Do you know that customers who are highly emotionally connected to your brand are 53% more loyal than those who are merely satisfied with your products and services?
Today I’m talking with Kevin Perlmutter. We explore why traditional brand strategies often miss the mark, how branding has evolved beyond surface-level connections, and Kevin’s concept of Limbic Sparks—those moments when emotional motivation meets brand desire. You’ll learn the three steps to spark brand desire and how even B2B brands can connect emotionally. Kevin shares why talking directly to customers beats cold data alone and staying in the thick of the details will make you more successful than just relying on AI. And we chat about marketing ethics and the crucial difference between being a customer habit versus gaining their loyalty.
Finally, Kevin shares the one big lesson he wants every leader to take away from his book. We could have talked forever about one of my favorite topics, so enjoy the insights and take a listen!
To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Listen in for…
- Maintaining ethical behavior when deploying and evolving the brand.
- How to spark customer interest using emotional insights.
- Why the difference between habits and loyalty is important to understand.
- How to balance AI and humans to better serve your customers.
- The three steps for embracing a limbic spark mindset.
“Limbic sparks are what you feel when emotional motivation meets brand desire. It’s that moment when you encounter a brand, and it feels like it was designed with you in mind.” — Kevin Perlmutter
Episode References:
- The Empathy Edge podcast:
- Kevin Perlmutter: When Emotional Motivation Meets Brand Desire
- Melina Palmer: What Your Employees Need But Can’t Tell You
- Melina Palmer: Why Your Customers Can’t Tell You What They Want
- MIT Article on human skills that complement AI shortcomings: https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/these-human-capabilities-complement-ais-shortcomings
About Kevin Perlmutter, Chief Strategist & Founder, Limbic Brand Evolution:
Kevin Perlmutter is Chief Strategist and Founder of Limbic Brand Evolution, a brand strategy and neuromarketing consultancy that puts emotional insight at the center of how brands attract and retain customers. He is also the Author of BRAND DESIRE: Spark Customer Interest Using Emotional Insights. Based near New York City, he works with business and brand leaders to create stronger connections between their brand and the people they want to reach – as a consultant, speaker, and workshop facilitator – to guide the development of more effective methods for brand evolution and customer engagement.
Connect with Kevin Perlmutter:
Limbic Brand Evolution: https://www.limbicbrandevolution.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinperlmutter/
Book: BRAND DESIRE: Spark Customer Interest Using Emotional Insights www.BrandDesireBook.com
Connect with Maria:
Get Maria’s books: Red-Slice.com/books
Hire Maria to speak: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross
Take the LinkedIn Learning Courses! Leading with Empathy and Balancing Empathy, Accountability, and Results as a Leader
LinkedIn: Maria Ross
Instagram: @redslicemaria
Facebook: Red Slice
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Maria Ross 00:00
Welcome to the empathy edge podcast, the show that proves why cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. I’m your host, Maria Ross, I’m a speaker, author, mom, facilitator and empathy advocate. And here you’ll meet trailblazing leaders and executives, authors and experts who embrace empathy to achieve radical success. We discuss all facets of empathy, from trends and research to the future of work to how to heal societal divisions and collaborate more effectively. Our goal is to redefine success and prove that empathy isn’t just good for society. It’s great for business. Do you know why customers who are highly emotionally connected to your brand are 53% more loyal than those who are merely satisfied with your products and services? It’s about empathy. Today, I’m talking with Kevin Perlmutter, chief strategist and founder of limbic brand evolution, a consultancy that puts emotional insight at the heart of how brands attract and retain customers. He’s also the author of brand desire spark customer interest using emotional insights, we’ll explore why traditional brand strategies often miss the mark, how branding has evolved beyond surface level connections and Kevin’s concept of limbic sparks, those moments when emotional motivation meets brand desire, you’ll learn the three steps to spark brand desire and how even B to B, brands can connect emotionally. Kevin shares why. Talking directly to customers beats cold data alone and staying in the thick of the details will make you more successful than just relying on AI. And we chat about marketing ethics and the crucial difference between being a customer habit versus gaining their loyalty. Finally, Kevin shares the one big lesson. He wants every leader to take away from this book, we could have talked forever about one of my favorite topics. So enjoy the insights and take a listen. Welcome to the show once again, heaven. Perlmutter, I am so happy to have this conversation with you, my kindred spirit, about emotional brand desire and getting people to emotionally connect with brands. So welcome to the show.
Kevin Perlmutter 02:27
Thanks for having me back. It’s been a little while, but I’m thrilled to be here. Yeah, it’s been
Maria Ross 02:30
a little bit, and I will put a link to your past episode that you had with us, where we talked a lot about your philosophy and your work working with companies to create those connections and those moments with their ideal customers and clients. But just as a recap, tell us how you even got to this work. What’s your passion behind it?
