Allen P. Adamson is a noted expert in all disciplines of branding. He has worked with a broad spectrum of consumer and B2B businesses in industries from packaged goods to hospitality, technology to healthcare. His previous books, including BrandSimple and, more recently, Shift Ahead, are used as textbooks in higher education business programs nationwide. After holding senior management positions at Ogilvy & Mather and DMB&B, Adamson joined Landor Associates, a full-spectrum brand consultancy, and eventually rose to chairman. Under his leadership, the company partnered with global brands including Accenture, GE, Johnson & Johnson, FedEx, HBO, Marriott, MetLife, P&G, Sony, and Verizon. Additionally, he guided non-profit organizations such as the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. For the past several years, he has been an adjunct professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, where he also serves as the brand expert-in-residence at the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship.
A sought-after industry commentator, Adamson has appeared on ABC News, NBC’s Today, CNBC’s Squawk Box and Closing Bell, and Fox Business Network, and is often quoted in publications including The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Advertising Age, and Forbes. He is co-founder and managing partner of Metaforce, a disruptive marketing and brand consultancy that takes a multidisciplinary, channel-agnostic approach to driving growth.
His latest book, Seeing the How: Transforming What People Do, Not Buy, to Gain Market Advantage, was published by Matt Holt/An Imprint of Ben Bella Books (May 2023).
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Before discussing Seeing the How, here are a few general questions. First, was there a turning point (if not an epiphany) years ago that set you on the career course you continue to follow?
While in university, I spent a semester studying in Amsterdam. I lived with a Dutch family, rode a bicycle to class, and was lucky enough to visit impressive museums, try great breweries, travel around Europe, and see life from multiple perspectives. It was a powerful growing experience. When I returned home, I went to thank the Department of International Studies people for providing me with such an incredible experience. In my conversations with them, I learned that they needed help finding students for programs in even the most amazing European cities.
Given that the tuition was not the issue, I wondered why students weren’t lining up to sign up for this remarkable opportunity. Why weren’t students enthusiastic about the chance to live and study abroad? Why was there a marketing problem? This so intrigued me that during my senior year I took a marketing elective and decided to make this issue my term project. What I came to recognize was that in marketing, facts don’t always make a sale. I discovered you have to dig into people’s mindset for insight. In this case, it was that students were comfortable living their lives on campus, hanging out with their friends, going to athletic events and concerts. It was their comfort zone, and they didn’t see the benefit of changing the game plan. My project was hands-on schooling in marketing. Facts are not enough, and marketing is not linear. You need to know your audience and understand barriers to acceptance. You need to understand what is relevant to consumers, and how a product or service fits into their lives, makes it better in some significant way.
Here are several of my favorite quotations to which I ask you to respond. First, from Michael Porter: “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”
Knowing what “not” to do is a key to success in marketing. Sure, you can do a lot of things and be pretty good at them, but no one will notice. The best organizations and companies succeed because they focus on doing what they know they are great at doing. Success, be it in business, in a civic organization, or in any initiative, is about executing things brilliantly. No matter what the initiative, the project, the objective, you have to be all in. If you’re into something from 9 to 5, staring at your screen, you will probably do OK, but you will not be great. It’s not enough anymore to offer up what are called “table stakes.” This is the price of entry. You have to offer way more than what is expected. As my friend Thomas Friedman says, this takes a combination of high PQ – passion quotient, and high CQ – curiosity quotient. Average is over. Do what it takes to be brilliant at whatever you do.
From Maya Angelou: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
As people – as consumers – our first reaction to something is on an emotional level. From a pure marketing perspective, brands are a collection of associations, or feelings, that people have about a particular product, service or organization. Branding is the process of getting consumers to feel one way or another. Relative to this, the most important marketing tool is word of mouth on social media. Word of mouth reflects how people feel about an experience. People share experiences far more than product features. More than this, no one shares ordinary, only extraordinary. “Here I am white water rafting. Here I am at the Jonas Brothers concert, Here I am in London.”
Obviously, you want your brand to provide an extraordinary experience.
While I love my Apple products I would never have talked about them on social media. But I had an experience at the Washington, DC., Apple Genius bar that caused me to share a story on social media. A deaf Apple employee helped me with my air pods. I talked into his iPad and another Apple associate translated my words to sign language. It made me feel great to work with him, and of course, I shared it on social media.
From Theodore Levitt: “People don’t want quarter-inch drills. They want quarter-inch holes.”
