Hey everybody and welcome back to another episode here of the daily grind today We have an awesome interview lined up for you all we're joined by Alan Adamson Alan is an entrepreneur marketing expert author and we talk about a lot of different things in this episode As always be sure you have a pen piece of paper sit back really dive in today If you're a business owner if you're looking to start a business Alan provides really amazing and actionable steps to truly help you on your journey in your business Along with that He is a new author for actually a four-time author but of his new book shift ahead which we talk about a little bit stay tuned Everyone hope you enjoyed today's episode with Alan Adamson Do you ever feel like there's something interfering with your happiness or is preventing you holding you back from achieving your goals? For me, this was my past I kept using my past as a crutch to not move forward and an excuse and it wasn't until I started to talk about it with a Professional that things really changed and I transformed and this is why I love this company better help better help We'll assess your needs and match it with your own licensed professional therapist You can start communicating with them in under 24 hours now. This isn't a crisis line. It's not self-help It's a professional counseling service done securely online The best part about this is guys is that you don't have to worry about driving in a location sitting in an awkward waiting room Not knowing who you're talking to like you to pick your counselor you to do it from the comfort of your own home So it's really comfortable and super discreet for you and you can really open up what I find when I'm in the comfort of my own home I open up in ways I never thought I would and there's a broad range of expertise in better health counselor network Which is definitely not available for you in your local area and the service is for clients worldwide All you do is log into your account anytime send a message to your counselor and in a short matter of time You get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule a weekly video or phone sessions So again, you don't have to sit in the waiting room You don't have to book a week out you can do this whenever you're ready better help is committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches And they make it super easy for you and free to change counselors if needed so if you're not jiving with someone Or they're not jiving with you.
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How are you terrific? Thanks for inviting me? Of course for people being first introduced to you today if you wouldn't mind Alan's kind of explaining us to who you are what you do For everyone's name. Yeah, I'm I'm in the business of helping people and companies build their brand Which I define is their story But they want people to take away when you hear your company name or your your own name And then how they could do that through better branding Which is how they signal their story and that could be advertising it could be social media It could be the logo on the front of the business card.
It could be Many many ways as everyone knows to get your story out there and both are interrelated You gotta have a clear story you want to get across and then how do you get it across? Changes by market by day by category and by communication change. So let's take a step back How long have you been doing this work? Many years I started on the marketing side at a company called Unilever Which makes a lot of consumer goods those soap and other things which was a good place to learn marketing because despite what?
Many people say it's hard to tell the difference in one shampoo and the other one soap in the other And so if the products are pretty similar a lot comes down to marketing and how you tell that story and how you communicate it to make you think that That is better than Ivory and after doing that for a number of years. I went over to the advertising side and I worked with another large consumer company Global Procter and Gamble and did and did help them with communications and then for the third part of my career I went to a firm called Landor which was a brand and branding firm But more of a consultancy to help clients figure out how they should position themselves in a market They should position their business and sometimes big companies needed to be reimagined whether it was VP or FedEx or others And then we would help them tell that new story to the marketplace Got you and then how long have you been on your own for about three years? I set up this organization called Metaphors Which is sort of a special forces team of senior partners and we look at client challenges from multiple perspectives each coming out of a slightly different background And then we can fit it to once we have an idea as to how to Enhance a business competitiveness to a great team of implementation specialists from advertising to social media to digital to PR and on down Got you. So I mean you had a successful career you're working for a lot of great companies learning a lot Why start something on your own what drew you to start metaphors?