Kevin Perlmutter 02:49
Wow. What my passion is currently focused on evolving the craft of brand strategy by putting emotional insight at the center of how brands attract and retain customers. And I came to this through some enlightening work I did prior to starting my brand consultancy, limbic brand evolution, which launched in 2019 prior to that, I was working at a sonic branding music studio, leading strategy, innovation and research. And I co created a research capability rooted in neuroscience, working with some outside partners, some people who I refer to in my book as my behavioral science mentors, and they helped me understand the non conscious activity that happens in our brain, the instinctive emotional responses that we have that guide our feelings, our decisions and our behaviors. And it occurred to me that all the work I had been doing for over a decade in advertising and almost a decade at one of the largest global brand consultancies, leading strategy work for brands, that this did not come up at all. And I was like, wait a minute, there’s a whole industry running around, yeah, marketing to people, and not thinking about how the brain works and the impact that our instinctive emotional responses have on what we do next. So I said, huh, maybe I should go back, leave the music studio, go back to my brand strategy roots, and create and approach the brand strategy that puts emotional insight
Maria Ross 04:25
at the center. I love it. I love it so much. And I know, you know, I so enjoyed our last conversation because we’re like I said, we’re kindred spirits around this idea of, we have to remember that we’re marketing to human beings and not automatons and not robots, not yet, right? They’re not making the buying decisions yet. But this idea of the whole field of behavioral economics exists because we don’t make rational decisions, and we often make decisions based on our emotions and back it up with logic. Even some of the most skeptical, analytical left brain people, they can’t deny. By the data and the research that comes out from the field of behavioral economics. And I’ll put a link to another episode I did with Melina Palmer, where she talked about behavioral economics in terms of how you market and how you persuade people, but in an ethical way. And I want to get a great series of books she does. She’s amazing. So I’m going to put a link to both of her episodes she did, one that was customer facing and one that was an employee facing. Okay, book around using the principles of behavioral economics, but let’s get to this idea of emotion. Share with us the three steps from your book in how you spark emotional desire when you’re talking about products, right? Because I’ve worked B to B to C, like you, you know? And it’s like, okay, how do I find the emotional desire for a developer platform or an accounting software? Right? So talk to us about those three steps.
Kevin Perlmutter 05:53
Yeah. Well, it’s and a lot of my work is in professional services and technology and software and as well as entertainment and other customer facing consumer product kind of customer facing brands, but the process that I share in brand desire is three steps, focus, connect and evolve. And focus is all around insights, discovery, and it’s what a lot of marketers and brand strategists do, or think that they’re doing in that early phase, which is gathering information to form judgment on what the strategy should be, and the difference between what I’m suggesting and what traditionally happens is that traditionally, traditional brand strategy is when there’s kind of a surface level understanding of customers. A lot of you know what the company already knows. A lot of you know. Do a Google search and find out some basics. A lot of you know. Let’s read some reports about what’s been learned in the past. Here’s what we know from our current customers. You know, based on years and years of collected data. But you know, what I’m recommending is, you need to get out and talk to people. You need to hear from them in the current day. You need to understand the context of their lives without your brand, and you need to understand what they’re trying to achieve in life and business, whether your brand exists or not. You can’t start from the premise of, here’s what we have to sell. Let’s figure out how to talk about it. You need to start from the premise of, here’s what people are going through, and what would they need to hear so that their lives can be made to be better. So one of the pieces the conclusion of insights, discovery, this focus phase that I recommend, is something that is not part of traditional brand strategy, and that is what I call the shared emotional motivation. The shared emotional motivation is one bookend and the first input to what I call a limbic sparks brand strategy, which is I define that shared emotional motivation as what the brand and the customer are both trying to achieve, individually and with each other, and if you could understand that, that’s the only way that you can start to make real connections with people. Because you are in line with you, are understanding of you, are cognizant of what it is that they actually need, want and desire and care about, with or without your brand. So that’s insights, Discovery focus, phase one. Phase two is connect. And connect is all about developing that brand strategy, and it includes some of the same outputs that you would suspect from traditional brand strategy. It has the core brand benefits, it has the personality and voice traits, it has a positioning statement, it has a brand idea slash tagline. But what’s different with limbic sparks, brand strategy is a the first input you’re starting with the premise of that shared emotional motivation. The second thing is, you are identifying not just benefits, but emotional brand benefits. Because what you’ll find when you do insights discovery and look at the sentiment analysis from reviews, and you talk to customers and you understand what it is that they actually care about, and when you ask questions like, Why do you keep returning to this brand? What would you miss the most if it disappeared? What is this brand superpower? What do you get from this brand that you’re not getting from anyone else? All of those benefits you are going to find to be emotional benefits. They’re not the features and the services that people want to talk about inside the company. It’s those emotional benefits that you keep hearing over and
Maria Ross 09:19
over again. Yeah, absolutely. Because if I can interject real quick, please do please. There’s this idea, you know, even I’m kind of, you know, I teed you up with a question that I’ve already dealt with a lot of my clients, which is, even when you’re talking b to b and you’re talking about software, you’re talking about infrastructure, you’re talking about the most mundane and specific or specific tech. It all boils down to the So, why does that matter, right? So, when you list all of those benefits that the product or the service offers if you keep drilling down, and if you keep kind of forcing the client to drill down, it comes down to an emotional response. It comes down to because they can have confidence in the decision. Yeah. Because they can feel courageous about making their choice, because they can feel good about leaving their legacy. Like, when you really get them down to the point where they, you know, I’m sure you’ve had this where they get mad at you for drilling down so far, it’s like they kind of blurred it out. And it’s like, that’s it. That’s the nugget,
Kevin Perlmutter 10:17
