Kerri Konik is a leading expert, consultant, and speaker on how to catalyze the emotional bonds between customers, brands, and companies to increase revenue, value retention, and advocacy. Kerri has launched and managed six businesses and is currently the CEO of Inspire Fire, a woman-owned brand marketing advisory firm. She is also the CEO of Equality Communications Group. In this episode, Kerri discusses why she chose her field, the importance of understanding the emotional driver of your customer and what emotions you want them to experience when they use your product or service, the four experience stages she helps her clients create a roadmap for, the value of bringing your potential customers to a state of possibility, the most powerful question she asks her clients, and more!
Mentioned in this episode:
- Inspire Fire
- Inspire Fire on Instagram
- Kerri Konik on Instagram
- Richard Branson’s Book | Screw It, Let’s Do It: Lessons In Life
- Video Insight: The Top 10 Emotional Motivators
Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Transcript
Hey, hey! It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. Today, I have with me Kerri Konik who is a leading expert in maximizing the ROI of emotional connection and customer experiences. I’m super excited to talk to Kerri today. She is a consultant and speaker on how to catalyze the emotional bonds between customers, brands, and companies to increase revenue, value retention, and advocacy. Kerri has launched and managed six businesses and is currently the CEO of Inspire Fire, a woman-owned brand marketing advisory firm as well as the CEO of Equality Communications Group.
Andrea: Kerri, it is great to have you here today on the Voice of Influence podcast.
Kerri Konik: Hello, hello. Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be with you.
Andrea: All right. I love emotional connection. Love this idea. Why does this topic of emotional connection? Why did you choose this topic? How did you get started here?
Kerri Konik: Uhh, well, I started working with brands and products, consumer products, and groups back when I was in New York, and I worked with the New York Times and I worked with Campbell Soup and services as well as products. The most valuable component beyond having an item of value, an item of quality is how people feel about it, which became branding, right? What is the brand relationship between your customer and your product or your service? And yeah, it does a thing, you know; let’s say you bought a shoe polisher. Yes, a polisher or shoes. It’s a quality product. It does what it’s supposed to do, but the relationship actually lives in how they feel about what you enable them to be able to do because of what you did, if that makes sense. So, I start to notice of the most important piece to a brand or a brand’s growth, and this is true for startup brand or a very small solopreneur type brand is the customer connection. And that connection is an emotional connection. Like after it’s all said and done, how did they feel now? Are they like totally in love with that experience? Do they refer you? You know the quote by Maya Angelou, “People won’t remember what you said, but they’ll remember how you made them feel.”
Andrea: Absolutely.
Kerri Konik: Yeah, so it’s like, “Yeah, yeah, I got the shoe polish and it was great in it polished my shoes. But what it did was it enabled me to look awesome on that stage and I felt like one million bucks. So what it did was it raised my courage and my confidence so I could go full out.” So that’s an emotional _____ what we call the emotional solution you really provide.
Andrea: I love that. It seems like it is not the easiest thing to achieve though. How do you help or what do you suggest or how do you approach this whole idea when somebody calls you and says, “Kerri, we need help connecting with our customers so that they actually feel like whatever we want them to feel like.” Or do they even know what they want them to feel like when they contact you?
Kerri Konik: Usually not. That’s a great, great question. And actually it’s really, really easy to unpack and get at it once you know what you’re looking for. Like if you’re going fishing and you know exactly what fish you’re looking for and how they like to swim and if you know the behavior of the fish. So, what happens when we do get those phone calls where they know that their brand or the experience was transactional and one thing, you know, they bought it and they were satisfied. It was like, “Yeah, that’s great.” “Yeah, it was fine. Thanks.” But there’s no emotional connection like, “Oh my God, I have to tell my friend Andrea about this.” There’s no like emotional experience.