What Levitt was stating here is one of the most well-known dynamics of marketing. It’s not about the product, per se. Consumers want to understand the benefits of a product or service – how it will make their lives better in some meaningfully different way. Your marketing should be focused on the benefits – demonstrating an honest understanding of consumers’ needs and wants. Consumers want solutions to problems. Great brands solve problems. The drill is a drill– but will it give consumers the quarter-inch hole they need to get the project done? Good marketing, good branding communicates solutions, not product features.
From Charles Kettering: “If you’ve always done it that way, you’re probably wrong.
We are all creatures of habit. That said, the number one reason companies – and people – can’t keep up with today’s accelerating pace of change is that they get comfortable doing things the way they have always been done rather than looking at the road ahead and shifting strategies appropriately. I often refer to this as the “Marty Crane effect.” For those who may not know the television series, Frasier, Marty Crane is the guy who moves his scruffy, duct-taped recliner into the stunningly sleek living room of his son, Frasier, upon coming to live with him.
Whether in business, or life, it’s just natural to want to hang onto things that are in your comfort zone. The world is evolving faster than ever before. To be successful – to stay successful – in marketing means continuously looking ahead and identifying ways to maintain relevance in order to keep a competitive advantage.
Now please shift your attention to Seeing the How. For those who have not as yet read it, I hope your responses will stimulate their interest and, better yet, encourage them to purchase a copy and read the book ASAP. First, when and why did you decide to write it?
One of my favorite activities is heading down to Washington Square to the NYU Stern School of Business, where I meet with groups of students at the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship. Four or five years ago, more than a few students of mine encouraged me to listen to this NPR show called “How I Built This.” When I next had some downtime, I explored the show and its library of episodes. It didn’t take long before I was hooked. It quickly became my routine to start my day listening to Guy Raz tell the story of how brands that have companies and products that are now everywhere started their journey, and the challenges they faced.
After many pleasurable hours listening to the podcast, it struck me how so many of these new businesses over the last 5-10 years found their success not by inventing something new or developing some new technology. They hadn’t contrived to bring to this world the newest and best mousetrap. These companies had, instead, looked at what was going on in the marketplace and saw an opportunity to take what I call an “off-the-shelf” idea or technology and reconfigure it in a way that would change the way people were doing things.
The fastest-growing segment of the marketplace is comprised of companies that identify “how” the routine activities of daily life can be made better or more convenient.
Were there any head-snapping revelations while writing it? Please explain.
When I started my career in marketing at Unilever, the focus was on the product. In fact, my title was Product Manager, and my role was to take a product developed in the “lab” and figure out how, and to whom, to market the product. Marketers are the ones in the organization who are most focused on what consumers want and need. We are charged with getting inside the consumers’ heads and determining what’s important to them.
It was early in the research process for the book that I had my “a-ha” moment. It struck me that, given that the marketing team is closer to the customer than anyone in the company, it is marketers who should be leading the charge to find experience-based, not product-based, innovation opportunities.
To what does the title refer?
“Seeing the How” refers to the process by which innovative people, entrepreneurs, “see how” the stuff we do every day can be made better in a significant way – and how others can use this process to see opportunities for themselves. A product is a “what “consumers purchase. “How” refers to how the product or service fits into people’s lives. How it changes what they do, how they live, and how it benefits them. Whether it’s how we bank, how we shop, how we travel, how we dine, how we pay our bills – there is always an opportunity to “see how” something can be made more beneficial. Seeing the How provides readers with lessons on “how” this can be
done.
My own opinion is that, in essence, marketing is a process by which to create or increase demand for whatever is offered for sale or trade. To what extent is this true? Insufficient? Obsolete?
If you Google “marketing,” I suspect that the definition you will find is that it is “a process to increase demand for a product.” That definition is still valid, but the book’s purpose is to demonstrate that the classic definition is insufficient. Marketers will miss many opportunities to grow their business if they don’t look at the total experience of interacting with a product or service. Good marketing today is about more than increasing product sales. It’s about creating an experiential eco-system that reinforces competitive advantage at every consumer touch point.
You “take a closer look” at real-world situations — of customer experiences — with different companies that include Amazon, Apple, Delta, Ford, Netflix, and Warby Parker. What do they share in common in terms of how they interact with current and prospective customers? Which seem(s) to be most effective at (a) seeing the HOW and then (b) leveraging it?