absolutely and in my process, as you’re suggesting, you need to drill down to that and then bring it right up to the top. Uh huh. But something else you were saying is, I don’t I try to get that out of my clients. But here’s the thing, I’m not going to get it completely out of my clients. I get it from their customers, from their customers every time. Yeah, and that’s what’s missing in traditional brand strategy, yes, being able to actually talk with customers, hear from customers, and learn that, and that’s one of the biggest things. So in Connect, there are a couple of things. One is, you start with the shared emotional motivation. You understand the emotional brand benefits. And then when I create a brand idea or a customer facing tagline, and in my work, they’re one in the same, because I’m not a strategist, and I don’t hire a copywriter to rewrite what I wrote. I’m doing it all. So the the brand idea, the criteria for that is narrower than traditional brand strategy. In traditional brand strategy, it’s often in about a statement. It’s we do this with limbic sparks brand strategy. It must be in order to qualify, it must be a brand benefit and invitation. It needs to feel like you are inviting something, someone into how they want to feel. So couple of brand ideas that have been part of give
Maria Ross 11:32
us some examples.
Kevin Perlmutter 11:33
Yeah, love to give you some examples. So one, I mean, I’m going to click through a couple of them really quickly without giving the full case, but one of them is a SaaS platform in the inventory management space. So these are, this is software that helps you have precise inventory levels, so that the cash flow of your company is not too drained by having too much inventory on the shelf, and so that you always have things in stock that you need. The shared emotional motivation is improving planning precision. That’s what both the company and the customer are trying to achieve, individually and for each other. The benefits are around eliminating guesswork, around maximizing inventory performance, around an unmatched partnership that you get with this company, that you don’t get from other companies in the space, and the brand idea. The benefit invitation is, be supply chain invincible. Be supply chain invincible. You’re inviting people into how they want to feel. The original idea, before I started working with these guys, was we put you at the center of supply chain success. Now it’s B supply chain invincible. One other example that’s kind of cool is scratch event DJs, which is the largest corporate DJ booking service. They book DJs. You can book DJs with them for events all around the world. They’ve been on every continent, 10s of 1000s of events. They work with corporations. If you’re Nordstrom and you want a DJ at every store on Valentine’s day at noon anywhere in the world, they can make it happen and talk about empathizing with your customer. They were. I worked for a sonic branding music studio right before launching this company. I understand all these statistics around music. If you have music playing an environment, it can invite it could keep people there longer. It can increase linger time. If you have the wrong music playing, it could actually cause people to want to leave sooner, all of these things. So they were going with a very rational brand idea. I’m trying to remember the exact words, but it was around the idea of the ROI, of having a DJ. I forget the exact words because it was a couple years ago, but the it was around, you know, bring in the DJ and the ROI will be there. And when I spoke with their customers and understood what their customers were dealing with, you’re talking about people who are managers or regional managers of retail stores. You’re talking about people who are running the entertainment on a cruise ship or in a casino. You’re talking about people who are maybe account people at an ad agency hiring a DJ for one of their clients events. These are not they care about the ROI. Of course they care about the ROI. What they really care about is nothing going wrong. They care about I have a million things going on to pull this event off, and I need one less thing to worry about. And with Scratch event DJs, we recognize that what they care about are amazing experiences that keep people coming back for more. That’s what their customers care about, and that’s what their the brand cares about, the shared emotional motivation. We recognize that there are important benefits that are emotional benefits around incredible client service, so you never have to worry about it. The largest DJ network, so you’re always going to get paired with the right DJ for your event, and there are backup DJs. Should somebody be sick or ill at the last minute? And amazing event experiences time and time again. And our brand idea for them was curated. DJs, anytime, anywhere, and it signifies the quality. It signifies the. The breadth of the offering, it gives the customers confidence that they’re going to get what they need when they need it, and it’s going to be one less thing to worry about. So that’s what happens in Connect. And to answer your the full question, the Evolve phase, the third phase is about activating that brand strategy, and that’s and it’s doing so by pouring yourself back into those insights that you discovered in the first phase, understanding all the nuances of what people want in the experience. And it’s then creating, whether it be visual identity, Sonic identity, brand messaging, brand I create a brand messaging hierarchy with and for my clients that outlines all of those emotional benefits. We take the three core emotional benefits, we then segment the customers based on a couple of different core personas, not a lot of 12 personas with stock photos and saying John is the CFO and he wants all the money to go smoothly. It’s not that. It’s actually short paragraphs, fewer personas. It’s about what these people care about. For the inventory management company, what does the C suite care about? The people who have to sign off on the check or the second persona would be the users of the software. What do they care about? And then we take those three benefits, what does eliminate guesswork mean to each one
Kevin Perlmutter 16:22
that is eliminate guesswork mean at the user level. So we create all of this brand strategy, content, guidelines, assets, and we activate it into brand experiences. And when people encounter those experiences, they counter those messages. It feels like it was designed with them in mind. Yeah, it was, it was right, as opposed to traditional brand strategy,
Maria Ross 16:46
guesswork, right, exactly. And I think, you know, that’s the important piece that’s missing, is you have these folks in leadership roles who don’t get out and talk to the customers enough. And you know, when I work with my clients on brand projects, it’s very much about I don’t care how you want to describe it. How are your customers describing their need or their pain or their benefit that they’re seeking? And let’s echo back. This is part of empathetic marketing. It’s asking and echoing back to your point where, when they see your messaging, when they see your ad, when they see your email, they’re like, oh my gosh, that’s the voice inside my head. They get me, they get me, right? And that’s where, you know, this is where this all ties back to empathy. And so, you know, let’s talk for a minute first about ethics, right? Because we’re talking a lot about leveraging neuroscience and leveraging what’s in people’s brains. And I just want to get your viewpoint on, how do you help clients maintain ethical behavior when deploying and evolving the brand and putting it into action?