So, one thing I say is there’s always an emotional transaction before there’s a commercial transaction. So, what we do is we _____ with the brand and we get at the core of the brand identity. And there’s four components to that, so we help them look at in what problem do you solve to your product, to your service, and who’s your audience. Who do you solve it for, and that’s the most important piece. And then why do you do what you do and that’s more for the business owner or the brand purpose. And then we look at the why, which is why do you do that, but we look at the _____ behind it and that really helps fuel the brand. But we look at the emotional solutions like, so what’s possible? And I just demo that a little bit with you, Andrea, with the shoe shine. It’s like, “Yeah, I bought shoe polish.” There’s nothing very emotionally connected about that, right? It’s transactional. It’s like “My shoes are scruffy. I wanna look good on stage. I have to buy this, you know, $6 item.
But, oh my God, the packaging was incredible. The customer service was great. They helped me match my shoes. And when I got on that stage, I knew I looked like one million bucks from head to toe and I love Kiwi,” or whatever the brand might be. And so that love figuring out in the core four of the identity, the who, what is your customer emotionally motivated by? So there are two sides to that, a little bit of education here, right? So, on the one side is what’s the emotional driver like your customer, you know, what do they want? How do they want to feel? They should buy a shoe polish. I don’t want a shoe polish today, but here we are. Well, she wants to feel confident. She wants to feel like she’s buttoned up and looks great, right?
So, she wants to feel confident, let’s just say. OK, so that’s her motivator. Nobody wants to spend 6 bucks on shoe polish if they don’t have to. Nobody wants braces either, you know. So, when you get clear about the driver then when you craft the sales experience, the purchase experience, the product unboxing experience, that I just kind of mentioned, and it’s lovely. Or it is in alignment with her or his or their emotional driver and you satisfy that driver, you design the moment what we call the touch point in that experience of buying shoe polish where you design what is the emotional goal of that moment.
And so if you know who he, she, or they are and what they’re after and it’s pretty true across the board why anybody would buy a shoe polish, that’s actually a good example for today. And then when you actually deliver personality or experience or messaging that then resonates and aligns to that, so you’re creating an emotional connection moment that they receive and now there’s a bond and there’s an emotional reaction and an emoting. So, this is where you’re going to say, “Oh my gosh.” You couldn’t see it, but once you see it, you can’t unsee it. We’re humans, right? We’re human beings and we’re actually programmed.
We’re emotional beings. We respond emotionally, first and foremost every time, from the moment we were pre-verbal, inside the womb, inside being a baby, we didn’t have words. We didn’t have language. We had emotion. So we’re hardwired for this. And so once we work with our clients and we work with small businesses and growing businesses, but once we figured out, OK, who are they, what’s the emotional driver and then let’s architect experience to create experiences with the right emotion at the right time then the customer is like in love. They’re so loyal, they’re “Oh my gosh, I would never go anywhere else.” We all have these experiences and I can give you a couple of questions and like boom, I could get you emoting about your favorite brands.
Andrea: Love it. OK, so let’s go back to this example that you’re using with a shoe polish and confidence. So, if in general that is what the customer’s wanting, they’re wanting to feel confident, but you’re saying that there are different touch points at which there might be different emotions that you’re trying to evoke. What other different emotions you might be touching on when the overall emotion is confidence?
Kerri Konik: Uhh, great! OK, so the confidence is what they want for why they’re buying or shopping the category of shoe polish anyway, right? So, they have an event. Usually, there’s a reason they’re buying it, right? Their shoes are scruffy. Their boots are scruffy. They have an event. I used the example of being on a stage. So, maybe someone, and we can shift genders here, maybe he is going for his big job interview up in New York City and he’s taking a train and everything like just came out of MBA or just came out of undergrad, right? Everything’s riding on this moment, right? Think of that anticipation.
Think about the emotions involved with, “Huh, this has to go right. I’m gonna do everything I can. I’m gonna iron my shirt. I’m gonna polish my shoes. I’m gonna press my jacket. I’m gonna dry clean.” So, if you know who the audience is, why would you buy a shoe polish or all these scenarios, but it’s because you want to be spiffy. You don’t want to be scruffy. And so confidence might be one and that’s a really nice broad emotional goal, right? So, that’s the shopping experience. That’s the overall arch, like why would anybody buy that? I’d rather buy an ice cream sundae. Nobody wants to spend 6 bucks or 10 bucks on shoe polish.
