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How Transforming the Customer Experience Can Be Your Competitive Advantage with Allen Adamson, Metaforce: Show Notes & Transcript

Post | Nov 19, 2024

Welcome back to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business! Looking for Marketing Smarts? You’re in the right place. After almost 4 years of helping to make you savvier marketers, we decided to broaden this podcast to include more business-oriented topics that will make you savvier business leaders.

In this episode of Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business, we’re talking customer experience (CX) with Allen Adamson. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your other favorite podcast spots – follow and leave a 5-star review!

  • Episode Summary & Player
  • Show Notes
  • Strategic Counsel Summary
  • Transcript

Strategic Counsel: How Transforming the Customer Experience Can Be Your Competitive Advantage with Allen Adamson, Metaforce

Customer experience (CX) can be a game-changer when it comes to differentiating your brand. But, you need to do the work to get your CX to a good place. That involves getting a deep understanding of the customer’s journey and creating a true relationship with your customers – not just selling to them. We wanted you to learn from a force in the world of CX, so we welcomed on Allen Adamson. He’s the Co-Founder of Metaforce and Author of many books, including Seeing the How. This episode covers everything from customer experience to your competitive advantage. Here’s a small sample of what you will hear in this episode:

  • How do you transform your customer experience?
  • Why is competitive analysis important?
  • How do you keep innovating?
  • What’s the best use of social media?
  • How can you take a concierge approach with your brand?
  • What’s an example of a great customer experience?
  • How do you create a true relationship with your customers?
  • What was Allen’s favorite business to work on & why?

And as always, if you need help in building your Strategic Counsel, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at: ForthRight-People.com.

Check out the episode, show notes, and transcript below:

Show Notes

  • How Transforming the Customer Experience Can Be Your Competitive Advantage with Allen Adamson, Metaforce
    • [0:28] Welcome to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business
    • [0:34] How can transforming the customer experience (CX) be your competitive advantage?
    • [2:08] Learn more about Allen on LinkedIn, at Metaforce.com, and check out his books, including Seeing the How
    • [4:32] How do you transform your customer experience?
    • [9:52] How do you create a true relationship with your customers?
    • [13:12] How do you keep innovating?
    • [18:19] Why is competitive analysis important?
    • [20:50] How do you know when you’re talking to yourself too much?
    • [29:38] What’s the best use of social media?
    • [34:48] What’s an example of a great customer experience?
    • [40:45] How can you take a concierge approach with your brand?
    • [43:08] What final thoughts does Allen have?
    • Quick-Fire Questions
    • [44:00] How would Allen spend a perfect Saturday?
    • [44:40] What’s a book he’s reading right now?
    • [45:42] What was his favorite business to work on & why?

What is Strategic Counsel?

Welcome back to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business! Looking for Marketing Smarts? You’re in the right place. After almost 4 years of helping to make you savvier marketers, we decided to broaden this podcast to include more business-oriented topics that will make you savvier business leaders.

Thanks for listening Strategic Counsel. Get in touch here to become more strategic. 

Transcript

Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.

Anne Candido 0:02
Welcome to the Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business podcast. If you’re looking for honest, direct, and unconventional conversations on how to successfully lead and operate in business, you are in the right place in our discussions, we push on the status quo and traditional modes of thinking to reveal a fresh perspective. This unlocks opportunity for you, your team and your business. Now let’s get to it.

April Martini 0:29
Welcome to the Strategic Counsel podcast. I am Anne Candido and I am April Martini, and today we’re going to talk about how transforming the customer experience can be your competitive advantage over many other methods in business, like new product innovation, sales promotions, all of those different marketing channels. We talk about all of those things, and not to say that those aren’t important, but if you do start competing solely through the things that you sell versus the relationships you’re building with your customers, you’ll become a commodity, and we all know where that goes. The conversation becomes about who has the lowest price, who can do it the fastest, etc, etc, which is the opposite of how you can really compete in your business. And that’s what we’ll talk about today, yeah. And to

Anne Candido 1:13
further set the stage here, many of you will state that you have superior customer service quote, right? And you expect the customer to kind of infer what that means, or you’ll say people will know after they try us. But there’s an inherent flaw in that if you want to use your customer service as a competitive advantage, that they actually have to try you before you can use it as a competitive advantage. So you have to figure out, how do you going to actually sell it, and that means articulating it in a way that drives that relevancy, and we’re going to talk about this emotional engagement factor that gets people to understand that you’re for them, and you’re going to deliver in a way that is going to truly blow them away. Yes, and

April Martini 1:52
for the purposes of today, we’re going to talk customer, but our examples and our discussion will apply in the B to B space and the consumer space and everything in between. So you might speak in terms of consumer or client. It applies to all of that. So keep that in mind, and we’ll try to contextualize as we go. And we have a special guest today to discuss this topic with us, and that is Alan Adamson, co founder of metaphors, and author of many books, including his most recent, which is seeing the how. And that focuses all around the topic we’ll cover today, which is competitive advantage through customer experience. So the perfect person to round out this discussion with us, Alan. Do you want to introduce yourself and just give listeners a bit of your story?