Kevin Perlmutter 17:52
Yeah, such a great question. And here’s the thing. First of all, I don’t believe in using negative motivation, fear tactics, click bait, you know, like any of the stuff that is driving us nuts because we keep getting spammed emails and like, so I’m not some of that is not unethical at all. Some of it is bordering on unethical. It’s just icky. It’s just icky. It doesn’t feel good. So like, anything that I’m going to be recommending is going to feel good to my clients and to the people who encounter it. So that’s a premise, is that we’re going for positive. It’s not, you know, it’s not your company is going to not survive without this inventory management. It’s when you bring this software in, you will feel supply chain. You will be supply chain invincible. And it’s a positive message always when it comes from the work that I do in terms of understanding what makes people tick, and then using that to your advantage as a marketer, that’s not unethical. It is strategic. It is using research. It is using an understanding of what matters most to people, so you can most effectively help them. Now, if you take that information and you promise them something that they really, really, really, really want, and then you can’t deliver it, and you suckered them into something else that is unethical, but if you are understanding what current customers are feeling, why they keep returning, and you are turning that into messaging to attract other people who want those same benefits, and then when they arrive, they receive those same benefits and are not disappointed. There is nothing at all unethical with that. I love that you said that
Maria Ross 19:33
so eloquently, and it’s really about, you know, you’re not trying to manipulate people who don’t have a need for your product and service to spend the money on it. That’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about finding a way to surface the needs and the desires and the values of the people who will benefit from your product or service, and sort of, you know, creating a beacon of light to say, here’s what we do. We can help you with this.
Kevin Perlmutter 19:59
Yeah. And I’ll You just reminded me of something as you know, as a book author, when going through the process of coming up with a title and a subtitle, uh huh, that could be as much ideation as writing the whole book. Yeah. So the subtitle that we landed on for brand desire is spark customer interest using emotional insights every word dissected thought through, and there were 40 alternatives for that line and everywhere in that line. Yeah. So I struggled at first with Spark customer interest. It was like it was a little flat interest, interest. But then, when I thought about it, it’s exactly what we’re talking about, right? It is about sparking interest. I don’t believe for a second that a company is going to spend hundreds of 1000s of dollars on a piece of software because I said, or the brand said, Be supply chain invincible. But when they see, be supply chain invincible, and all of a sudden they’re like, Wow, maybe they get me, I need to look into this further right. Sparking of interest that has to happen first, and that’s where it becomes linked to behavioral science. We understood them. We get them. We’re speaking in their language. We’re empathizing with them, and we are helping them see that there’s something there that they might want to learn more about. Part of it is also understanding what drive I talk a lot about. You use the word empathy a lot. I don’t use the word empathy a lot, but I talk about emotional motivations, and they’re pretty much cousins, if not. You know, right? Even closer relative.
Maria Ross 21:29
Well, if you understand someone’s emotional motivations, that means you’re seeing things from their point of view, in which case you are actually practicing empathy Exactly.