So, the question of backing up when you’re a brand and you are a manufacturer of the best shoe polish in the world and when we look at the emotional connection, there are different emotions because they’re not ready to buy when they first find out about you. So, we actually help our clients create a roadmap, you know, you’ve heard the term, the customer journey, where we do emotional customer journeys. We do an ECX roadmap where we start a stage of marketing and we go into the sales process, because they’re not a customer yet, and I’ll walk you through slower. And then the delivery, what’s it like to get it, to buy it, to use it. You know, “What if I’ve never done it before? Are you gonna send me videos of how to do it well from doing it myself?”
And then the loyalty of what we call the retention stage. So the four stages we help with; we look at marketing, sales experience, the delivery experience, and then the loyalty or retention experience. So, for example, I have this big gig in New York City. I have a big important meeting, my shoes, I pull them out, “Oh my gosh, they’re scruffy. I need shoe polish.” So, maybe I’ll take to Google, right? Or I’ll ask my friend, “Hey, where do you buy shoe Polish?” So you’re going to ask and then they become aware of you. And so the marketing stage is they don’t know about you before. They didn’t need you before, now they need you.
So, now they become aware. The different emotions of that journey where if you look at the marketing, if they Google and they find your website or they find your product in Target or they find your product on Amazon, they just became aware you can’t sell them confidence. And we’re not going to look directly at confidence; we create the atmosphere of confidence but they’re not there yet.
Andrea: Can you hold on just a second, because you just said you do not talk directly about confidence, you create the atmosphere of confidence. I just want to pause on that for just a second because I think that’s a really an important thing for people to hear.
Kerri Konik: If it’s OK to switch metaphors, I have a really great example.
Andrea: Go for it.
Kerri Konik: All right and we do this all the time. You have a great keen ear, Andrea, for that because when you’re playing with somebody’s emotions, you don’t go straight at the emotions, especially if it’s a pain point. And the reality is it’s always a pain point because we’re trying to solve a problem when we’re buying something. So, you have scruffy shoes. So, we wouldn’t say if we went head on and we went after the shame that would be a bad idea.
Andrea: Right.
Kerri Konik: So, we said, “Are your shoes scruffy? That’s not very confident, is it?” What you’re doing is you’re shaming, right? We don’t go after the confidence straight. The other example I’m going to give you is we’ve worked with professional organizing brands before where people who hire a professional organizer have kind of lost control of the calm and organization and the peace in their home. And that can be anywhere in the continuum of being just a little bit messy because let’s say their in-law has moved in and their lives have been disrupted or they have toddlers or they added a dog.
That’s one level of being disorganized or having to like reevaluate flow in your home all the way across the continuum to someone who might be a hoarder, right? Well, you wouldn’t go right after somebody who is embarrassed to have anybody come over to their home, doesn’t have dinner parties anymore, doesn’t go out, or doesn’t invite anybody in because they don’t want anybody to see the state of chaos in their home. So, you wouldn’t go right after that shame. What you would do instead is create an atmosphere or you would normalize the problem and say, “We all get disorganized.” This is really sort of an advance, I’m sorry to go there.
Andrea: No, I think this is great.
Kerri Konik: OK. So, and I have a more severe example as well in which everybody can relate to, but you wouldn’t say “Hi, are you embarrassed? Are you ashamed of the state of your house?” So, you wouldn’t do that because someone’s going to run for the hills, right? They’re not going to resonate and they’re not going to feel OK and they’re certainly not going to invite you in to help. But if you say, “Hey, all of us have times when our house gets beyond us, we can help.”
Andrea: Yes!
Kerri Konik: So, you’re talking to the shame, you’re talking to that part of human being who feels really embarrassed, you’re talking to it, but you’re not adding fire or gasoline to the issue. You’re adding calm and relaxation and you’re normalizing the problem. And a more obvious place, let’s say somebody was on a bridge and look like they might want to jump. If you were going to try to help that person, you wouldn’t say, “Are you going to jump?” Say “Hey, hey, what’s going on? Come here, talk to me. Come here, come here.” Like you would kind of try to talk them off the ledge.