Allen Adamson 2:31
Sure. Thanks for inviting me. I’m looking forward to our conversation. No one. No one grows up and wants to overtly be in branding or marketing. It’s usually an accident. I was going to be a filmmaker, and I realized that I was good, but you had to be great, and you had to be lucky and willing to starve for multiple years. So I went on to school and ended up in the business I never thought of, which was advertising for a couple of years, where we were making many movies in those days, over 32nd things. I wasn’t allowed to touch the creative product. But it was a good intro. And what was interesting about advertising is it’s the bridge between the rational and the creative world emotional, because businesses are filled with very linear, rational people, because that was that’s what it takes to run a business, and creative shops and agencies are filled with people that are not that linear or rational, which is often what it takes to see around corners and to solve non linear problems. I did that for a while, and then I went to, as I said, back in those days, at dark side, I went to become a client at Unilever, which made lots of things, including gov, and it was great learning for many, many years, but after a couple years sitting at the lunchroom table, all the conversations eventually always focused on, did you see what P and G did this week? And it became very my opera. So really good.

Anne Candido 3:56
Exact same thing on the other side.

Allen Adamson 3:58
So I, so I flipped back to advertising and ended up working with Procter & Gamble for many years. It was a great experience. And then the final chapter right now, I went into brand consulting, which helps companies and products and people tell their story clearly, and then figures out how to get the story from your PowerPoint deck into customers or consumers heads. Yep,

April Martini 4:20
absolutely. So as everybody just heard, Alan’s got kind of a mix of both of our backgrounds, which will be really interesting today and help us really bring this conversation to life. So let’s start first, Alan with what do you have to do in order to lead by transforming your customer experience? So give us kind of the starting point to ground us in the conversation. You gave us the leaping off point about making this real, so contextualize that a little more for people, and we’ll go from there.

Allen Adamson 4:48
So back in when I was learning about brand and marketing, I was lucky enough to work on products that were truly better and different. Both dove for a while and. And dawn at PNG, and you know, back in the day, they would identify a consumer problem develop a product that solved that problem, grease and dishwashing. And the technology was so ownable that no one could copy it. So you had many, many years of being the only dishwashing detergent on the market that really took care of grease for people that wash their dishes or pans in the sink. And so over time, you could tell that story different ways, but it was always about the product. It was always about Look, Look how shiny This dish is. Look at the grease scattering. Look at this greasy pan. It was very product centric, same with other things. And for a big chunk of my career, marketing and branding was about telling a product story. But we all know what’s happened in most categories, that even if you have a better mouse trap, a pen or phone or a service or a product, you have that for a year, six months, three months until there are five people exactly like it, and yet, companies are still very focused on just starting with the product and saying, here’s what we do, and here’s why it’s better. And they tend to be very product centric. And as you zoom out across categories, it’s hard to see the difference between many products. And if you’re only talking about what your product does and why it’s right and why it’s better. It’s become clear you’re missing a lot because social media is one of the most important word of mouth. Everyone talks about it. And back in the day, you would go to your backyard fence and ask your neighbor what you would you recommend in a lawnmower or whatever. But now everyone uses word of mouth, but no one shares ordinary no one will say, Well, I bought this product. It was okay, you know, they’ll share extraordinarily good, you know, changed my life and made me younger, whatever you want to say, or extraordinarily bad. So the first impetus was zooming out from the product and saying, all right, if you can no longer make your brand and your company about exactly your product and why it’s different, because by the time you tell somebody is different, there’s three competitors that have beaten how else think about it? How else do you know? And that led to this piece of work that says, how else do you look at a business? Yes, if you’ve got an iPhone and it’s better than everyone else, you’re fine. But very few categories. If you’re a dry cleaner, the dry cleaner down the block, it’s roughly the same thing. If you’re a tennis instructor, you know, it’s really hard to have a difference that you can own for a long period of time. And that’s all you have to talk about,

Anne Candido 7:36
yeah, and I think that’s that’s right on. And I mean, just now the proliferation of performance based products, and the fact that when you get them to be so good, the difference between, like you said, the performance starts to diminish. So what it all becomes about is, what is that product or that brand mean to me, right? So it’s more of the how that it’s being sold. How

Allen Adamson 8:04
does it fit into your life? Yeah,

Anne Candido 8:05
does it fit in my life? And what is it doing for my life? And how is it improving my life versus necessarily? How is the product performance really ranked against others? And so, I mean, that becomes a really hard thing for people who are traditional consumer products, who fall in love with their products, to be able to distinguish the importance of really thinking about, how do I build something beyond just the product itself? But then also, when we talk about, kind of like the B to B space, I mean, even though you’re selling services and products, in some respect there, it’s all about the relationship. It’s all about the how it’s it’s it. And so that becomes, like the the core basis of, really, what we call a, what I was saying in the beginning, the the emotional relationship that you’re having with your your client, your customer, your consumer, and really using that as a leverage for what you sell, and that even though you’re putting a price tag on a service or a product, what you’re selling is its ability to be able to to change life for people. And that sounds so kind of esoteric to say, but if you could really grasp a hold of that and really hone in about what’s that tension, what is my attention I’m really solving for and understanding your consumer, client, consumer, consumer, client, customer, say, consumer, twice, in a way that you can really, really offer something to them, unique, authentic, that only you can, you can do. I mean, that starts to kind of create that loyalty, that that coveted loyalty, so that when Amazon, you know, starts launching five different products that look just like yours, you’ve already established that emotional relationship. So I think that’s like, super, super important,