Well big agencies and big companies are struggling big agencies in particular They're struggling because today you need to be far more agile and big companies like big battleships are hard to turn around And ultimately it's having the right talent for the right problem And again big agencies are struggling to keep the best talent loss of the best talent is independent these days And being able to tailor teams to suit a client's need it seems like the right time and ironically we started off as a virtual We had a couple offices in San Francisco Seattle in New York But we were somewhat more virtual and now of course with the dramatic change in the world in the last six months or nine months Being virtual is not as big a difference as it was when we started two years ago two and a half years ago So you start two and a half years ago How long did you have the idea in your head that you were gonna do that well even Atlanta We were struggling for how do we get the right people to play against the right problems and to be other right people in the Cincinnati office The Chicago office at the New York office at the San Francisco office So it was already challenging back then and lander was owned by a large agency holding company called WPP and they owned JWT Young the Rubicon they had lots of companies and what we found difficult or I found difficult within WPP was to get those individual companies to work together because everyone had an individual profit center and so The notion of tailoring a team with multiple perspectives was hard to do in a very large structure organization So I began to experiment it with with that idea of Landor and then I decided to write another book called shift ahead Which focused on why so many people know you have to change to stay relevant But most people most companies struggle to change struggle to stay relevant and why you know why the theory is easy Why why so many people struggled to shift their business head and it was a year and a half project I co-wrote it with a colleague at NYU business school and we did a lot of research looked over a hundred companies some had successfully shifted Many had not big company small companies for profits not for profits And it really was a great foundation to sort of look at why staying relevant is easy in theory, but hard in reality Why do companies struggle to shift like through all your research? I know there's probably a lot that goes into it, but Yeah, the first the first obvious one that most people realize is we are all creatures of habit Everyone is more comfortable doing what they did yesterday than trying something new tomorrow And we categorized it somewhat as if it was an old TV show in the US called Frasier and Frasier's dad had an old chair and he kept that old chair Frasier's and you know we found as many many people go to the office every day open the emails do their same thing talk to the same people They talk to stop at the same coffee shop every morning Say hi Bill how's things are going they get very stuck in the familiar and comfortable and when you're that stuck You know in that doing something new is hard to see and it's hard to do So human nature is more comfortable doing with it what I did yesterday yet shifting ahead requires you to do something different So that was a big one that everyone starting in the end zone if you would With a big handicap and then the other big one is that most organizations big companies all started too late the time They started to think about maybe shifting their business is when sales starts drop sales start to drop Customers started to go away and once you're on that downward slide your business is shrinking You're losing clients. You're losing customers then to try to say oh, we got to try something new You're already behind because it's really hard to try something new and you have to anticipate It's gonna take Murphy's law It's gonna take longer than you think it's gonna be harder than you think and if you're running out of money and you can't take any chances You're gonna be more risk-averse and you know So many companies big and small just wait until the sky is falling before they do something and then that's really hard Or they are so uncomfortable with the rest they can't try something new we did the numbers big company many years ago toys Are us went bankrupt But you know they you know for years toys are us knew that people were changing what types of toys They bought how they bought them Amazon was killing them And so the company knew for eight years that they needed to change but internally they were looking at two choices Do they go with a high-end boutique toy store or you could go in they had a flash at the door in Times Square Or you could ask the sales person what's the best toy for an eight-year-old boy and the sales person would know or they go with a cheap Warehouse where everything's piled to the ceiling and no one's knows and they try to compete with Amazon So they built both models and they kept on researching it and they were a deer in headlights They couldn't decide and at the end they didn't execute either and both, you know vaporize So many times figuring out which way to go is not obvious and a lot of companies are nervous about to go left or right So they play both angles and tell almost so much time has gone by that the opportunity has changed or that they're too late So first point so how would you determine like how is a company would you suggest that one determines? Whether it's a it's an avenue in which they should they should test it right because I mean there's a lot of ideas being thrown out They're looking to change.
How do you determine if one's right for you to test or one's not usually both Or right to test you know the trouble is if you agonize do I try both and I'm not sure not It's likely neither alternative is right and doing both if you don't spread yourself to think and learning and assuming you're gonna have to pivot It's gonna give you a higher chance to succeed than overthinking and say well Do I do you know French rise on Tuesday or milkshakes on Wednesday? Let me think about it I'm gonna do French rise on Tuesday and even if you do French rise on Tuesday, it's probably not right But you're gonna have to most times you're gonna need to iterate to a new solution and getting out and trying something You're gonna learn more even if you fall on your face than sitting in the conference room and mapping What's what um? So there's no real like right, you know the right flow. Yeah, well certainly start early Yeah, yeah another major finding which is so obvious to everyone But it's hard when you're there is it most people are really focused on the competitor right in front of you So if you've got a dry cleaning shop, you're looking at the one across the street And if they offer a buy one shirt clean one free, you're gonna do that You know and everyone at that it happened to me when I was working and I worked with Gillette and Gillette was totally preoccupied with check And I work with Pepsi and Pepsi you know every day there was discussion of what's doing and as you know All those companies got into trouble not so much from the person right in front of them But there's somebody in their peripheral vision or behind them so Gillette didn't get shaken out by check It got you know, they're clocked clean by Dollar Shave Club.
