BRAND DESIRE – Spark Customer Interest Using Emotional Insights

This Book is a Modern-Day Guide to Brand Strategy, to help you put emotional insight at the center of how your brand attracts and retains customers.

 

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“This book is a call to action for all brand builders and marketers. Discover how to build a brand that truly connects with your customers on a human level. The future of branding is emotional.

Are you ready to lead the way?”

Ruth Gaviria - Foreword Author
Chief Marketing Officer & CMO Advisor

  • BRAND DESIRE is for anyone who is responsible for a company's brand — how it presents itself, the experiences it delivers, and how well it works to attract and retain customers.

    Whether you’re a CEO, CMO, Brand Manager, Consultant, or Student, you’ll learn how to spark brand desire with emotional insights using Limbic Sparks® Brand Strategy.

  • Each BRAND DESIRE chapter will inspire you and teach you how to move beyond the limitations of traditional brand strategy. You’ll learn about the three steps to sparking brand desire – Focus, Connect, and Evolve – and you will become a believer and practitioner of the idea that understanding and addressing how people want to feel, will be what sets your brand apart. Whether you’re doing the work yourself or guiding your team, you’ll be able to put this emotion-centric mindset into practice every day, even when a big brand evolution is not underway.

  • "We buy on emotion but justify with logic." This inextricable link between emotion and desire is fundamental in human behavior, but it's not an insight that most business or brand leaders apply to their work, and it's a big, missed opportunity for all kinds of companies. Too much "what's your why?" Not enough "who's your who?” Despite good intentions, so much brand activity is stuck in the persuasion era, and lacks deep customer understanding and relevance. BRAND DESIRE will help you embrace a Limbic Sparks Mindset, so you can address how people want to feel, and evolve your brand to ignite interest and spark desire.

  • Foreword - by Ruth Gaviria, Chief Marketing Officer & CMO Advisor

    Preface

    Part I:  Feel

    1 – Evolving Brand Strategy

    2 – Shifting from "About Us" to "For You" - AT&T Performing Arts Center Case Study

    Part II: Focus

    3 – Discovering Emotional Insights

    4 – Finding a Durable Competitive Advantage - Sundless Case Study

    Part III: Connect

    5 – Developing Brand Benefits & Invitations

    6 – Turning Customers into Heroes - Blue Ridge Case Study

    Part IV: Evolve

    7 – Designing Brand Expression & Experiences

    8 – Amplifying the Most Compelling Brand Benefits - Scratch Event DJs Case Study

    9 – Differentiating on Brand Experience - ServiceByte Case Study 

    Part V: Lead

    10 – Revealing Emotional Insights with Research

    11 – Championing Customer Centricity

    12 – Sustaining Ongoing Brand Evolution - Rise Case Study

    13 – Embracing Your Limbic Sparks Mindset

  • Kevin Perlmutter is Chief Strategist and Founder of Limbic Brand Evolution, a brand strategy consultancy which puts emotional insight at the center of how brands attract and retain customers. He works with business and brand leaders to create stronger connections between their brand and the people they want to reach. Throughout Kevin’s 30+ year career, including his time as Senior Director of Brand Strategy at Interbrand, he’s worked with dozens of top global and regional brands in various roles and has consistently guided the development of more effective methods for brand evolution and engagement.

Check Out These Wonderful BRAND DESIRE Reviews!

Paco Underhill, Global Best-Selling Author of Why We Buy

Branding, like retail, is in a constant evolution-Kevin Perlmutter gives us 21st century coaching.

Flavia Barbat, Editor-in-Chief at Brandingmag

Kevin is a thought leader you can trust. Recognizing our industry's need for experts who do more than identify strategic gaps, he offers the practical guidance to fix them by openly detailing his entire approach to more effective branding. I'm among his biggest supporters because he's honest and willing-qualities I look for in the people who I listen to and learn from.

Dominik Prinz-Barley, Head of Brand at Google

This book shines a light on one of the most powerful (and most overlooked) principles in marketing: Only if you truly understand what moves people and their behavior can you be a builder of great brands and businesses. Brand Desire reveals precisely how to act on this simple and timeless human truth.

Stephan Gans, SVP, Chief Consumer Insights and Analytics Officer at PepsiCo

Perlmutter's Brand Desire insightfully catapults brand strategy into a new era-one that evolves from persuasion-based approaches to creating meaningful connections rooted in the emotional drivers of customer decisions.

