2495 - Why Emotional Insight Beats Feature Lists in Brand Strategy with Limbic Brand Evolution's Kevin Perlmutter

Kevin Perlmutter, founder and Chief Strategist of Limbic Brand Evolution, joins Josh Elledge on The Thoughtful Entrepreneur to talk about building brands on emotional insight. Kevin Perlmutter, author of Brand Desire, says customer insight is a brand's greatest competitive advantage, and a why without a who is half the equation. In this episodeLead with emotional insight. Kevin wrote Brand Desire to put what customers feel at the center of how companies attract and keep them. Find what people want to feel. For a divorce specialist's clients, Kevin says, it came down to one line: everything will be okay. A why needs a who. Kevin calls "what's your why" half baked as a brand strategy framework when it ignores the customer. Ask your customers. Conversations and reviews show why people choose you, and Kevin says it won't be what you think. Questions this episode answersWhat is the book Brand Desire about? Kevin wrote Brand Desire as a modern brand strategy playbook for company leaders, founders and brand leaders. It puts emotional insight at the center of how companies attract and retain customers, instead of proof points and feature lists. What's wrong with starting with why? Kevin says it may be a great leadership principle, but as a brand strategy framework it's half baked. Without knowing who your customer is, talking about your why is like talking about yourself all night at a bar without asking the other person a single question. How do you find out what your customers care about? Kevin points to customer conversations and reviews. Ask how they found you, what they would miss most if your brand disappeared, and what one reason they would give a friend for checking you out. A standout quote“So your customer insight is your greatest competitive advantage.” Kevin Perlmutter About Kevin PerlmutterKevin created Limbic Sparks Brand Strategy and launched Limbic Brand Evolution in 2019. His site lists more than 25 years helping brands evolve, including work with Interbrand, Made Music Studio, Publicis, McCann and Hampel Stefanides. His book is Brand Desire: Spark Customer Interest Using Emotional Insights. LinksLimbic Brand Evolution website https://www.limbicbrandevolution.com/Kevin Perlmutter on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinperlmutter/Full article and transcript on podverified.com https://podverified.com/post/2495-emotional-insight-brand-strategy-kevin-perlmutter About The Thoughtful EntrepreneurThe Thoughtful Entrepreneur is a daily podcast where Josh Elledge talks with founders and business leaders about what is working right now. Want to be a guest? Apply at podverified.com/podcast https://podverified.com/podcast. Curious how podcast hosts see you as a guest? Get your free PodVerified Score https://app.podverified.com/start.

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  You're going to find other people who want to experience those same feelings and benefits. So the your customer insight is your greatest competitive advantage.

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  Welcome to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur, the show where I talk with business owners about what's working for them right now. I'm Josh Schellidge. Today, I'm joined by Kevin Perlmutter, founder of Limbic Brand Evolution and author of the book Brand Desire. Kevin's big idea is simple. Most businesses talk about their features, but customers buy based on how something makes them feel. I have been talking about Kevin's episode with a lot of people in my day to day. I really love this episode. You're going to learn how to find out what

• 0:50Speaker 01

  your customers really want to feel and the easiest research tool there is. And if you go on podcasts to grow your business, please get your free Pod Verified score. It's free. It's like credit karma for podcast testing. So you could stop wasting your time reaching out to shows that you should not be spending your time on. It shows you how to pod, it shows you how podcast hosts see you before they ever say yes. Now that is at podverified.com. Here's my conversation with Kevin. With us right now, Kevin Perlmutter. Kevin, you are the Chief Brand Strategist and founder

• 1:33Speaker 01

  of Limbic Brand Solution, and you are the author of the book Brand Desire. I am so excited, Kevin, to speak with you about the work that you do. I think it is so critical, and I think it is such a huge gap that I see with a lot of founders. I look at a lot of, I look at a lot of founder websites when I do this podcast, obviously. And I think you nail a big, kind of, like I said, a gap big enough that I think we could drive a truck through. But we're going to talk about that in just a moment. Kevin, thank you for joining us.

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  Thank you for having me. And I'm so appreciative that I'm here and for your enthusiasm for what we're about to talk about. Thank you.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  For sure. Before we get into that, you know, one thing I love to talk with other leaders about is the things that they are enthusiastic about when they are not at work. Usually phrase it in the sense of, what are you geeking out on lately? And so I understand you've got a really fun hobby. Tell me, tell me about what you do.