Kevin Perlmutter 21:37
So, emotional motivations, the drivers of our decisions and behaviors is what I talk about quite a bit. And I had this one client, a client a brand called sunless. It’s a Chinese, China based company, and it is in the space of bulletproof and highly durable materials. So they’re like a competitor of Kevlar, and they are a relatively new brand, where brands like Kevlar that are a household name for people not even buying that their brand is relatively new, and Kevlar has been around for 30 plus years. So when we were working with them to try and understand how they were going to convince manufacturers of other products to consider using their material as an ingredient in their products, and thus switching from what they’re currently using and retrofitting their factory for this new material to be part of a production process of some product, we had to understand the barriers to entry, and it wasn’t going to be just about well, Our material is 30% stronger, like everybody has a 30% stronger claim for something like you need 14 asterisks and four lawyers just to explain what part of 30% is so. But what we did was we understood that these manufacturers wanted an uncompromising advantage. An uncompromising advantage was the shared emotional motivation and the line the brand idea that we use to invite them in is a material difference. So when this company shows up at a trade show and they have a banner that says, sunless a material difference, it invites them into a conversation to go, oh, well, what’s different about your material? No, it’s materially different because it’s made this way as opposed to that way, and it’s much stronger in these use cases and and the conversation goes from there, right? They can actually get into a conversation where the manufacturer says, yeah, let me take some of that back with me and try it in my factory and see how it works. Yeah? And that’s all they want at that moment. All they want at that moment is trial. They want somebody to say, this is worth a shot, and a material difference gets them to ask, what’s so different about it
Maria Ross 23:46
exactly, exactly, you know, what you said, kind of buried in that too, was really understanding what the objection is. Because in that case, the objection is not that I want to necessarily use a better material or better product, like we all do, but think about all the things we put up with lesser quality just because it’s a pain to switch. Yeah, switching is high in this Yeah, right. So it’s like, Whatever you do around your house, like, if you buy certain cleaning products, or you do things a certain way, you may actually know there’s a better way or better solution, but you’re like, but the cost and the energy to make the switch is too much of a barrier for me. Yep, and I don’t think I’m getting that much more out of it, right? So I love that they identified. And where my brain, my brand brain, goes is, how do you help the company figure out what processes and tools and support they can give to a new customer to make that switch as easy as possible, right? That’s where you come up with new new offering ideas or new like deal sweeteners of like, what can we do to actually get you over that hump so you will at least try this. So I love that you kind of uncovered that I love what you said. About everybody’s got a 30% more claim about something right within the product? Exactly. They were lined up on my
Kevin Perlmutter 25:04
wall as I was studying the competitive set, and I’m like, How are we going to break apart in this thing? Well, let’s talk to their customers and understand what actually matters most, right? 30% or is it something else? Is there something bigger? I want to, I’d love to jump on something you said as well, if it’s okay. You talked about, you alluded to something that I talk about in the book, where I differentiate between habits and loyalty and loyalty. Loyalty is a conscious desire to keep going back to a product and service over and over again. Habits are more instinctive, which means that you’re not consciously thinking about it. Habits are part of a routine that happen over and over again, and sometimes we stay in that routine because the conscious part of switching, like you talked about, or the idea, the you know, you just you’re willing to put up with it, but the second the routine changes, or there’s a better alternative that makes it easy for you to switch, comes along, you’re going to break that habit pretty quickly. And this, I refer to this as the illusion of loyalty. Some brands believe that they have great loyalty when most of their customers may be stuck in a habit that they’d be thrilled to get out of if the opportunity presented himself presented itself. So I I think that if you’re not keeping up with what matters most to your customers, you could find yourself losing business when somebody comes along more quickly than you imagine, because that loyalty you thought you had doesn’t really exist.
Maria Ross 26:31
Yeah, it’s why so many brands rope you into things. It’s why, you know, it’s easy to buy something with the click of a button after they have your credit card saved. It’s why it’s easy, you know. And there’s all these hooks that a lot of brands put in place to make it harder for you to break that habit. And so I love that part of the book, because it’s this idea that you may call it loyalty, but it’s not. It’s just inertia, and at some point, when a competitor comes along and makes it really easy and worthwhile for them to switch. You’re going to switch. Yes. So what are you putting in place now to ensure that that loyalty is really about loyalty, and it’s about identity, and that’s where I really believe in the work you’re doing around when you can create that emotional connection. There was data several years ago that I used to talk about all the time, which, and I can’t remember the report it was, but it was about the value of brand loyalty, and how one of the vectors was that even in an economic downturn, if someone truly connects with a brand and it’s part of their identity, they will pay the premium, even in downtime, because that brand, They really are loyal. It’s not out of habit, absolutely.