I don't know what Pepsi is not getting their clock clean by Coke It's getting they're getting attacked by waters and healthier beverages and smaller brands from the outside So, you know a lot of big companies or small companies are very focused on what I call you know They were playing tennis I play tennis badly, but you know when I play badly one of the things I try to do is really pay attention to What my competitor is and try to hit the ball whether or not. I'm totally focused on the competitor When I play golf badly even worse, it doesn't really matter if I watch my competitor What really matters is how well I hit the ball am I paying attention to the wind and you know So if business could play more attention to what's going on around them seems obvious as opposed to just being preoccupied Because there's also a belief if you're very focused on your competitor that oh John knows what he's doing I'm gonna do that and you get into myopic view of the world really quick and most likely if you're gonna run into business trouble It's not gonna be from your direct competitor Sometimes it is but a lot of times it's gonna be from someone you're not even looking at off to your side That's gonna you know eat your lunch got you So what's I mean you mentioned some companies that you've done work with what's like an ideal company that you work with like What types of companies do you you help? We tend to help companies that don't have an obvious Problem where you can say what do you want from your customers? And I say I want better tasting food and you make better tasting food and they come most of the time I we work what I call solving non-linear problems where all the choices look bad You know the customers say one thing and do another so typically problems that require more than just two plus two is gonna Give you four and most businesses the challenge is you can't ask customers what they want because as Steve Jobs famously told us if no one Could have envisioned I want an iPad you know You know sometimes you know they see the world or often they see the world through the world They've lived in and can't tell you what's around the corner.
So Companies that that have a challenge. They're not usually not growing and they're not growing and they've tried the obvious They tried you know a few you know polishing things and shining things up and a little bit of emotion and what worked last year is not working This year those are good clients because it requires some non-linear problem solving something out of their Wheelhouse to figure out what to do not just oh just do a promotion and tell people the price is down 15% Got you so when you go in I'll do like two parts maybe to this question What's the first thing you look at and then how long would you typically spend with that customer or client? Well the first thing of course you like in any situation you you can quickly go in and speak to the leadership team and find out What do they think what do they've tried? What do they try that's not worked and why haven't they tried some things that?
They've thought of but they've decided not to do so and from that assessment you can pretty much quickly see I are they being so myopic are they only looking for the same sorts of things or they really trying everything under the moon and boy? You know this is gonna be a tougher one So we usually start with some interviews is to talk about what you've done not so much what led to your success because most people are pretty comfortable talking about how I built the business how it came but yeah a great It is but get them to talk about more of things They've tried that haven't worked get them to talk to their customers And the next step would be to do some customer perspective not so much asking people but we are more believers in watching people either when they shop online digitally or Because consumers often give you the socially acceptable answer when I was in the ad business And we would show some commercials, you know that a focus group everyone say oh, I don't watch I don't believe in advertising. I never listen to that and you know, you run the end of course sales go up So, you know, I'm a really big believer that Jerry Seinfeld would have made a good marketing consultant If he didn't make a billion dollars on sitcoms because he was pretty good and is pretty good at observing Isn't that strange the way people you know lose a sock and a dryer and why is that last taco was alone? You know to be successful in marketing.