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  I build furniture. I've been building furniture for decades. I built this piece behind me, this bookshelf. I built this maybe two decades, maybe three. This is something I do all the time. In this past couple of months, I've built two pieces. I built a coffee table that's in this room that I'm in right now. And what else did I build? Oh, I built

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  over years, I built a bedroom set. So I built the headboard a few years back. And over the summer, early in the summer, I built these side tables that match. And a couple of weeks ago, over a three or four day period, I built a bed frame so I could get rid of the box spring and actually have a matching frame for the mattress. So I've been, one of the things that I love, love, love, love about this is, is just custom designing pieces for my home and finding things that are, that my, that my family will find useful. And we have converse creative conversations around utility and design and I build custom pieces to spec, basically based on, and one of the things that I bring into it that is

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  so in parallel with my career is a new tool and a new skill on every job. And I started that, I mean, I don't do it as much now because I have a lot of tools and a lot of skills. But I started that decades ago, and it made, it makes it so much easier to do things when you bring in new tools and learn new skills. The next time you do a project, you've already got that banked and you can do that stuff easily and build onto something new. And you start collecting a lot of ways of doing things. And this coffee table that's in front of me here that you can't see, might have taken me a couple of months, years and years ago, I built it over five days, a couple of weeks ago. So.

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  Oh, my gosh. Well, how cool is that?

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  It's a lot of fun.

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  I guess it's like, you know, I can't imagine, what does your shop look like?

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  I have, I have a shop that has a lot of good tools in it. I've got a table saw, I've got radio alarm brand. So I mean, I got, I got all kinds of stuff. I got lots of toys.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Oh, boy. Yeah. And, and do you find, you know, I've talked with other people that do, you know, a lot of woodworking and furniture building, and it's meditative, you know, kind of like, you know, I kind of, I'll do a lot of work out in the yard and the property and, you know, plants, I got an herb garden and stuff like that. And, you know, that's just my moment of zen, you know, and I'm, I'm engaged in work, but it's not, you know, it's work for me. And I just, I feel afterwards, I feel like I just had like a, you know, like a 20 minute meditation session afterwards.

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  Absolutely. This is how I know what you're saying is absolutely true. I am a, I'm a two time a day habit coffee drinker. I have coffee first thing in the morning, and I have coffee at around two o'clock in the afternoon. And if I don't have my afternoon coffee, I start to feel it. I will be in my wood shop on a Saturday, and I'll be working for hours and hours. And I will emerge from my wood shop covered in sawdust at four o'clock and realize I forgot my two o'clock coffee. That, that's, that's deep in, that's deep in a zone that's different from every other day.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  I love it. Kevin, I'm so excited to talk to you about your book, Brand Desire. Now, I will share, I think it flies in the face of a lot of conventional thought, particularly when we, well, we'll get into it. I'm just going to tease our audience here about something that we might think is kind of the holy grail of, you know, our values or how we define our businesses. I think you know where we're going with that. But do you mind just kind of beginning with Kevin, just an overview of what brand desire is? And of course, you know, is associated with the work that you do through Limbic Brand Evolution?

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  Yep. I wrote Brand Desire to be a modern day brand strategy playbook for company leaders, founders, brand leaders. It puts emotional insight at the center of how companies attract and retain customers. And that does fly very much in the face of traditional approaches where emotional insight is not often considered or prioritized. There's a lot of things happening in traditional approaches that have been going on for a very long time that people have learned through school decades ago, people have learned through their mentors more recently, that are rooted in approaches to advertising, marketing and branding that

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  predate the internet, where it was all about proving to people with proof points and reasons to believe and unique selling propositions and an actual language, language that takes you down the path of sitting in a conference room and thinking, how are we going to prove to people that they should be buying our stuff? What are the features that we should be talking about that we've designed because, you know, we think they're going to be compelling? Those are all important things to know. But what's equally or more important is understanding what people actually care about and desire in their own lives with or without your brand? And how can you find the relevant intersection between the two? So what I'm helping leaders

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  solve is understanding more about their customers. What are their emotional motivations, the drivers of their decisions and behaviors? And what is it that they care about in their own world so that their brand is out there in a way that is reflective and personally relevant to the people they're trying to reach, not just what they decide in a conference room, they should be selling?