Andrea: Yeah.
Kerri Konik: That’s what we do emotionally at different stages of the connection between two people or two parties, in this case, the brand and the consumer.
Andrea: Yes. This is really, really good and it’s really, really important, especially in light of what we’ve tried to accomplish at Voice of Influence. When people want to have influence, they should not be speaking directly to the shame to make it worse. But they should be speaking to the shame to calm it down to say, “This happens to everybody, it’s OK,” kind of helping them.
I mean, I think everybody who’s listening right now can feel how, you know, the difference between the tension that you feel when somebody calls you out on something that’s bad versus saying, “OK, look, we all go through this. This is hard for everybody. I totally understand and here’s a way out.” I mean there is so much more. It’s such an easier path. Like you said, when people feel better, they feel more emotionally connected to you because you’ve made them feel good like you said.
Kerri Konik: Yeah. Like I said, it’s human nature, right? Now that we’ve planned that out, it’s like, “Oh, it’s OK, I get it. I’ve been there too,” if that’s true. But it’s like, “Yeah, no worries. Hey, we help people with this. It’s a temporary situation, so we’ll fix it.”
Andrea: Exactly. Yes, yes not catastrophizing it.
Kerri Konik: Yeah.
Andrea: Not making it like you are this bad person or you are the person who always has scruffy shoes.
Kerri Konik: So, now that we’ve handled that one, the piece about the marketing, when they first discover you, they try literally tripped onto your brand, your website, or your product and they know nothing about you. So, what needs to happen is there needs to be a little bit of, they’re not even curious or interested quite yet. So, the messaging and the connection goal is maybe moving them into a state of curiosity or a state of possibility.
Andrea: Possibility, I love that.
Kerri Konik: Yeah and then moving them into being inspired or excited by buying shoe polish and then you can be like be your confidence self, right? You see this on advertising, a 30 second spot every day, every day. It can be done very quickly, but it’s the right emotional goal at the right time. But the overarching, you know, nobody needs or wants to spend money in that category. And that’s true for most of the stuff we buy, actually. It’s what we want from the thing we’re buying.
Andrea: Oh yeah, absolutely that was so powerful. You just shared so much that applies absolutely directly to the customer experience, but also to our experience of life with people. So that’s fantastic. Why do you care about this topic?
Kerri Konik: Uhh. Well, I’m really, really most passionate. I mean, we can brand or we can do marketing and emotional CX for anything, but I’ve chosen to help small businesses in particular. I used to be a chief creative officer for food, drug, cosmetic, luxury brands, and worked with some of the most emotional icon brands you would all know and aspire to have in your home or in your closet. But that doesn’t really change the world for me. So, when we were working with, you know, really huge iconic brands that are amazing, that doesn’t really change the world or make progress in the world and we can move the needle, we can sell more volume, but where my heart, my passion, and my purpose lives is leveling the playing field for business owners, right?
So people who have the courage to set out on their own and do something that they’re looking to accomplish. So, I shifted and bring all my chief creative officer knowledge from big agency strategies and packaged it up and bring it to the smaller underdog, if you will. And the reason is because I want to level the playing field between the small business owner competing with the really giant marketer. Let’s say you did shoe and shoe polish and you’re going up against Nike, right? That’s like a David and Goliath thing. So, I’m not always for the underdog. But what I’m for is leveling the playing field, so small business owners can not only survive but grow and make the positive impact in the world that they came into make through their business. That’s my why.
Andrea: Yeah. I love that. So when you’re going through and helping people or helping brands to be able to kind of identify what their why is, or maybe they already know what their why is, how does that connect to the way that you helped them with the customer experience?
Kerri Konik: I just had a conversation yesterday with a really fast growing brand in the southern hemisphere. And they’re growing so fast and as you know, at the end of the day, you have to evolve your brand message, your marketing because your purpose needs to be obvious. And that entrepreneur, the owner said, “Well, my purpose is crystal clear. This is what it is.” And I’m like, “Great that you know but the world doesn’t know that, it’s not in your brand messaging.” And so chances are, if a brand has started and they’ve got some sea legs and proof of concept is there and they’re surviving, the purpose is now known. But it’s not in their appearance.