Kevin Perlmutter 27:43
Yeah, this is related to what you’re talking about, but it’s not the same report. There was an article in Harvard Business Review, and it dates back about 10 years, I believe, but it said that customers who are highly emotionally connected are 53% more valuable than those who are highly satisfied. Now think about that. Think about the customer satisfaction surveys that most brands offer. Five point on the five point scale is highly satisfied. They’re not going high enough, because if you’re emotionally connected, you’re 53% more valuable for all those reasons that a loyal customer is valuable. You stay with them longer, you buy more referrals, you forgive poor experiences once in a while. So like for all those reasons, yeah, highly emotionally connected is, as you just said, so much more valuable. Oh, my God, I have so many
Maria Ross 28:28
questions I want to ask you, but we don’t have enough time. I want to ask you this, though, the innovation of AI to make things easier for marketers, to make things easier from a campaign, from a brand strategy perspective, and from a gathering and synthesizing customer insights perspective, where do you see the role of AI in this process, and how do we help brand leaders or marketing leaders ensure they’re not losing creating the emotional connection when they Lean into AI as part of this process? Yeah, that’s
Kevin Perlmutter 29:03
a whole hour’s discussion at least, but let me answer it in the best way I can. So first of all, I’m still of the belief that humans are better at understanding emotional insights and relatability and humanistic qualities than AI. I think AI could probably synthesize information if you know, you used AI to synthesize sentiment analysis through language across a number of reviews on Amazon or Google or something. You know you might save you’re going to save yourself a lot of time, and that’ll be helpful. But you can’t use AI to analyze what you’re learning. You can use AIS to summarize what it’s seeing that’s in the research side of things, I think in the marketing and marketing automation, customer experience automation, whether it’s live, virtual, retail, whatever it is, I worry about people losing connection with a brand because. Either. There’s research out there that says people don’t trust AI, that if they think that they’re hearing an AI voice, it’s less trustworthy. That if they think it’s a human voice, and notice I said, think, because if you think it’s an AI voice and it’s a human, you’re going to trust them just as little as if it is an AI voice and you think it’s AI, if it’s AI and it’s and you think it’s human, you’re going to trust it more, right? Which tells us, but here’s what it comes down to for me, here’s what it comes down to for me. AI is going to be around for a long time, longer than us, and it’s going to keep getting better in certain ways, and it might, probably will get worse in a lot of ways, but it is going to be a line that keeps moving, right? So as a brand leader, and this is what I talk about in brand desire. As a brand leader, your job is to know where that do not cross line is, and the do not cross line happens, occurs where, if you cross it, the customer experience will be degraded. Your job as a brand leaders to know where that line is and to not allow your brand to cross the line and degrade by thereby degrading the customer experience as a result of AI or marketing automation. So I’m not an AI expert enough to know where that line is exactly right now in every situation and how it’s going to change. I just know, as a brand leader, if you’re going to start deploying AI, then you need to think about the impact it’s going to have. If that impact is negative, don’t do it. If the impact is positive, go for it, absolutely.
Maria Ross 31:34
And you’re echoing the big sentiment that was in a recent MIT report. And I’ll put the link to it in the show notes I saw that report, yeah, it’s about the human capabilities that complement AI, and these are things that AI lacks, its empathy, judgment, ethics, hope, all of these emotional drivers that are uniquely human capacities. But what the report, you know, it’s, I want to be very clear, the report wasn’t saying, Oh, these skills can’t be replicated by AI. What it was saying was that, right now, they can’t, and so the best use of AI, if you want to get the maximum value, is to pair and augment AI with these human skills, which means we as humans are still required to strengthen and build those skills so that we can work alongside AI, but to your point, I think it is about automating and pulling the information in a more efficient way, so that people can spend the time focused on what is the emotional driver, what is the emotional connection, and not spend, you Know, the eight hours I’m putting together the spreadsheet, right? Gather, you have to get
Kevin Perlmutter 32:44
to that information exactly. I mean, I’ll be honest with you, like there have been times when I could have hired, I mean, and there are times when I do, but there are other times when I could have been I didn’t hire a junior strategist to analyze some information for me, because I felt like I needed to be in the middle of the information, analyzing it myself, yeah, so that I could use my skills as a strategist to connect the dots in unexpected ways. Yeah, and if I wasn’t in the thick of the data the analysis, then how can I really get to the good ideas that I need to get to for the clients that I’m supporting and the brands that I’m working on. And the other thing that I worry about with AI is that if we have a generation of people who are reliant on AI for their thinking and their creativity and their ability to ideate and their ability to judge what they are looking at and know whether it is good or bad. Yeah, I worry about that even more than I worry about the poor brand leaders who cross the line. I mean, I worry about a generation of people who can’t think and who can’t have judgment. And, you know, it kind of kind of cringe a bit when I hear people outsourcing their thinking to AI. And these are not young people. These are people, good thinkers. They’re just saving time and deciding that I’m gonna let ai do it, and I just like, I can’t,
Maria Ross 34:07
yeah, yeah, I think you’re right. It’s a balance of leveraging AI as a thought partner, yeah, and as an efficiency play, yeah, being able to do something that we just we would spend hours, if not days, if not weeks, doing. So, right? That ability to free up our time to then put more into connecting the dots, finding the emotional connection, going out there and actually doing the talking to customers, right? You know, because a lot of times what scares people away from doing that is all the drudgery work that goes with it. But if you could tell somebody, Hey, I just want you to go out and interview and talk to them and ask the probing questions, and take the conversations down these different routes that you know where to take it. And we’ll take the transcripts and find you know, synthesize everything for you. You don’t have to worry about that being like three weeks worth of drudgery after you. To have those conversations. I personally feel like a lot more marketers would be willing to have those conversations and take the time to do that, if they knew that on the back end, they weren’t going to have to put everything together and crunch the numbers and you know, but to your point, to your point, getting in there. I love what you said about I wrote it down about I still want to be in the thick of it so I can connect the dots. I can find the insights for myself, because you don’t know what’s going to come up. And if you see a sanitized summary, sometimes it’s not in a sanitized summary, it’s, you know, actually looking at the transcript or reviewing the interview you did, and you find that one line that’s gold, and yeah, AI missed that line.