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  One example that really stood out to me was you're working with, you're working with a divorce law firm, and the emotional, the shared emotional motivation came to, and get this, this is the, this is the marketing message now for a room of lawyers. And the emotional motivation was, this is their message to their audience, everything will be okay.

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  Yes.

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  How did you get a room of attorneys to accept something that's?

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  Let me, I'll be honest with you, that, that's, that's a client that goes back to some of the earlier days of my business about six, seven years ago. And it wasn't a whole room full, to be honest with you. It was a, it was an individual specialist who focuses on working with people who are getting divorced and helping them through the legal and financial situation. But I spoke with this person about what she does and how she helps people. And I understood from her customers, the people, her clients, the people she works with, what it is they're thinking about going into the situation,

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  and how it is that they are feeling when they go in, and what it is they're motivated to try and accomplish. And how can this professional invite people into a situation that will make them feel comfortable and that they want to be a part of? And everything that I'm doing with my, with my clients, no matter what client, no matter whether it's a single person helping divorcees, or if it's a large global corporation with, you know, tens of thousands of employees and many times more customers, what I'm helping them do is understand what people care about and what motivates them. So they could present their brand in

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  a way that has a benefit and invitation to what they've discovered people want to feel. And for this particular client that you mentioned, when, when they're going through the situation, they're faced with tremendous unknowns, in addition to a heavy emotional time and.

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  So raw in many cases.

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  They're, they're, they're, someone is leaving the home. They're breaking up finances. They have doubled the expenses as opposed, you know, between them. There's so much uncertainty that all they want to know is at the end of the process, they will be okay. And, and when she understood that that was the emotional motivation that people were striving for, it changed the entire way she put her brand out there to help people feel that way from the beginning. Everything will be okay.

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  You push back on the start with why movement. Walk me through what you call who's your who and why the why question sends brand leaders down the wrong path.

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  Well, I think, I think for your listeners, the majority of them are familiar with the what's your why question.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

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  It's very famous. It's been around for what 15 or so years since the book came out. And it's taken, it's taken hold in corporate America and especially with smaller companies, I think, because people hear that and they're like, that's so smart. It's brilliant and the golden circle and all this wonderful stuff. And, you know, like, if we just tell people what we're passionate about, what we're, you know, what we're in the world to do, they're going to come running to us and, and that's heavily, it may be a great leadership principle to inspire people in your organization and inspire people maybe outside your organization, but as a brand strategy framework,

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  it's half baked because what's your why in the absence of who's your who is, it's half the equation.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

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  In order to really like, like, imagine, imagine, Josh, you were, you were at a, at a bar, this never happens, I'm sure. You were at a bar and you were trying to meet someone and you started talking about, you know, Pod Verified and what you do and what you're passionate about and, you know, these wonderful interviews that you had and all this stuff you're talking about, but you haven't asked a single question to get to know the person. You haven't figured out how your conversation can both be about you, but also be personally relevant to the person who you're talking to. You're just continuing to talk about who you are and what you do and what you're passionate about. And meanwhile, the chance of an emotional connection is slipping away. And, and, and people are starting to get a little bit bored because this

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  guy's just talking all about himself and like, we don't. So when companies enthusiastically embrace what's your why in the absence of understanding their customers, they're missing the mark. They're, they're, they're potentially overshooting what people need to hear about, and they're missing things that people would want to hear about to be inspired to learn more and inspired to go deeper in a conversation or a relationship.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Fascinating, you know, and this tracks so much with a lot of, you know, I know I've recently I was, you know, kind of doing a deep dive on the spotlight effect and, you know, there's that aspect of it. And, you know, everybody's the star of their own show. And, you know, I remember back in the day, you know, you know, kind of this everyone's favorite radio station, what's in it for me, you know, WII FM. It's really old school.

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  Yep, yep, yep, yep.

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  And I'm like, yep, apps 100%. And, you know, it's amazing how often that, how easy it is to forget that. What's the pressure coming from most founders or marketers that we don't exercise that level of empathy for others?