So let’s take a big brand like Apple or Virgin Records, right? You can name the founder of both of those organizations and you can then pretty quickly dial right into what they stand for, right? So what does Steve stands for? What is Richard stands for? That’s the purpose that as the brand grows, it doesn’t become like the core messaging of like trying to sell the sneakers or sell the iPod or sell the computer. But it becomes what you stand for and what you’re about and the possibility that you’re creating.
With Steve, it was about changing the way people relate to each other through technology. And for Richard, it’s in his book the cover, “Screw it, Let’s do it.” It’s about empowering going for it and creating something that never existed before. The pure meaning of creativity, which is creating something that doesn’t exist yet. So, that purpose fuels the brand. And you know, Apple is 45 years old, and I don’t know how old Richard when he started, about 40 years old also, right? So that why becomes bigger than the entrepreneur, it becomes the vision of the brand. So, one of the most powerful questions we ask a brand, and we just put this on Instagram yesterday, is “What are you trying to accomplish? You know, what would you like to accomplish through your company?” Which cuts right to the core of the heart and soul of purpose? “I want to create a lot of computers.” “Why?” “So that people everywhere have a voice and can express themselves, you know.” Boom!
And then as a brand becomes more and more successful, they talk less about product marketing, product promotion, and they talk more about brand marketing. That’s what we really specialize in is elevating the brand, not necessarily the product. So, we don’t do product marketing. We don’t do, you know, the latest sneakers, the latest jeans, or fashion apparel, we elevate the brand. And not the brand story and storytelling, but more about the brand’s purpose and how it changes you and your life. That’s how brands grow, really.
Andrea: Hmm, love it. OK, Kerri, so how do you work or what are some things that you offer? I know that you’ve got a podcast that you’re launching. Tell me a little bit about where people can find you and how they can work with you.
Kerri Konik: Oh, thanks. Well, Inspire Fire is the name of our core brand and we are launching a podcast hopefully in Q4, yes, yes, yes and it’s going to be about customer experience. It’s really going to be about inspiring fire and emotional connection that ROI. What does that mean? How do you do it specifically for small brands so that they can grow and change more lives, make a greater impact, whether it’s just for your own family, your community, or changing the world, you know, however broad or your ripple effect is. So Inspire Fire, you can Google us. You’ll find us on Instagram and our websites inspirefire.com and I’m on all of the social platforms as well. And we love talking to small business owners who are really looking to leverage that big, big, big throttle called emotional connection so that they can like propel their brand forward farther, farther, faster we say.
Andrea: And you mentioned before we started recording that you even have some, it’s not just a matter of we need to do this really big consulting with you, but you’ve also got for small brands, you have something for them to, is that right?
Kerri Konik: Yeah, definitely. The big shift from moving from big iconic brands with huge budgets to small brands with modest budgets is we productize, packaged up our services in what we call Lego modules. And the two we talked about earlier what I mentioned to you is called Calibrate, which is a CX customer journey auditing discovery, strategic initiative that’s really affordable to any small business including a startup. Although there’s nothing to look at it with a startup, right? Not yet. And the other service we do is we architect that Resonance Roadmap where it’s a strategic engagement, but really looking at what is the experience end to end.
And then we can help them with system. They identify systems and processes and automation and digital tools that they need to build. We don’t build those, but we identify those and then we reconstruct or add touch points into what they’re currently doing to really advance the emotional connection. And you know, pricing, it’s not expensive stuff. It’s just adding a moment that’s meaningful and memorable into key stages. So, we always add a stage in the shift between marketing and sales. Because what happens is your prospect or your visitor, their identity changes with you. Your relationship changes in every stage, so we help you look at them. In the Resonance Roadmap, when there’s just a browser, they’re just checking out and they shift into being a prospect.