You have to sort of look at what is and say hmm You ever wonder why people line up to check out instead of checking? Yeah, so we try to do a little bit of observational and Research into customers not so much answer four questions about you know What's important to you in the tuna fish sandwich because you know, most most companies know the answer to that and most people Just go on autopilot and give you what they think you want to hear or what's been done for years You know, they don't see around the corner So there's a lot of when you're going through that research and you're kind of looking into the customers and trying to determine kind of their Behavior is that a lot of that is that a lot of data? You're looking at some data But sometimes you need some stimulus to get people to look at the world in a different way Which is you know, you can ask them open end of what would you be interested if we were gonna do a new dry cleaning store And then they would tell you but you learn more if you then quickly said well here are three ideas We're thinking of for new dry cleaning stores. Here's this one We'll pick up your laundry Here's this one where you know, we spray your shirts So they never get dirty again and here's this one where we give you two shirts clean for the price of one And they all could be different ideas bad ideas But when you start showing them what ifs you get them thinking about what could be and you get them participating in the ideation process Not so much telling you the way it's always been and you know Why you don't like that company because they're not friendly on the phone or whatever So we often create some stimulus to act as a catalyst to get people to Zoom out a bit and to help you envision what could be different not so much tell you what's in the rear view mirror Otherwise if you do a lot of research most of it's in a review mirror Which will confirm why you're in this space and tell you why customers don't like you anymore and tell you what you've done badly in the past And all that's nice to know but insufficient to solve the problem interesting So I mean a lot of people who are listening right now are you know, they're working at a company say maybe they're starting a business And I think one of the most important things you've mentioned this word a bunch of times is how do you differentiate yourself from one person to another Especially in 2020 because a lot of people are doing the exact same thing So how would someone what are some questions maybe that they need to answer?
Where's some things they need to look at in order to help them start to look inside and realize what differentiates them from everyone else? Yeah, one of the things we'd like to do early on which goes back to this is Exercise is say map your customer journey with somebody's gonna do business with you if you've got a carbental or you've got a home painting company You know how to write down the you know, how they find you how's that first call goes? How do they how do you price it? Do you send them a an email with a prize do you send a proposal do you go see them in person in a different time in place?
Yeah, and get all those touch points because there's a conversation lots of innovation happens when people look at touch points and reimagine And I mean many many examples of it. You know, what am I? You know favorites is a classic But most people look at it and don't even pay attention when Apple set up the genius part There was no there were some retail stores the sole computers But there was no one you could go to in a retail setting that could tell you how to work the computer Oh, and and so that that touch point didn't exist. They invented that.
Oh, and yes They did a lot of other things and many many other reasons are feeling Apple success But I would argue that that additional touch point has dramatically differentiated their brand experience over years No matter how shiny Samsung's phones are or LG's phones all the spring is like the same But you know, if you have a problem Who's gonna help you solve it? So you look at touch points and think of new touch points and also think of what happens if if things change dramatically? That's another one I For a lot of time very big categories and often asking your Your your client to make up if you were gonna totally reinvent your business and had to redo it from scratch How would you start it off again? Would you have a store in every corner?
Would you you know put all your money into into into one touch point? So then we look at those touch points have those conversations and you know one of the first things we also try to do is that people have a Many many business folks have a check the box mentality. Oh, we have a website. We've done some social we create some content You know, I'm on LinkedIn I we have a nice logo and that used to be pretty good, but the problem is that everything is okay averages over You know the most important touch point that that's dominated our marketing for the last 10 years is word of mouse or word of I would you share with your pictures on your phone?
But and no one shares everyone talks about how do I go to an idea to go viral? How do I win word of mouth and again the strategy is really easy no one shares ordinary if you have an ordinary you listen to an ordinary podcast It was okay. Yeah, somebody said how was that podcast? All right?
It was pretty good. If you have a terrible podcast You know, you could be sure that you know, you'll have a whole bunch of things like don't ever listen to that I was reporting this but if you have a great podcast I learned three incredibly important things you got to listen to this podcast Then you know so getting away from the check the box mentality and doing a few touch points better And so maybe you don't redo your website. Maybe you don't you do your design system Maybe you don't but the one thing you do do try to figure out how you can really do that extraordinarily well How can you create your own genius bar and not just have a service desk to answer questions on technology? That's so important.