Allen Adamson 9:42
right? Not only you can do an emotional that’s a good way to go versus, let me give you 25 facts as to why this is better. Or you can figure out how to fit in someone’s life differently. Yeah, one of the stories in the book was about how, when you look at online retailers or any online business, they always say, Oh. Returns are easy. We’ll take it back for free. But if you look at how people are living these days, yes, it was much worse during the pandemic, but even today, I was visiting my daughter in university a couple years ago, and I went to the her sorority house, and on the front deck of a sort of house was like a shipping and receiving thing for a large factory. You know, there were, you know, target boxes, Amazon. And I asked, you know, some of the her friends or her sorority mates, yeah, what do you do when you return things? And I get a lot of blanks here, they don’t have a printer, post office. I don’t even really know what that is, and so, but this is when people do a lot of online shopping. It’s a real hassle, because you have, is this a UPS? Is this a FedEx post office during the box? Did I really send that back in? Where’s my so a bunch of companies have started, and I interviewed one a couple years ago called Return queen, which you just leave all your stuff in a bag. They pick up the entire bag of your 20 items that month you want to return. They ship them back. They follow up and they say, here are your refunds. This one was Yeah, and so you’re wondering why people, most people, don’t do that, but to innovate in direct marketing, online marketing, just offering free returns is not going to be differentiating, but if you understand different segments and can solve different problems, not only for university students, but maybe for people who shop a lot, or maybe you people that are not organized enough, like me, you know, lose the box, lose the receipt. You know, that’s part of the other thing. When you’re zooming out from the product, you have to see where it fits in someone’s life and look for ways to either make it easier, make it better or make it different. And so zooming out was the impetus for seeing the how, how can we do business differently? How can we make the experience different, as opposed to just relying on, back in my day, the folks out in Ivory Dale, in the labs and P and G to come up with product that will last for 20 years, and no one could copy it

April Martini 11:59
well. And I think it this is the really good thing about the marketplace that we’re in now, and what I think we feel we’re responsible for in all of our jobs, right, is being able to, like you said, zoom out. But then think about the journey that all of these folks are on, and the fact that it’s not linear at all. I mean, I don’t know that it ever was, but it definitely isn’t now, right? You said online shopping. We may be online, looking for six different things at the same time and also in different mindsets about what we’re solving for. And so I think part of our job, and the part that I find the most fun is looking for trends or patterns or problems being solved elsewhere, and bringing those into industries that can learn from them, and then solving through that lens. So like when we talked, I know we talked about razors, right, and the disruption of that category, and we can talk whatever examples we want here, but really thinking about, when you zoom out, what are you really learning about, and how can you look at the journey that your target is on holistically, not just within what you are trying to sell them to then get ahead of it, or give them something new or solve a different problem, et cetera, et cetera. That’s

Allen Adamson 13:16
one of the things I talk about in the beginning of the book. You know, lots of companies tend to hire people that are experts in their vertical. So if you go to a beer company, you have a bunch of, typically, guys who know a lot about the beer business and how to get it on premise, but that’s their world. And, you know, I’ve been in the beer business, you know, 15 years. This is how we do things, and they get very myopic, and they tend to hire from that same bucket. So if you want to, you know, change it, you know, make sure you look at your category, but step to another category, look outside your category and see what’s changing there. Because oftentimes innovation, as in the Gillette conversation, you just we talked about, doesn’t come from the person right in front of you. And I was, you know, I was totally focused on Procter and Gamble. When I worked with Pepsi, they were completely focused on coke. But disruption typically doesn’t come from the person right in front of you, as in the razor business, it came from somebody who was solving a different problem, saying, I don’t want to remember to get razors all the time, and I don’t want to have to wait for somebody to open it up at Target to get them, and so maybe so. But that wasn’t, you know, when you’re in the in the zone, mostly in any business, you get people that are, you know, done things a certain way and really good at their business, but don’t have a horizontal view. Don’t zoom out and see a little bit of peripheral vision. You know, when I was working in the pizza business, fast food pizza. You know, we would talk to a big chain, and they said, I said, How are your customers happy? Oh, they love our pizza. We’ve done all this research. We get, you know, top two box ratings on our pizza. They like to flavor. And so, you know, we tend to hire some creative people. And we said, well, let’s just do a few more. Mike will ask a. Different question is, it says, how happy are you with this brand of pizza? Let’s ask, you know, what would you do if this brand of pizza went out of business? And of course, they said, Well, I don’t care. I go to Papa John’s. You know, it was no, it was no friction. There was no they were happy with the product. They’re there. You know, if you had two pizzas the same and one wasn’t, you’re a little bit of an inhabit there was no difference. But they were, you know, convincing themselves that they had a superior product. And just by asking them how we doing on the pizza taste, they were assuming that that’s all you need to do. And so part of that is looking out of the category and saying, you know, if this didn’t exist, what would you do if you couldn’t get razors at Target, what would you do? How are other people buying different things? And it led to a whole bunch of lenses in the book to look at the business through different perspectives. And one was keeping fresh eyes and looking outside your immediate category.