Nancy Harhut, Co-Founder & Chief Creative Officer at HBT Marketing, and Author of Using Behavioral Science in Marketing

The smart, new way to spark brand desire. Perlmutter reveals exactly how any brand, big or small, B2B or B2C, can identify and implement emotional insights to refine their strategy for attracting customers. Brand Desire is an indispensable compass for marketers, as well as brand and business leaders.

Barry Martin, Branding Consultant and Adjunct Professor of Consumer Behavior at New York University

This book is a masterclass in unlocking the emotional drivers of consumer behavior-offering insight and inspiration far beyond any textbook. Perlmutter blends human understanding and real-world application with clarity and heart. He outlines an intuitive and practical guide for creating emotionally intelligent brand strategies. Brand Desire is now on my consumer behavior class reading list because it captures what students need to understand most.

Craig Albright, Chief Executive Officer at Valera Health

Perlmutter's Limbic Sparks approach is unique, and helped my company evolve our branding to better connect with the underlying emotions of our most important stakeholders. Whether you're a branding veteran steeped in marketing and behavioral science, or an executive looking to strengthen brand credibility and relevance to your customers, Brand Desire simplifies the process with real world examples that translate to practical application in organizations.

Dr. Jez Frampton, Adjunct Professor at University of Westminster London Business School, and Former Global Chief Executive Officer at Interbrand

In an age of influencers and exponential messaging, brand clarity and emotional resonance is ever more important. Great brands have always captured our hearts and Perlmutter's approach forces us to seek deep customer insights, while embracing the science of emotion, to accelerate sparks of connection.

Rajiv Pancholy, Global Chief Executive Officer and Brand Practitioner

Brand Desire shares clear direction that will enable any CEO to uncover blind spots in their brand strategy. These are not just conjectures or ideas-rather, actionable pillars of brand management that I've found to be indispensable in steering organizations internally, so that the brand delivers the best possible experience for customers externally.

Michelle Niedziela PhD, Neuroscientist and Behavioral Science Consultant at Nerdoscientist

Perlmutter's focus on aligning the emotional motivations of customers and brands is a great reminder of what really drives successful branding. His Focus-Connect-Evolve model adds structure to emotion-centric branding, echoing key principles in behavioral science. Reading it was a joy and even made me reflect on how emotion shows up in my own work.

Della Mathew, Executive Creative Director at 22Squared, formerly with Ogilvy NY, Arnold Worldwide NY, and Publicis NY

As a creative lead, I know that there's nothing more frustrating than being challenged to create effective marketing with a less than helpful brief. Kevin's Limbic Sparks approach to understanding the “who” reminds us that emotional impact is often why people respond and remain loyal to a brand. It's those nuggets of customer understanding that feel like a secret cheat code to elevate the work with emotional storytelling that connects.

BRAND DESIRE - Back Cover Summary

Ignite customer enthusiasm for your brand and open new opportunities for business growth, by discovering and addressing what matters most to your customers.

BRAND DESIRE gives you the tools to accelerate your brand growth by delivering a detailed strategy playbook that puts emotional insight at the center of how brands attract and retain customers. At the heart of this book lies a simple yet powerful premise: brand leaders who understand and address the emotional motivations of their customers lead the brands that thrive.

Drawing on insights from behavioral science that rarely feature in brand leadership initiatives, this modern-day guide to brand strategy will help business and brand leaders move beyond the limitations of traditional brand strategy. This book shares real-world examples of how this approach has been put into practice through the eyes of brand leaders who have benefited from using it, from companies such as the AT&T Performing Arts Center, bulletproof material manufacturer Sundless, social services nonprofit Rise, the world's leading corporate DJ booking service Scratch Event DJs, IT managed service provider ServiceByte, and supply chain software company Blue Ridge. It also shares examples of emotionally intelligent brands such as Lemonade Insurance, Trader Joe's, Zappos, Cutco, Bose, and Ben & Jerry's.

Reading this book will enable you to understand how you can put emotional intelligence at the center of your strategy to spark brand desire and strengthen customer-brand connections.

You Can Buy Your Copy of BRAND DESIRE Today

Shipping from Bookstores Everywhere in July 2025

Only at Kogan Page - Get 25% Off + Free Shipping (US & UK) + Free E-Book - Use Code: KOGANPAGE25