The Marketing Book Podcast: "Seeing The How" by Allen Adamson

Seeing the How: Transforming What People Do, Not Buy, To Gain Market Advantage by Allen Adamson

About the Book

Among today’s most successful businesses are those that have significantly transformed our daily routines.

This focus on the consumer experience, not solely on the product, has enabled them to drive remarkable growth and customer loyalty and, in many cases, to create totally new marketplace categories.

Seeing the How invites you to reimagine your brand, company, or idea through the lens of consumer experience.

It gives today’s disruptors a path to offering consumers a new and better way to do what they do, clearly demonstrating how to see opportunities, and how to seize them to great advantage.

Two years ago, Zoom was unknown to most, six years ago, Netflix was a DVD delivery service.

We ride in Ubers and stay with our families in Airbnb homes.

We share Spotify playlists, refresh our closets with Bonobos, and pamper our pets with Chewy.

We set up meetings with Calendly and pay bills with Venmo.

The speed with which these disruptions to how we do things, and the enormous profits that come with changing daily routines, is breakneck and only points the way for other industries to carve out market dominance.

Seeing the How combines data-driven research on consumer behavior, behavioral psychology, marketing analysis, and storytelling to provide a framework to help identify the methods by which business leaders can make these experience disruptions possible.

Allen P. Adamson, an expert in branding, experience creation, and innovation strategy offers businesses a step-by-step guide to breaking into the market based on the tactics of the biggest experience disruptors, including Netflix, Apple, Warby Parker, and Stitch Fix.

These businesses speak to market segments and consumers that are diverse and far-flung. What they share is the extent to which they are experience disruptors. Their successes derive from their ability to make the stuff of daily life different, better, and easier.

Successful experience disruption is the de facto new competitive advantage across all categories.

With Seeing the How you’ll have the strategy necessary to bring your disruption to life, command market segments, and cultivate consumer loyalty.

About the Author

For more than 30 years Allen Adamson has helped launch, nurture, and reinvent brands, ranging from startups to nonprofits, to companies known worldwide, in categories including packaged goods, technology, healthcare, financial services, hospitality, and entertainment.

His philosophy, substantiated time and again, is that a successful brand stands for something that is both different and relevant – and simple for consumers to understand.

A noted industry expert in all disciplines of branding, Allen has worked on the agency side for several iconic firms including Ogilvy & Mather and DMB&B, and on the client side for Unilever.

He was chairman of Landor Associates, a global brand consultancy where, under his leadership, the company worked with brands including Accenture, GE, Johnson & Johnson, FedEx, HBO, Marriott, MetLife, Procter & Gamble, Sony, and Verizon.

Allen’s four previous books are Brand Simple: How The Best Brands Keep It Simple And Succeed; Brand Digital: Simple Ways Top Brands Succeed In The Digital World; The Edge: 50 Tips From Brands That Lead; and Shift Ahead: How The Best Companies Stay Relevant In A Fast-Changing World, (which was featured on The Marketing Book Podcast on episode 163 in 2018). Allen has also written a column on branding for Forbes for 20 years.

Allen is now co-founder and managing partner of Metaforce, a consultancy that takes a disruptive, multidisciplinary approach to marketing challenges. He’s also an adjunct professor at the Berkeley Center for Entrepreneurship at NYU Stern School of Business, where he earned his MBA.

And, interesting fact: he originally wanted to be a filmmaker!

Listen to the Interview…

Links…

Seeing the How: Transforming What People Do, Not Buy, To Gain Market Advantage by Allen Adamson (Amazon)
Allen Adamson (website)
Allen Adamson (LinkedIn)
Allen Adamson (Twitter)
Allen Adamson (Metaforce)
Allen Adamson (Forbes)
Shift Ahead: How the Best Companies Stay Relevant in a Fast-Changing World by Allen Adamson and Joel Steckel (Marketing Book Podcast interview)
René Neubach – ridiculously good-looking Marketing Book Podcast listener (LinkedIn)
“Marketing Myopia” by Theodore Levitt (Harvard Business Review)
The Experience Economy: Competing for Customer Time, Attention, and Money by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore (Marketing Book Podcast interview)
From Impressed to Obsessed: 12 Principles for Turning Customers and Employees into Lifelong Fans by Jon Picoult (Marketing Book Podcast interview)
The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

P.S. – If you have rated and reviewed the podcast on Apple Podcasts, please let me return the favor and mail you some Marketing Book Podcast bookmarks and laptop stickers. Just click here to provide your postal address (I’ll send it anywhere in the world)! ~Douglas Burdett, host of The Marketing Book Podcast.