Anne Candido 15:55
I like that. I also think even keeping fresh eyes looking inside your category is a good one too. Because, I mean, even just in some of the examples, we talked about the razor business, which I was heavily involved in. And then also, back to even the the the example of the returns is like, if we, if we keep our eye or ears and everything open, all the senses, all the senses, to the actual tension. What we’re what we will recognize is that attention evolves based on what’s going on in the system, right? So when you were talking about the the business that helped you do all the returns that might work, we’re all in a environment where it’s kind of it cumbersome in order to do returns. But then now they have, like, these places where, if you buy something and you try to return it, they pay you not to return it. Yeah, so there, you know, then the tension start to shift, or I try to return something, and then I did have to pay for return. I’m like, Who pays for returns anymore? So all of a sudden that that that having free returns, I mean, starts to then look attractive. Or in the razor business, where, you know, a lot of the technology was all invested in, and actually all the advertising was invested in the performance of the razor, then all of a sudden, you know, Dollar Shave Club and some of the others come up with, what about the convenience of shaving? Isn’t that attention standpoint? But then they were, then they advertised it better, right? They were able to really connect with the consumer in a very relevant way to address that tension. They’re like, Oh, well, yeah, it could be more convenient, right? And so why not try that? So it’s constantly, I think, reevaluating the tension of what’s going on and knowing that day to day, it could be totally different, and not knee jerking to adjust to that constant state of detention, but being really in tune to what is going on in your industry. But then also, I love what you said about using ancillary industries or outside industries to inspire what could go on, like what happened? I mean, who would have thought that like seltzers in the beer market would start to Trump people drinking beer. I mean, nobody would have thought that. But now it’s like, Hmm, who’s going to seltzer me, you know, starting to kind of use that as a context for how to think about your competitive analysis. So I like that, yeah. And part

Allen Adamson 18:13
of it is, you know, when you’ve been in the business a long time, you tend to hire people to think like you and same experience, and oftentimes getting people in from the outside who have, as we just said, fresh eyes, or have, you know, when you first come to the company is the best time to ask questions. I often did when we brought new people on in the first month and a half. I said, You’ve been here a month and a half. Tell me what seems bizarre to you about what we do, yep, yep. And, you know, get those people who are and listen to them for a previous book, I did an interview with HBO. They would hire, when you hire interns in the marketing world, often you hire them, and in the day, you would put them in a cube, and how you put them remotely, and they would crunch some numbers and then show up and pop a little report up. But you gave them very menial tasks. But HBO at that time said, We need to get more digital. We want to have 20 interns, but we’re going to give them to the C suite. We’re going to make these 20 something year olds follow these 50 somethings and re educate these guys so they understand what digital is, really what a digital native does, and it forces that up. So even on your own business. You know, it pays to ask people who you know, who may be in a different business. Hey, look at this business. What do you think you know? If you’re going to look at something new, what would you do? Because you tend to only go to the same core people, and you also, over time, you say, I know this business. You know, there’s nothing in a change in in this business. And the same goes true with customer service and all the other dimensions. You know, there’s a set way of doing things, and it’s always we’re looking in hindsight. Gee, no brainer that, you know, spending, you know, 20 years talking about four blades versus five blades versus three blades versus blade tension. You know, somebody would say, Well, maybe the story isn’t in the blades. Yes, that’s a benefit. Getting a closer shape. But what other stories you know, could we talk about to win that game? Well,

April Martini 20:04
I think you bring up a good point of, and I would love to get your perspective, because Anne, you brought up a good one of making sure that you are keeping the pulse on the industry that you’re in and that you’re not missing opportunities. Or that’s my interpretation within there. But also, I mean, I think Alan, the point you just brought up, how do you know when you’re starting to talk to yourself too much like the blade example, right? Like, I look at that as and I remember standing at the shelf clearly one day at Target and being like, I was like, the first time I bought razors for my now husband. And I was like, I have no idea, like, I have no idea what’s happening. What is the difference between four and five and this one versus that one? No, we’re not going down that rabbit hole today. No, I

Anne Candido 20:46
can explain it all if you want me to tell you.

April Martini 20:49
But anyway, I mean, I think, how do you know when you need to look outside, like, kind of talk us through the Well,