That’s a different relationship. And what can you do? What should you do there? And then in the delivery, they’ve become a customer. It’s a brand new relationship, right? They decided to marry you or get engaged at least and that needs to be memorialized through meaningful moments. So that’s also a service that even the small businesses can afford to invest in. We’re doing several of these right now and if the brand is up and running, we highly recommend that people do this because it changes who they hire or don’t hire. It puts in systems. It puts in technology, what my friend Paul Sokol calls the Digital Plumbing.
So those services are really affordable. So it’s not branding. And people say, “Well, I know you’re a brand expert. You know, we don’t want to change our brand. We just want to grow our company.” That’s what I’m talking about. The other thing, we also really fix is we laser fix the messaging in the marketing state so that positioning statement lands emotionally. It makes sense to the target audience, phone rings. That is always upside down. We literally flip people’s messaging literally upside down. We focus on making it customer centric and not you, not what we call narcissistic. It’s never about you in all of the communications throughout the entire journey. But how do you say what you’re trying to say in a way that’s about them? So we have a messaging offer as well called the Messaging Matrix where we solve for nine distinct verbal marketing messaging assets, and boom, they run with it and they grow more and then they come back and we’ll do some more things with them.
We try to make really our services are strangely affordable and it’s because like I get it. You know, I’ve started six businesses, and investing in your own brand growth is expensive. You don’t have a line item for that usually, not yet, you need to. We make it affordable and we make it modular so you can _____ then you get the ROI. You know, you sell one or two client engagements, boom, that’s paid for, now let’s do the next one. I just had a meeting before talking to you, Andrea, where they said, “OK, that’s nice to have. You know what we have to do now and we’ll come back and get that in Q1.” I’m like “Perfect.” So you know, we can make it bite-sized or we can take on three-year engagement also.
Andrea: That sounds awesome. OK, so you’ve just shared so much with our audience. I’m so grateful. Thank you so much, Kerri. But I’m going to ask you one more thing. If you could leave this Voice of Influence audience with one tip to help them to grow their voice of influence, what would you say?
Kerri Konik: Getting crystal clear, clarity on who you serve. Who’s your client, it’s not everybody. I know you could probably do something for everybody, like let’s say you work with women. That’s a really way too big. Getting clear on exactly what kind of person, what kind of woman or man, who do you work with? What problem do you solve for them? Once you know who they are then identifying what drives them emotionally. And we have tried actually, I don’t know if you want to offer this to your group. There was a great article in HBR that talked about the 10 emotional motivator drivers and I’d be happy to make that available to you, Andrea, and you could share it with your folks.
Andrea: Sure.
Kerri Konik: But once we know that, you have a lot more insight to grow, because once you’re clear, “Oh, OK, and I sell shoe polish to anybody who has scruffy shoes and wants more confidence.” Boom, that alone, that alone would change and move the needle in sales if you knew that and started messaging and marketing around that, around what you say and who you say it to. And I’m talking psychographically, demographically, where you put that message, where you don’t put that message, who your customer is not, “Come on, stop marketing, stop wasting money,” doing that sort of thing. So that kind of clarity and then you identify their emotional driver and then you look at your own experience and you can architect like what’s it like to call us, what’s it like to buy their thing from us? What’s the sales process look like? Do they come through a register and give you a $10 piece of cash and you give them a thing in a bag and say, buy, you know, what is going on? And then what should go on, right? And then change it, just little steps.
If the devil is in the details, the profit and the gold mine is in the… Every detail sends a signal. If you think it doesn’t matter, you’re killing your brand or you’re killing your sales, everything matters. And you can consciously decide not to handle something, I get it. But everything does send a signal because we are sponges, we are emotionally connected and we’re taking in and creating meaning out of everything. That’s a whole other conversation about what happens with the messages that are going into the brain of your client, but they’re noticing everything, not necessarily consciously. But if you just change one or two things, and every time you get a moment, up-level the next little thing, you’ll see your sales go up. You can add a zero to your revenue, guaranteed. It’s what we do every day. It’s amazing. That’s what I love to do.
Andrea: Awesome! Thank you so much, Kerri! Thank you for sharing your voice of influence with our listeners.
Kerri Konik: Thank you. Thanks for having me.