All of these companies zoom out beyond the product to look at customer interaction at every point of touch. For example, Delta in the past was more focused on their “product” ….the plane. A few weeks ago, they updated the app to tell customers how long it will take to get them to the gate, factoring in TSA times, walking distance, lines at the gate, and the like. Before they would have just told customer the flight is leaving at 10 AM from gate 22 B. Now they provide a “Waze”-like experience to get them from the curb to the boarding gate with as much information as possible.
Of course, the same has been true of Apple for some time. Yes, their products are spectacular and, yes, for most they are so intuitive that one never needs to read the instructions. But, they, too, have been focusing on the users’ life beyond the product. Just visit a Genius bar or call Apple Support.
Here’s a question I have been eager to ask you since I first read Seeing the How: What did you learn about yourself while creating it — what did you “see” — that you had not previously realized?
It reconfirmed that I do my most productive thinking when not in front of a computer screen but rather when exploring and learning about new “things.” At Landor, my days were scheduled back-to-back going from one meeting to the next, one call to the next. In between I jumped on the computer and tried to “check the box” of getting through as many emails as I could. There was little time for learning. But then, during Covid, when my schedule opened up a bit I would listen to a few podcasts while walking down the street in between Zoom calls. And I started to jot down some ideas. Then after a few more meetings, instead of getting on the subway to go to a client I would go for a run and think about those ideas. Then I would write them down in a bit more detail.
I realized the importance of zooming out and leaving time to think and kick ideas around vs double click and reply to one email after another. Call it personal brainstorming.
Marshall Goldsmith asserts that “what got you here won’t get you there.” My own opinion is that what got you here won’t even allow you to remain here, however and wherever “here” and “there” may be defined. What do you think?
I love Thomas Friedman’s take on Marshall’s perspective with regard to the speed of change and a hyperconnected world. I have often spoken to Tom, who is an internationally renowned author and recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes, about the marketing ramifications. If you cannot continuously change, learn, and deliver excellence and only do average work, you will not succeed.
Here is how he puts it:
“It is not enough anymore even to say ‘I’m not routine.’ You have to be creative non-routine. Think like an artisan. Do your job every day as if you brought so much extra to it you want to carve your initials in it. Think of yourself as a work in progress – needing to learn and relearn and re-engineer for your whole life. In the hyperconnected world, average is officially over. As they used to say in Texas, “if all you ever do is all you’ve ever done, all you ever get is all you ever got.”
When companies attempt to “transform what people do, not what to buy, to gain market advantage,” what are the most important dos and don’ts to keep in mind?
It’s hard to teach old dogs new tricks. As I said before, people are creatures of habit. The technology for remote work like Zoom and Microsoft Teams has been around for a while. It took the disruption of the pandemic to change how business was conducted. Don’t assume people won’t change the way they’ve always done things. Offer them a better and more compelling option and they most certainly will.
As for “dos and don’ts, first and foremost, you have to prime your eyes to see opportunities others have yet to notice. Look at the world from different perspectives. Reimagine your brand or category, not through a product or service lens, but through an experiential lens. Bring a little Jerry Seinfeld-esque “Have you ever noticed…” to the situation. Be willing to point to and talk about the obvious, the things staring us in the face and that no one sees.
Also, diversity matters. One set of eyes on a situation or idea or problem will rarely net the results of a group of eyes all looking from different places, ages, experiences and expertise. Once you’ve seen an opportunity, seize it – but, be sure you can deliver on it brilliantly.
In your opinion, which of the material you provide in Seeing the How will be most valuable to those now preparing for a career in business or who have only recently embarked on one? Please explain.
It’s in the up-front section of the book, “Get ready for experience innovation,” that readers will be introduced to the ideas that can stimulate new business or growth opportunities. It provides tips on how to really see how consumers and customers are living – and how to reimagine and leverage these situations in order to make them better or more convenient. Readers will learn why consumers are open and ready to do things differently, and how to rethink the experiences
that dominate our daily lives.
To the owner/CEOs of small-to-midsize companies? Please explain.
For both small, medium, and large businesses, Seeing the How is a valuable guide on how to see and leverage opportunities to make the things people do every day better in a significant way. It will help readers look at the marketplace with fresh eyes and from different perspectives enabling them to identify opportunities for growth and sustainable competitive advantage. It will explain how businesses are becoming successful, not the result of product innovation, but experience innovation. It does so with both case studies and prescriptive guidance.
Thank you, Allen, for your insightful responses.
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Allen cordially invites you to check out the resources at these websites:
His homepage link
Amazon link
Metaforce link
Allen’s YouTube videos link