Allen Adamson 20:55
I think there’s a belief that you ask customers, you ask and they’ll tell you the answer, yeah, you know. And invariably, once in a while, if you ask really provocative questions, they may tell you something that you didn’t already know. But I’m a big believer in not asking, you know, what’s most important when you buy an insurance product, or what’s most important when you want to hire somebody to do something for you, or law firm, whatever they’re going to give you the you know, the expected answer. I need somebody I can trust do a good job. So the only way to get at it is to one do more observation, hang out in the target aisle and watch somebody in front of the shampoos trying to figure out where’s do I do I want curly hair and shiny hair, or do I want straight hair? And yeah, you know, because there’s so many variants you have a bit of that. Gee, why is it so complicated? And isn’t there one size fits all for people that don’t really want to spend 20 minutes doing that? So one is is observation. The other is showing them something, saying, Hey, we have a crazy, two, three crazy ideas. Here’s a concept. And you don’t really think it’s a great concept, but just by showing something, you know, a little bit out of left field, like, you know, that’s not really good, but I never wonder why. You know somebody did so you have to give some stimulus to shake them up. Otherwise they’ll just play back what you’ve been advertising, what the category talks about, how everyone does it, and you know, they don’t. That’s the way life is. You You have to. You have to, unless you have a piece of technology that totally changes things. And so, you know, it’s the belief, how am I doing, or what else do you want? Or what else can I do for you? Oftentimes, what else they would never imagine. That answer I tell we talked about the story of customer service is just meeting your needs, is, you know, wiping my teeth, you know, they clean, they painted the house, nice, everything’s just, you know, yeah, they did it, that’s why. But no one, no one shares that. That’s sort of expected. You only share something extraordinary, but you need to look at your business saying, What could we do that would really surprise somebody, or the goes above and beyond. We did talk a little bit about Ace Hardware, and, you know, they compete against Home Depot and Lowe’s, and so obviously they have to have a higher touch product, because they can’t sell whatever Home Depot and Lowe’s sells cheaper or Amazon. And so they become pretty good. You can go into there and you can show them a picture of your sink overflowing or, you know, breaking into pieces. And they can be a little bit of a consultant and say, but, but they, sometimes they go beyond it. So I had left the credit card. I couldn’t find my credit card, and I realized the last charge I made was at a gas station, and I caught I could have been the hardware store. I called the Ace Hardware person, and I said, tell you my credit card there No. And instead of saying no, thank you very much, goodbye. That was the expected answer. He said, Well, where else did you go that day in town here? I said, Well, I went to get gas. He goes at that gas station. I go, Yeah, I’m going to call you. Don’t call them. They never answer the phone there. I’ll walk over there and see if your cards there for you. 40 minutes later, he went over. He called me back, yep, they left your card. I got it. Just come pick it up at ACE next time you’re in town. So again, that’s not you can’t you have to, sort of, we talk a lot about this in the book, getting out of your category, what they’re doing is what a hospitality chain would do. Because if you’re seeing like a concierge, you’re saying, what problem can I solve? Not, I need a dinner reservation and going to open table, you know, you know there’s an she’s got three screaming kids. She’s asked me for a restaurant, but I’ve already sort of understand her problem. She can’t go far. They’re hungry. They have to have a place that, you know, you could throw some food and it wouldn’t be a problem. There could be screaming. In other words, so solving your problem, as opposed to you may ask for a restaurant recommendation at the front desk of the hotel, but a good hotel or a good concierge or a good solution provider will will say, what problem is he or she really asking? And how can I solve a problem they don’t expect? Because I’m just paying attention to not only the question. But what’s behind the question? And so when you think about customer service, always answer the question, of course, but then try to think about why they asking that question. Well, is there a chance for us to do something different? Could we do it better? Because when they do something surprising, next time you’re in town, you’ll tell your neighbor, hey, this funny thing happened, I lost my credit card. They went over and got it for me that’s unusual, but if they just said, No, it’s not here. Have a good day. It was a missed opportunity to do something that would be more shareable in word of mouth or word of eye the pictures. Yeah.

Anne Candido 25:32
And I think too, as you are giving those examples, it just strikes me, because a lot of people, it seems like would say, it’s very easy to say and a bit harder to go do. And I think this is, if I was going to kind of backtrack why some people do these things versus not, it’s really a manifestation of culture. So I think customer service is a massive manifestation of culture. So if you expect somebody who that Ace Hardware to follow up with a customer like that and not just be like, Nope, we don’t have your car See you later. Goodbye. Later. Goodbye. There has to be some set of expectation in the system, but that’s how we operate. That is our value system. That is the way that we talk to to our customers, our clients, our consumers. That’s the way that we engage and we do business. This is the importance of what our brand stands for, I mean, it’s, you can look at everywhere from like, you know, Chick fil A and how they quote, unquote, sell a chicken sandwich all the way up to, you know, a concierge, like VIP service. And there’s some elements of the same thing all through the way. And if you look at those themes, it’s all in the way that their culture has embedded itself in the expectation of how their employees are to are to act, and that is in every single little thread, from the way that they hire to the way people are rewarded, to the the allowance that they’re given In order to give people certain benefits or certain little rewards or, I mean, it’s just all there, but it has to come from somewhere. And I think that’s where sometimes people get stuck, is because they’re just like, oh, okay, so today, I’m going to, you know, be nice to the customers on the phone, but I don’t know, like hand

Allen Adamson 27:16
question, Have I met your niece today? How did I do yes, you know, can you stay on the line and give me a good rating and but you’re right. You have to hire for that, and you have to have a culture and an environment that allows people to do that. I you know, airlines are a great example. Everybody flies the same planes. Mostly everyone flies. There’s very little difference. So unless your people are tuned to find you stressed out and on the plane, or find something and solve that problem, if they’re just like, we’re delayed. So, you know, that’s not our responsibility. It’s hard, but you have it. I think that’s you know, when you talk about how experience can differentiate almost any business could differentiate by figuring out how to do customer service in a different, better way. As product differentiation continues to diminish, because it’s not the only way. There are many, many other ways but, but it’s also the hardest to do, because you have to empower that front line. I’ve worked with Marriott. I’ve worked with Delta. If those flight crews aren’t empowered to do something and say, you know, I know you’re starving. You didn’t eat anything. You couldn’t get there was no food at the airport. I’m going to bring you a tuna melt from first class and give it to you. They have to feel empowered to do that, to do something as opposed Well, I’m sorry. You know, I can give you two bags of the peanuts. One does not expired, the other one’s expired. Different.

