re in your business mindset or your personal mindset, have the same brain activity that is largely informed and sometimes driven by your emotional instincts. So like that example of the SaaS platform, these are all business people buying a very expensive SaaS platform for their business. And what’s going to make the difference is understanding the emotional drivers of the decisions of the people who they’re trying to reach. For the C-level, which I talk about in my book, they want to know that this capital investment is going to actually help the company be more successful from a cash flow perspective and provide better customer service because things are going to more often be in stock. from a user of the software perspective they want to go from and this was an insight we heard from an individual while doing this research that said they want to go from being the person in their office that gets yelled at for being wrong too often to the person who is the hero with the accurate information that helps the cash flow and profitability of the company stay strong. That was an insight that we heard and that’s an emotional benefit. There’s emotional benefits to having this brand in your wheelhouse because of the unique things it does. Even within its competitive set, there’s a lot of uniqueness to what this brand does.
Adrian Tennant: Kevin, were there any particular influences that were really important during your research and writing process?
Kevin Perlmutter: Oh, well, absolutely. I mean, writing the book itself was a task and I had some incredible support from Elaine Pofelt, who is a writing coach that worked with me in the early days. And of course, Kogan Page has been incredible. But thinking beyond the actual writing of the book, getting me to this stage in my career, getting me to the point where I can actually have the insights that led me to Limbic Sparks Brand Strategy in this book. are my behavioral science mentors. Joe Sauer and Dr. Cyrus McCandless are my behavioral science mentors, and I’ve done tons of work with them over the last decade. And that work and those insights about how the brain works is what most brand leaders are not aware of. And it led me to understanding things that can help shift brand strategy by focusing on emotional insights. So I’d like to thank them.
Adrian Tennant: What’s the most important takeaway you want readers to implement after reading “Brand Desire”?
Kevin Perlmutter: Well, it all comes down to one question. How do people want to feel? In the development of every product, service offering that you have, in the development of brand experiences, in the development of marketing, in the design of every touchpoint, Think about how people want to feel at the macro level and at the micro level. And if you do that, when people encounter your brand, they’re going to feel it was designed with them in mind. It’s going to create limbic sparks and people are going to be coming back for more.
Adrian Tennant: Great conversation, as always. Kevin, if listeners would like to learn more about your consulting work at Limbic Brand Evolution, your new book, “Brand Desire,” or connect with you, what are the best ways to do so?
Kevin Perlmutter: Two things. One is connect with me on LinkedIn. That’s easy. The other thing you can do is go to BrandDesireBook.com. BrandDesireBook.com is a page on my website where you can find out more details about what’s inside the book with links to connect, links to purchase the book. There’s one to Kogan Page. There are some other options out there as well. That page is also on my Limbic Brand Evolution website, so you can click to other pages. You can see more about my strategy approach and the work that I do for my clients. And there’s also a ‘Meet with Kevin’ link at the top of every page where if you wanted to chat with me, click the link, schedule some time, and let’s go.
Adrian Tennant: Perfect. And just a reminder, IN CLEAR FOCUS listeners can save 25 percent on “Brand Desire” when you order directly from coganpage.com. Use the promo code BIGEYE25 at checkout. Kevin, thank you very much for being our guest again on IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Kevin Perlmutter: Thank you so much for having me, Adrian. It was great to be here.
Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Kevin Perlmutter, brand strategist and author of “Brand Desire.” As always, you’ll find a complete transcript of our conversation with timestamps and links to the resources we discussed on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at Bigeyeagency.com, just select ‘Insights’ from the menu. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.
TIMESTAMPS
00:00: Introduction to Emotional Branding
02:51: The Limbic Sparks Methodology
04:03: Shifting from “About Us” to “For You”
05:28: Discovering Shared Emotional Motivation
07:08: Common Mistakes in Identifying Emotional Connections
08:49: Effective Discovery Activities for Insights
11:05: Crafting Emotionally Compelling Benefits
13:58: Avoiding Clichés in Brand Benefits
15:17: Brand Expression and Emotional Resonance
17:09: Mid-Episode Break
18:23: The Importance of Emotional Intelligence in Brands
19:37: Embracing the Limbic Sparks Mindset
21:07: Applying Principles in Daily Brand Management
22:30: The Impact of AI on Emotional Connections
24:53: Emotional Insights in B2B Branding
26:40: Influences in Research and Writing
27:37: Key Takeaway from Brand Desire
28:19: Connecting with Kevin Perlmutter
29:17: Closing Remarks