Kevin Perlmutter 35:45
I know right? That’s, yeah, that is. I that finding that gold. And I’m in the middle of working with a client right now, and I’ve just conducted 20 interviews with their key external stakeholders, and I’m in that moment right now where I am looking at a large screen of all of my notes. I have all of my questions down the left, all the people I interviewed across the top, and I’m looking in, down and across, and I’m highlighting nuggets. And like, I love that. And AI is not going to interpret those nuggets the same way that I’m interpreting those nuggets, no. And to your point, about, like, the time it takes, you know, I one of the wonderful things I was able to do in my book is from interviews that I had, from my podcast that I was running for three years. I interviewed brand leaders during that time, and I have quotes from brand leaders about a lot of different things. So I was able to use quotes from people who are not consultants like me, but actual people who are brand leaders at a company with a brand and a product that’s being sold. And you know, one of them said, I asked why some people ignore and under leverage the power of emotion and emotional insights. And I got answers like, because it’s hard work, because it takes time, because you actually have to spend time getting that information, and you all don’t have the luxury of time or patience. And I’m like, okay, yeah, don’t, right, do the same as everybody else.
Maria Ross 37:06
Yeah, well, and it’s also, but it’s also about building. You’re taking the time to build trust as well. And that’s where I love this conversation, because this is where in my own head, I ping back and forth between the pros and cons, and I’m like, if I can spend more of my time on the building the relationship, building the trust, being in front of the person, and seeing seeing on their face, where they light up, yeah, where they get bored, where they, you know, their excitement starts to, you know, like, look at us right now. I know some people can’t see us, that aren’t watching the video, but you know where we start to lean in, and now we’re like, now I’m talking with my hands, and I’m getting excited about what we’re talking about. You can’t see that from a sanitized report. And so what I love to say, and I’d love to hear your take on this, is I’ve said it over and over. So listeners, apologies. You’re going to hear this rant multiple times, but we are coming to a point where AI is it’s here. It’s transforming the way we work and how we do our jobs. And if you are a leader who has shied away from conversations with customers, hard conversations with employees, if you have any preconceived notion that you’re going to be able to outsource that to AI, you are sadly mistaken, because with AI, there’s nowhere to hide. You’re actually your work is going to be those conversations and using those human skills, that’s what’s actually going to keep you employed. Yeah, so you won’t be able to hide behind the tasks anymore. You won’t be able to hide behind the number crunching. You’re going to have to get out and talk to people exactly.
Kevin Perlmutter 38:42
Yeah, it’s so important. And you know, one of the things that I share a lot about in brand desire is not just you have to ask questions, but I talk about the ways to ask questions. What types of questions you should ask? For those who understand the brain a little bit, they’ll know that there’s the difference between the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system, and one has you curling up and, you know, being afraid to answer a question, and one has you leaning in and answering with optimism. So if I was to say to you, Maria, what’s the worst part about the experience your customer, your clients have with you, you’re not going to want to answer that question. But if I said to you, Maria, if there was one thing you could do to make the experience with your clients better. You’re going to light up and have an answer for me, and it’s the same question, just asked in a different way. So there’s things like that that I talk about. There’s there, like when I do these one on one interviews, I suggest in the book, and I in practice, I do not record the interview, and I say to the person I’m interviewing at the head, I’m interviewing you and about 15 other people, and your answers are going to be animized. You’re not going to know. No one’s going to know what you said. It’s going to be part of the answers to this question across everyone. And that allows people to open up when they know they’re not being recorded, when they know that their name isn’t going to be linked to an answer. I. Build trust instantly, and I get better answers. Yeah. So this is part of the behavioral science of the brand work, brand strategy work that people can learn how to do
Maria Ross 40:09
with brand desire. I love it real quick. Explain to us what are limbic sparks?
Kevin Perlmutter 40:16
Limbic sparks are what you feel when emotional motivation meets brand desire. It’s that moment when you encounter a brand and it feels like it was designed with you in mind. When it has you at Hello, you want to bring it into your world. And when it keeps delivering great experiences, you keep bringing it back in again and again and again. So limbic sparks are what we’re going to create that moment people intersect with your brand, and then hopefully forevermore.
Maria Ross 40:42
I love all this. I love that. You know, throughout this conversation, you’re debunking this narrative that people have around. Well, this has a place for B to C, but it doesn’t have a place for B to B. I’m like, there’s still human beings making the buying decision in B to B.
Kevin Perlmutter 40:57
So about to say that, and then you said it, yeah, well, and then yeah, it’s not company to company. It’s person to person.
Maria Ross 41:03
Exactly, exactly. Okay? So as we wrap up, what is one thing that you want people to take away from the book, and who would benefit the most from the book? So two different questions.
Kevin Perlmutter 41:16
Two questions, I’ll answer the second one first.