Anne Candido 28:48
Yeah, they have snacks and water by your gate. When your delta just get comfortable, you’re not going, Yeah, you’re not

April Martini 28:53
going anywhere for a while. We Yeah, we’ve learned that all of us have well, but I think it is an interesting point, because I think there are plenty of companies that are just about selling the things right. And so what we’re talking about here is a complete mindset shift to say, No, we’re actually creating an experience, and our expectations to your point, and from an internal branding standpoint, are that you operate this way and Alan to your point that you’re empowered to do so, and so therefore you’re bringing that experience forward for people. And I think that is where the delight and the unexpected happens, right? Like, I think that that is the kind of those key moments that then, like you said, Alan, people will go and talk about and share and right? You know, be proponents word of mouth or social media mouth? I don’t know if that’s a term, but yeah, and

Allen Adamson 29:45
a lot of people use social media just to promote themselves, yes, but I think the best people, the best use of social media is to do a good job listening and seeing what people are talking about and thinking about, how can i Is there a problem there? They’re not talking about, as opposed to. A platform to say, let me tell you how great my my services. And you know, we have a special buy one, get two free today. So, but there are other models. And you know, another one I like is, you know, just zooming in and focusing in a particular problem in the category and just solving it better than anyone else. So one that happened about six, seven years ago was that if you were using a computer calendar, be it Google or Apple’s calendar or Microsoft, they were all basically the same. They’re all sort of just like the old paper calendars, only digital, you had to type a thing. And you know, if you run a smaller business, you spend a lot of your time saying, well, and I can’t do the meeting on Tuesday. Can you move it to Wednesday? And it becomes and this, this person as entrepreneur, said, You know, he was this independent salesperson. He spent all his day re juggling appointments. And he said, Why don’t we share my calendar with the client and let them pick their own day? And so he started Calendly, but it was an example. You would have thought Apple or Microsoft or Google should have solved that, but they didn’t. They were stuck in the world of this is what people want with so lots that’s it’s an opportunity for smaller companies to figure out, you know, how can I do things a little differently? Don’t try to do the exact same model as a big company, because it’s really hard to compete with well,

Anne Candido 31:25
and I think that that is the opportunity for everybody, and that’s that’s why you do see like these smaller startups and being very successful in disrupting big brands, because they have an insight that they have carefully cultivated based on Some understanding that the others are ignoring. I mean, I say all the time. You know, the best marketing is discovering a problem somebody didn’t know they had, and then being the unique solution for that, right? And so that’s what a lot of these companies are doing, very, very well. But then they also are building, they’re doing a much better job of building in the IP and the technology and the infrastructure that makes their platform behave, act, perform much differently and much more efficiently than a lot of others. And so even though you have like seven, several Calendly like platforms now that manage your calendar and can schedule meetings for you, that one continues to be the one, because they’ve invested so much time and energy and building the whole ecosystem around it, and kind of like even slack, where I went kicking and screaming and April’s like, oh, we need to use Slack. I’m like, Oh my god. I mean we can do, I am we can do. I mean, whatever platform has some sort of instant messaging, why don’t we use this one? Well, this one, because it has, you can categorize a message and this and that and the other has become vernacular. Now, are you going to slack that or, you know? So, you know, it’s becoming like very intentionally developed, where these these companies are thinking about the whole entire ecosystem, where, I think a lot of bigger companies have kind of gotten a little bit complacent that they understand the ecosystem, right? They understand that they’re a big player. Me and tide. I worked on tide forever. They’ve been around for, you know, 75 almost like 8090, years. But, you know, and it’s like, we’re a staple, right? And so, yeah, but if you went, it’s kind of similar to your to what you were saying about disruption. If you went and you asked 10 people, what’s the best laundry detergent? And I know you worked at Unilever, but I’ll tell you, like, nine out of 10. I’ll tell them it’s tied, right? 10 out of 10, I was giving a little bit of buffer, so, but people don’t fact check me, but like, but only four or six, we’re buying it, right? So depending what your hassle penetration was. So that means that, again, what you’re trying to sell to the point where you’re saying, When do we know we’re talking to ourselves to what you’re trying to sell is no longer a value to incremental consumer base. It’s doing okay for your current one, right? So then how do you go beyond that? And one of the biggest ones is customer services. Why tide now Can, can? Can parlay off of the tried dry cleaning services, right? Right? Another service oriented business reinforces the performance, but then offers a convenience factor. It’s like, oh, I’m going to put all these things together now, and now I have, like, a complete, total ecosystem that supports my cleaning needs. So it’s a very interesting concept, which is requires people like you said, to kind of look outside the product and think on top and think about what kind of portfolio or platform are you building, not just what product are you making, I mean, and we could talk about, you know, the blockbuster thing, and I know the Kodak and, like all those, like, quintessential case studies of how if they had just seen their value of something more than the product they sold, they might still be around, but they didn’t. So, I mean, the history is there. I that that was just what came into mind when you were when you’re speaking about those another

Allen Adamson 34:44
lens, I talk a lot. I know during during COVID, everything became virtual. Now we, you know, we remember that, but life’s going on. But I still think there’s a lot of runway and virtual for many, many things. Give you an example of two years ago, I took a car in. Uh, to get serviced, and it was a new car, so they did the first two services at the dealership. And I get a text. I open up text and say, Alan, here your car. And let me tell you what we found. And all of a sudden they’re in a video under the car showing looks like your brakes here are, and they’re taking me on, like inside the body, under the and normally, when you went to auto repair places, they’d come out with a piece of paper and say, Alan, I think you need a XYZ bang, and scrolling up, and you had no idea, you know, that was in the engine. You weren’t going to crawl onto the car with the person. And so you always had the skeptical feeling, did you really need new brakes with it? Is the belt really worn us, but now they’re using, yes, there’s a little more civilian but any smartphone, and instead of writing down what’s wrong, they say, Hey, look, watch this video, and look at your brakes and look at your and so that’s simple change. Not a lot of car dealerships are doing it all of a sudden. Gives you more confidence. Yeah, oh my god, thanks for finding that. As opposed to, is he really trying to or she really trying to sell me something here that so lots of categories can use virtual I was installing thermostats of the house, and I had a problem, you know, and you know, they said, Well, you have to call a tech person to come. I said, Well, wait a second, I have everything but one wire. Can I just FaceTime you and show you? Tell me the red wire goes here or here? Well, we’re really not, you know, set up to them. We’ve certainly sent a service person at some ridiculous rate. Now, of course, you do it in more and more companies say, yes, let’s get on Zoom or something else. And we will show you how to do this yourself. But you know, part of that is realizing that everyone has a high television production thing in their hand, and how many more things can you do with that, if you allow that to communicate with your customer or your consumer a little bit?