I mean you touch on so many different things there But especially now like that checkbox mentality that people have it's I equate it to you know You do what Jimmy did like, you know, like Jimmy does all that. I want to be Jimmy So what does Jimmy have and I'm gonna try to like match what he does right? You just copy what the competitor does and you do what you do the exact same thing and by definition if you do what your number one competitor does Exactly the same way the best outcome is you'll do half as well as that competitor the best the more likely outcomes will be invisible Because you'll have nothing that will track people to say hey, we should take a look at you know Jimmy's hot dogs and why they taste better so looking into what you do what are some touch points that you found you do really Well over the last two and a half years that have gotten your business to where it is Usually Creating some disruption at some overlooked touch point Whether it's going back and you know marketing another thing that goes on and marketing which I'm sure you see as well We do besides this. Oh, we don't we've done this we check the box and do everything is a lot of marketing is like watching seven-year-old Play soccer.
Yeah, everyone's chasing the ball. No one's on defense And so if there's a hot new thing in marketing everyone is doing that everyone's saying oh I got it You know influencers. I got to do influencers. I've got to do social And those are all true Yes, if you those are important channels But if everyone's trying the same thing and you're not particularly good at those things or if you have an influencer approach But you have no money to get the right influencers or not a way to do it And so you get the guy down the corner who's gonna be influencers and your competitor has real influencers You know, you're gonna lose so you know going to some touch points that have maybe fallen out of favor So we often say let's look at your packaging.
You know is it clear? Yeah, let's look at your customer service experience It's something so we try to not just Jump on the bandwagon and say oh, you know Here's the top three things to drive word of mouthless. You know, what are you doing? You have to pay attention You may need to tie on those and do as well as Jimmy down the street But you got to have one that you're gonna win on and sometimes it's it's going back to the future It's looking at some touchpoint that others are overlooking or just deciding to do okay Well, you can do it extraordinarily well really interesting Because you've been doing this for so long obviously we're in a time now That's it's a lot different and say over the last you know many years What are some of the biggest differences you found in marketing in order to capture people's attention?
How is that behavior changed? Well, I actually think it's gotten much harder to do marketing That it used to be in the madman days when I started because back in those days There were a couple options you could you could do some advertising you could do some at that point It was called public relations, which is you know social and you could do some promotion But there were four or five levers and the issue was how do you push them and can you do that now? You know, there's so many more touch points plus consumers are incredibly more distracted You rarely get a chance to talk to a customer For 20 seconds without them doing something else or getting distracted They've got another screen open, you know So the importance of being able to cut to the chase to get your story simple and fast Has never been more important if you I'll tell you this one of the quick story It's always been key that the best communication of the best breakthrough was based on a simple idea when I started in in advertising It was pretty young and I went into the Creative teams office and I said look I've done there's a coffee brand. I said here's a three-page email It's everything you want to know about this coffee I've spoken to customers and it's Colombian beans and it's bruh right and the creative director the team flipped through the three pages And they highlight a few things and really really thorough job You told us everything possible about this coffee you've done so much homework It's really very impressive on and then the team ripped off the corner of the page the top quarter and hand me back a little scraps They said now when you can figure out what you want to say that fits on this one corner Come back here and don't ever comment to this office with two and a half pages of information So today, you know if you look at great advertising, I know World is more than advertising but if you look at in the us the Geico commercials that are funny And you know part of reason they can break through is because the strategy their story is so damn simple You know that 15 minutes can save you 15 percent now There's much more they tell that is owned by Warren Buffett and they do motorcycle insurance But if you can't start off that story in a really simple way You can't do breakthrough anything And so you know while that principle is the same what's harder now is that everyone's distracted There you have instead of four choices.
