Brand Experience: An Interview with Allen Adamson, Co-Founder of Metaforce Stephen Shaw 1 year ago <span hidden data-amp-original-style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-heig<P><STRONG>HT:</STRONG> 0;” data-mce-type=”bookmark” class=”mce_SELRES_start”></span><span style=" class="amp-wp-a0319c3"><strong>HT:</strong> 0;” data-mce-type=”bookmark” class=”mce_SELRES_start”></span><span data-amp-original-style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-heig<P><STRONG>HT:</STRONG> 0;” data-mce-type=”bookmark” class=”mce_SELRES_start”></span></iframe></p> <h3><span style=" class="amp-wp-d496082"><strong> Allen Adamson is a leading authority on branding and the author of the book “Seeing the How”.</strong></span> <p>At this year’s Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity NYU’s marketing superstar and provocateur Scott Galloway asked the audience at his packed session to take a red pill.</p> <p>“I think the era of brand is over” he bluntly declared, knowing it would rattle everyone in the crowd whose livelihoods depend on brand messaging. </p> <p>This is the same guy who once said, “A brand is the face of a business strategy”. Has he suddenly become an apostate? Not exactly. He was simply acknowledging what everyone in the room is reluctant to say out loud (especially if they work for an ad agency or media company): traditional brand building through advertising is dead. “People aren’t watching ads anymore”, he emphatically said, adding that “many ads are a tax on the people who are unable to avoid them”. </p> <p>Marketers have always had a tough time distinguishing between ads that generate sales and branding. Or they choose to do one at the expense of the other. They take it as an article of blind faith that consistent brand advertising will eventually lead to revenue growth because they’ve been repeatedly told that mind-share is crucial to converting shoppers into buyers. </p> <p>The problem facing most marketers, of course, is that saying your brand is better or best does not make it so, no matter how large a share-of-voice you may have. And getting an ad noticed, never mind remembered, has never been harder in this age of media fragmentation and clutter. Yet advertising remains the main crutch marketers use to promote their brands, notwithstanding evidence to suggest that it is becoming less and less effective, as Galloway noted.</p> <p>Marketing’s job is to build brand equity but that is not to be confused with brand image. Brand equity has to do with how important the brand is in the lives of people. As the legendary brand expert David Aakker once wrote, “The really strong brands have gone a step beyond achieving visibility and differentiation to develop deep relationships with a customer group – that is, the brand becomes a meaningful part of the customer’s life”. </p> <p>Brands that are on the periphery of people’s lives – that are me-too products – that lack a clear and distinctive identity – that are perceived to be substitutable – are doomed to compete forever on price. Whereas the most successful brands today offer a winning combination of product superiority and an enriching experience. The quality of that experience – the extent to which it becomes a “sharable” story, not just a credible one – is what earns a brand a loyal base of “fans” and keeps customers buying again and again.</p> <p>The challenge, of course, is gaining the confidence of customers that the brand deserves to be a part of their lives. To do so, marketers have to set their sights on changing those lives for the better, argues the noted brand consultant Allen Adamson, whose latest book “Seeing the How” chronicles how various innovative brands were able to do so. The trick, he says, is to deeply examine how people go about their day-to-day lives and the obstacles they face. He says the differences between products are so slight today that the only thing that can differentiate one from the other is the novelty and utility of that experience.</p> <p>Allen began his career at Ogilvy & Mather in 1979. I began by asking what enduring branding lessons he learned then that have stayed with him to this day.</p> <p><strong> Allen Adamson (AA):</strong>: Yeah. The one lesson that I’ve learned, many things, when you first start in any job your learning curve is pretty steep, so you tend to get a lot from your early experiences. But the one thing I got from Oglivy that has helped me every day is learning how to write and recommend and communicate a strategy or an idea, something intangible. You know, when you learn to write in university, you know, it’s more of a narrative and it’s engaging. But when you learn how to write for business, particularly the way it was done back in those days, you learned how to put a recommendation in an email, a letter, here’s what we recommend, here’s why, here’s what it gets you. You learned how to communicate in a business way. And Ogilvy was very disciplined, as you know, that, you know, part of their success was their ability to help their clients understand the recommendation, and then put enough rationale in it that it was a smart business decision, not because it sounds like a fun idea, let’s try something crazy.</p> <p><strong> Stephen Shaw (SS):</strong> Right. So there’s always a logic, obviously, a brand strategy really behind the communications program.</p>