April Martini 36:55
Yeah, well, and I think that that brings up another point here around transparency, because I think that that is a huge part of all of this that we’re talking about, is building that trust and being able to show it to people, whether literally in the sense of having the camera or taking the time to walk through and explain, so that it gets to the point where you can see and understand what they’re talking About. But I mean all the things we’ve talked about throughout this entire conversation today has really shed light on bringing it forward and thinking through for me, how, as a person, what I want it to be, and then solving the problem through that lens. And I think the examples we gave where that’s not happening is when it becomes too much about this is the business goal, financially I’m supposed to be responsible for, or this is the product that I need to push and sell. Or if I don’t do X, I’m going to get in trouble with my boss. I’m not empowered to do that, all of those kinds of things. And so I think when we take off a lot of these restrictions, really, and we think about it through the lens of, what can we ultimately solve? It’s going to elevate that customer experience across the board? And we’ve given so many examples today of the ways in which you do that, whether it’s dive in deep and keep an eye on what you’re doing and what have you not gotten to to come out and look at other categories to really get to know your customer and listen to what you’re saying.

Allen Adamson 38:25
Where else can you compete? As opposed to, the only way to win is to add, you know, a new ingredient to make it white and whiter.

Anne Candido 38:32
Yes, exactly. Well, exactly. I also think there’s an element of conditioning too. So, well, you were talking about the car, and it brought me about an example up. So my daughter, she’s 20, so she was here getting some car work done at the Honda dealership. Oh, geez, I remember this. Yeah, right. And when she showed up, she goes, I want you to walk me exactly through what you were talking about that is wrong with my car. And I want to see it with my own eyes. I’m like, we don’t do that. We get a little piece of paper that tells us we just believe them. I’m like, I couldn’t believe she was asking. I was like, mortified, you know, but I’m like, it’s because I’ve been conditioned that their expertise says this what it is, and they bring out a paper and you agree, and we don’t agree about what you’re gonna go do. And here’s my daughter, who’s like, why should I have to listen to what their days have this little piece of paper

Allen Adamson 39:19
I want GBT to tell me what the car needs. Yeah. So,

Anne Candido 39:24
I mean, I’m like, You know what? And so I wonder how much that we kind of get complacent in our own conditioning without even asking. Well, is it that way? Because I my expectations or my conditioning is kind of manifesting it that way, or is does it have to be that way? And when if we asked, well, could this be different? Or how could it be different? Or why should it be different? Or, you know, that becomes, I think, another element of a paradigm shift. So another example of that when we talk about Airbnb, Airbnb now when they added on above and beyond just the locations that you could stay at. They started adding on services. But instead of starting with like, a five star service, they said, What would a 10-star service look like? You know? And he gave, Brian Chesky give the example of like, well, you know, you would have a private jet, and then when the jet landed, you had a red carpet, and then we would have like, limo taking it to like, okay, okay, we’re not going to do that. What is a nine star look like? And they just backed it up until something that looked way more than what somebody else would offer, but was still in the realm of what they thought was possible, but they started from the other side.

Allen Adamson 40:31
Exactly. There was a when you look at hospitality, if you ask people what they want, they say a clean room, maybe a Wi Fi and maybe the late night snack. But you know, all that’s been done. But you know, Western, you know, recently did a thing. Well, what happens where people who you know, go to a destination wedding for the weekend and don’t want to, you know what? Let’s do a deal with Rent the Runway so you go to the wedding. Rent the Runway delivers your outfit to the hotel. You wear it, you look stunning. You don’t have to pack it up again. You leave it at the front desk. It goes back, and you can travel with a carry on. But a consumer would never tell you that, saying, Well, why do I have to, you know, take a nice set of clothes. I rather, you know, just take shorts on the weekend. But looking at problem solving, what do people do when they take trips. What might they need beyond a free toothbrush? It was before that they were doing sneakers. You have to pack sneakers if you want to go. I did

April Martini 41:31
that. I was going to give that example, yep, but

Allen Adamson 41:33
that’s an example of seeing like a concierge if somebody come in or think, How can I make their trip easier and you just playing on the same set of little toys, you know, air conditioning, control, pillows. You know, what’s what’s there doing that journey. What else can I do? Maybe through Joining Forces. Because a lot of what you can do, you don’t have to get into the rental clothes business. There’s parts of parts of solving things. Another chapter in the book is, you know, look to join forces with another company. So that one plus one, you know, peloton. Recently, they’ve had lots of trouble, but they joined forces with Lululemon. Now they’re not manufacturing their clothes. Their clothes are cooler. They have Lululemon, but for Lululemon, it’s a great way to have a people that are in decent shape modeling their clothes, who are in your face. So, you know, both companies got together, and it’s a better experience for peloton and a better experience for Lululemon, because they zoomed out and said, Well, maybe the way to win the clothing business is not only to just keep on trying to figure out the next hot