• 14:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, and there's, there's so many places to get the information. There's so many ways to get the information and it's an often skipped step there, maybe it's, it's seen as too time consuming. It's, it's seen as just something that, that wouldn't be as valuable because we know our customers is a common way of thinking. And the amount of insight you can get from customer conversations, customer reviews, understanding what people are going through, what, how they found you, why they found you, what would they miss the most if your brand disappeared? If they were to refer you to, to a friend or a business colleague, what would be the one reason why would they would say, you gotta check these

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  guys out? What is their superpower? What do they do differently than other people who do exactly the same kind of work or, or is the brand offer that's different than other brands that offer the same thing? And, and these questions can be asked very easily in a qualitative setting or quantitatively, you can look at customer reviews to understand what people are saying. And here's, here's the thing that I, that I help people understand that they can apply to their work. If you can find enough information and find common themes for why people are choosing your brand, one, it's not going to be what you think. Two, it's going to be more emotional, the experience that they're having with

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  you every single time, it's going to be the experience versus the features that you're prioritizing in your marketing. And then lastly, if you can aggregate those benefits that they, that most people are feeling for why they choose you and turn them into your core benefits in your marketing, you're going to find other people who want to experience those same feelings and benefits. So the, your customer insight is your greatest competitive advantage. It, it'll turn your business, even if it's a commodity, even if it's, even if it's a law firm, working with people who are divorced, who are, there are a dime a dozen out there, can turn your messaging into something so

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  personally relevant that people feel like I've got to work with this company.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  Wow. I am so grateful our paths crossed. I am absolute, I'm going, I'm buying, I bought your book already.

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  Thank you.

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  I am going to implement with my team, because this just absolutely tracks, you know, because we learned some time ago, you know, who our ideal client was, and, and it was a lot of people in their 40s on up who are very good at what they do. And, but the sentiment was, you know, I feel like, or I always felt like at this stage of my life, I wouldn't have to work so hard for visibility or to make impact to audiences. And at this stage, it, it, it feels bad that it still feels like a little bit of an uphill battle. I'm really good at what I do and I'm very, you know, this is what our clients are saying, I'm very generous, I love serving and I don't like yucky marketing. And so that's what we learned and, and it's amazing to me that I've kind of

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  forgotten that in, in some of, you know, a lot of the language that we use. So, thank you. Kevin, I want other people to, to experience this same transformation in their business as well. So let's make sure that they have some great next steps that they can follow. Now, certainly your website, you know, to our friend that's listening, we have this all linked up, to our friend that's listening, go to branddesirebook.com. And Kevin, when they go there, do you, do you mind sharing what they're going to see?

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  Yeah, of course. Branddesirebook.com is a page on my company website. It's the page that features my book, Brand Desire, with information about what's inside, what you'll learn, where you can find it, the usual kinds of stuff. And then it also, of course, it's one page, so it links to other pages. It links to pages that talk about my consulting practice, Limbic Sparks Brand Strategy. There's a page that is called, How I Can Help, and that includes a couple of other things. I've, I've written a course that can be purchased and, you know, it's just a, it's a company website and you could find out all about me and the various ways that I can support businesses, learning what I'm here to teach.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Kevin Perlmutter, your website is, is branddesirebook.com, which will take them to Limbic Brand Evolution, which is your website of which you are the founder. Kevin, thank you so much for the work you're doing. Thank you so much for sharing your insights.

• 18:59Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me, Josh.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Thanks for listening to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If you're new here, welcome. Every episode I talk with business owners or leaders about what's working for them right now. You'll find the full article and transcript and lots of other resources for this episode at podverified.com. There's a ton of free stuff for you there. Now, if you run a business and you have a story other owners should learn from, I'd love for you to apply to be a guest on The Thoughtful Entrepreneur at podverified.com. And if you go on podcasts to grow your business, I'd love for you to get your free Pod Verified score.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  It's like credit karma for podcast guesting, so you can know exactly the caliber of shows you should be aiming for, so you can get your message out to the masses, you can grow your business, you can make the impact you deserve. All of that is free at podverified.com. It shows you how podcast hosts see you and I would love to support you. Now, I'm Josh Elledge. Thanks for spending time with us.