You have 20 choices But the principle is still the same no matter which choice you do if you can't get your why you should eat jimmy's hot dogs down To the 15 minutes will save you 15 percent. You know you won't be able to do a website You won't be you won't be able to do anything in a way that will break through Interesting Are there's some tools that that people say listeners can use in order to help them with this Because I mean you can listen back to this episode 15 times and probably learn something new Which is awesome for everyone But is there something that you would kind of direct people to in order to start to answer some of those important questions themselves Yeah, you know to some extent you don't need any outside help to do this I often when we're meeting with a financial service company or whatever the company we ask them put Each benefit of your company or your product on a small In the days of face-to-face meetings you know index card one benefit per card And so they often be sitting at a desk in a conference table Each of them would have eight or nine or ten cards in front of them That did 15 percent cheaper that is owned by Warren Buffett that they do motorcycle insurance that they've been a business 75 years That they have a location you're gonna have all the and I said now let's you know those are great You have your 10 cards 15 cards 8 cards whatever it is put them in a triangle What's goes on top was the first thing you say and then because you can't figure out how you start the story No one's ever going to get to hear the rest of the story So getting and then you with a group of four or five executives when you find out everyone has a different pyramid Oh, and they can't agree on anything and to some extent the best marketing is also done when there's a single-minded idea and Really famous David Ogilvy who was a founder of the ad agency I started with said was you know look around all the city squares and town parks and you won't find any statues to committees And you know big companies are run by groups of people and it's really you know to do great marketing You need to make a choice You have to say no to a lot of good things and pick one thing To get behind And so the first exercise is get your products benefits or your service on individual cards one per id And then see if you can put it in a in order and and and start with that because if you try to tell everyone everything As you know you'll end up communicating not much to anybody 100 percent. So let's talk about obviously like lastly here You work with companies so you're more of an employee role. You're working with companies head on now Now you run your own business firstly how big is the team you have right now?
They're 12 partners got you have 12 partners. What has the difference or what has the transition like been for you to move from Working for others to now more of a leadership role You know to some extent The process is pretty similar the challenge for a small business Is that when I was in a large company that had been around 50 years a lot of reputation a lot of The phone would ring and say hey, you know, I've heard about you 10 years ago when I was at a conference in San Francisco You know, can you come see me and show me what you've done for FedEx or show me what you did for When you're in a small business much harder, you know, the phone doesn't ring a much You've got to build your external visibility. You've got to get out and talk more. You've got to get out and Uh, make sure people know what you offer how you do things and why you're different Uh, and you don't have the same tools of yours to build a reputation.
Um, and uh, you don't have the same, um, um, uh, Scale to be able to execute so you have to pick things that you can execute well, so Uh, it's been the good part is it's less about Discussing, you know, what are we gonna do next quarter or two years from now? There's some of that discussion and it's more about look here's here's the business We've got in house here the proposals that we've you know, got some conversations on You know, here are some people that have reached out and asked us some questions You know, how do we each take some of those and figure out how to get people on the journey from I've heard of you You're sort of interesting you understand my business I like your approach tell me what you want to do and then do it Yeah, very interesting if people wanted to to reach out connect with you. Where's the best place everyone can do that? Um, yeah, Alan at metaphors.com or you could you know, the power of google you can put my name in or my books and everything's connected Um, I think that's still the easiest way is to search by name and or by company Awesome.
And where are you most active on social media people want to follow along on your journey learn more about you what you're doing? Mostly linkedin. Um, uh, Uh, uh, of course everyone has to participate in a lot of social media, but uh, Uh, uh, the only Adamson on snapchat or my kids so No TikTok for ya a little bit of TikTok is it's a tricky thing because there's so much great content there That you get in front of a whiteboard and saying let me explain to you how you change your business It's probably not going to uh break through the algorithm. You got to work on those dance moves so you can like exactly Awesome.
Well, uh, Alan. I'll share all those links to make it super simple for everyone to connect I can't thank you enough for taking time out of your schedule sharing your wisdom and uh with the audience here today I really do truly appreciate it I enjoy talking with you and look forward to speaking some time in the future And there you have it for today's interview everyone. Hope you enjoyed it If you did all I ask is you share this out with a one person that you feel like could truly benefit from today's episode Thank you much. Thank you so much to better help for sponsoring today's episode If you want to sponsor the show just visit callamorgon.biz We'll be back next week with another amazing interview until then callamorgon signing off and always remember to keep on grinding