April Martini 42:34
chocolate or the season or whatever,

Allen Adamson 42:36
right exactly

April Martini 42:39
before we wrap up for the day, just to put a bow on things before we finish this part of the conversation, Alan, is there anything else you want to say about the book, or just kind of bring us home? And then we have a few rapid fire questions for you that are not really related to the discussion today and that you didn’t know about prior to so we’ll get to know Alan a little better. So

Allen Adamson 42:58
the books available, where you normally find books. Chunks of it are online, and you can buy it with somebody reading it to you and use it on your on your walks. And the examples are, even though they’re different categories, from hotels to and lots of people different businesses, it just forces, I think, you to apply that model to your own business, to look in different places. And you don’t have to be Lululemon or P and G. And I think for smaller businesses, if you’re not being creative in how you do it, you’re cooked. And so this allows you to see different ways to grow your business, and then you have to decide, can you do it? Is it right for you? But the first step in success is to be able to see something different as a possibility, and to perhaps be more entrepreneurial than saying this is the way it’s always been done, and this is how we sell tide. And you know, it’s wider and wider and brighter and brighter every year. All right. Well, that’s

April Martini 43:53
a good wrap up to that. So now the rapid fire questions we we started talking hospitality at the end there. So how would you spend a perfect Saturday, Alan, I

Allen Adamson 44:02
like to put her at the house and pretend that I can fix things before we have to call a contractor and do it properly, so that and letting my four legged trainer force me to walk faster and farther my dog in the park or on a trail, those are the two things

April Martini 44:21
Awesome. All right, what book are you reading right now outside of your own probably,

Allen Adamson 44:26
I tend to like to read books from different categories, so either books about technology or history. Right now, I’m reading about AI and but more pragmatic, it’s the power of networks, of social networks and all networks have changed things. So I try to read, you know, because my first quick sidebar, my first job out of business school, CEO asked me final interview, you know, what was the last book you read? You know, green and eggs and ham. I had. Off campus, and then he said, What was the last movie you saw on he accidentally hired me, and I, you know, a couple years later, said, you know, Ken, why did you ask me that question? Because we want people in the company who who are not like, you know, total nerds, and only think about the category. We want people who are in touch with arts, with culture, with other people with entertainment, because if we’re going to be the eyes and ears for our clients, we need to, you know, have a wide angle lens, and we want our people to see what’s happening all around, not just be an expert in the soap business. So that’s what I’m reading.

April Martini 45:34
Alright, and the last one, so you’ve, you’ve touched lots of different businesses throughout your career. What was your favorite or most interesting business to work on, and why?

Allen Adamson 45:43
That’s a great question. I like working on categories I’ve not worked in before, which is harder to do as time goes on, because, you know, you learn something new. So actually, working in technology right now, in software is interesting. And I like working on hospitality a lot, because the product is all the same. Everyone has the room with the 12 things. And doing an experience, creating an experience for somebody, is really hard to differentiate an experience, and so it it’s also something that lots of people can relate to. Everyone’s an expert in something,

Anne Candido 46:19
as I say, Are you sure you want to know why the difference between five blades, three blades, one blade,

April Martini 46:23
oh my gosh, we’re going to have to she’s going to make me she’s going to give me the razor education when we okay in the show. I know everybody’s

Anne Candido 46:28
going to be very interested in Nice. I can say this in less than 60 so, okay, all right,

April Martini 46:32
you gotta give you the floor, alright?

Anne Candido 46:33
So when you only have one blade, it acts like a hatchet, right? So all this doing is cutting. When you have more than one blade, what happens in the succession of the blades is they’re oriented, so the it lifts and then cuts, lifts and then cuts, because your hair is flexible, right? So if you’re pulling it out of the follicle, it can lift and cut it, and then when it’s done, it goes back underneath, so you have a smoother surface, and it takes longer for the hair to grow. So the more blades, technically, the more it can lift and cut, lift and cut, lift and cut to give you a closer shape. And then the shape of the blade is really important, and the coating on the blades really important to reduce the friction and make it a more comfortable shape. And that’s why they have all those things. And of course, the mechanics of the the razor to get to all the shapes, and you know, all the sort of thing. There we go. But

Allen Adamson 47:18
you have to know your target, right? Because my 26-year-old son wants to look like he hasn’t shaved in a couple of and has a stubble that says he’s too cool to shave. That’s right. Missing every other, every other, every other hand is probably the razor for him.

April Martini 47:33
All right. Well, before we leave, Allen, first, thanks for joining us. And also tell people where they can find you. I don’t think we covered that yet.

Allen Adamson 47:39
Yeah, you can search my name if you have a decent search engine, Allen Adamson, or you can do it at Allen@Metaforce.com which is my consulting brand consulting team

April Martini 47:50
Alright. And with that, we encourage all of you to take at least one powerful insight you heard today and put it into practice, because Strategic Counsel is only effective if you actually put it into action, did we spark something with this episode that you want to talk about? Further reach out to us through our website, ForthRight-People.com We can help you customize what you have heard to move your business and make sure to Follow or Subscribe to Strategic Counsel on your favorite podcast platform!