Maria Ross 41:16
second one first, yeah,
Kevin Perlmutter 41:18
I was gonna do that. So first of all, I this book introduces an approach to brand strategy that is not traditional, rooted in behavioral science. So on the grandest possible scale, I hope to evolve my industry with this thinking. On an everyday scale, it’s allowing any size brand leader, mid size company, small business owner, you read this book and you’re going to have a playbook for what to do for your brand, no matter how large or small your brand or customer base is. So I’m bringing this thinking, this modern day thinking, this modern day playbook, to any size business owner. It’s not just for the largest of the large companies. In fact, I think it can do really well for small businesses and medium sized businesses. And what I want them to take away is what I call I want. What I want them to do is embrace what I call a limbic sparks mindset. And a limbic sparks mindset includes three questions that you should ask at any given time. One is, what are the needs, wants and desires and unmet needs that people have in their life. If you could understand what people care about, what they need, want and desire and what their unmet needs are, jot that down. Get that information however you can the second question is from that understand how do people want to feel? Answer how people want to feel. And then the third step is, what should your brand say or do to make their lives better? What should your brand say or do to make their lives better? So the three steps to embracing Olympic sparks mindset wrap around this idea of understanding how people want to feel and using the answer as your guide. Well, I
Maria Ross 43:00
mean, the work is really a primer and how to better understand your customers and clients. It’s really a you know, whether you’re in research or not, whether you’re in customer insights or not, and we could look at this for any situation where your intent is to motivate or persuade or inspire a group of people. So I would say, you know, and maybe I’m going out on a limb here, even if you’re internal and your audit, you know, let’s say you’re in HR, your customer is the employee. Your customers are the employees. So how can you leverage this approach and this framework to bring them along when you have to implement change, when you have to roll out new policies, when you have to, sort of, you know, when you’re ready to offer a new program, you’re really launching those things with internally, right? So you really are.
Kevin Perlmutter 43:54
And something that I talk about in one of the latter chapters in the lead section of the book, yeah, is a chapter called championing customer centricity. I have this little chart where I show that customer insights can actually be the one thing that a brand leader brings to the table to align everyone and create success for people internally and externally. Because if you arm your organization at all levels with everybody having their unique motivations, their unique emotional motivations and KPIs and objectives. HR, customer experience, production, marketing, the CFO, whatever it is, if you have the customer insights to show them what they need to be doing to be more successfully, successful outside the company right then, in turn, if they do that, customers will have a more successful experience when they encounter your brand, which will feed the beast with sales, right? And you know, that’s the role that brand leaders can play. Customer Insights are their greatest competitive advantage for aligning people internally and having successful and happy customers externally.
Maria Ross 44:59
Yeah. I mean, this is why, when I have done my brand projects in the past, the group that’s in the workshop is not just marketing, it’s stakeholders from all across the company, because you’re changing the conversation of how everyone in the company understands the customer and how they understand their role in delivering the experience to the customer, and also they have a different viewpoint on the customer and on the product that they bring to the table. When you’re able to synthesize that and then map that to the customer experience and the insights that you get, it supercharges everyone, and it’s why I have always felt that brand strategy projects are transformation projects. Because you are, you are fundamentally changing the way the company talks and walks and looks. And what role does everyone within that company play in that transformation?
Kevin Perlmutter 45:53
Absolutely, you used the word earlier that I love, which is beacon. And what I feel is that the brand ideas that we develop in the work that I do with my clients, whether it’s be supply chain invincible, yours to discover, for the 18 foreign Arts Center, a material difference for some these brand ideas become a beacon internally and externally, because they are inherently a brand benefit and invitation. Yeah, the company needs to keep delivering on that promise. Oh my gosh, I love
Maria Ross 46:24
that so much. I mean, this is why taglines don’t just pop up out of the sky like they have to mean something. So thank you so much, Kevin. I We could talk for hours. I know on our mutual love for brand and for customer insights, but we’ve got to go. So thank you so much for your time today and your insights. Everyone. Check out the book. Brand desire spark customer interest using emotional insights. It’s a great read, and we’ll have all your links in the show notes, including a link to the book. But for anyone on the go, where’s the one best place they can get in touch and find out more about you?
Kevin Perlmutter 46:59
The one best place is brand desire book.com wonderful. It’s a page on my company website. It’s all about the book, and then the rest of my company is there. I’m also on LinkedIn. Perfect. Brand desire books.com is a good first start.
Maria Ross 47:13
Wonderful. We will put that link, of course, in the show notes. And thanks again. It was great to see you. Thank you so
Kevin Perlmutter 47:19
much for having me. So great to be with you,
Maria Ross 47:21 and thank you everyone for listening to another episode of the empathy edge podcast. If you like what you heard, you know what to do. Please rate review and share it with a friend or a colleague, and until next time, please remember that cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy, visit the empathy edge calm there. You can listen to past episodes, access show notes and free resources. Book me for a Keynote or workshop and sign up for our email list to get new episodes, insights, news and events. Please follow me on Instagram at Red slice Maria, never forget, empathy is your superpower. Use it to make your work and the world a better place.
