Allen Adamson is a noted industry expert in all disciplines of branding. He has worked with a broad spectrum of consumer and corporate businesses in industries ranging from packaged goods and technology, to health care and financial services, to hospitality and entertainment. With his perspective and depth of experience, Allen has helped his clients understand and activate strategies that enable them to shift ahead of the market and the competition, generating long-term value and increased brand equity. Allen and his teams help clients identify what truly matters to the audiences they serve – what is relevant to their audiences – and to brilliantly deliver on it. How organizations do – or do not – stay relevant is the subject of Allen’s most recent book, “Shift Ahead: How the Best Companies Stay Relevant in a Fast Changing World.” Using fascinating first-hand accounts and detailed case studies, Shift Ahead explains how the best organizations recognize when it’s time to change direction, and how they pull it off while bolstering their brands. Following the approach of Allen’s previous books, BrandSimple, BrandDigital, and The Edge:50 Tips from Brands That Lead – which are used in universities across the country – Shift Ahead offers up practical and readily applied lessons learned. Allen is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Metaforce, a disruptive marketing and product consultancy which, unlike traditional firms, takes a multi-disciplinary channel-agnostic approach to marketing challenges. It was created to help leaders understand all the forces at work inside and outside their businesses in order to identify strategies yielding the highest returns. Once they have determined the best strategy, Metaforce’s consortium of partners, each industry experts in their fields, pivot to help clients brilliantly act on and execute in market. Metaforce combines the best aspects of brand management, strategy, and experience consultancies to deliver solutions that ensure its clients shift ahead of the dramatic changes in the marketplace in order to meet fast-evolving customer needs.
Entrepreneurial Role Models:
Walter Landor
When business started difficulties overcame:
“When you leave that and start on your own no one is calling you. You had to wake up every day and say how are we going to go forward and so that was preparing me for the world I’m in now which was no one calls me up, I’ve get up and call clients, I don’t have a portfolio of 10, 20 companies that I can say I just did this on my own and so starting a new company you don’t have any brand equity”…[Listen for More]
Favourite Books:
- Business books
- Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle book by Dan Senor and Saul Singer
Favourite Quote:
“Only the paranoid survive”
Recommended Online Resources:
- Business books
- News articles
Best Advice to Other Entrepreneurs:
“Nothing is easy, everyone thinks success is overnight. Think of it as a marathon, it’s not going to be fast, it’s not going to be quick. Some of the most successful things I’ve done have happened of course after I’ve failed at it twice, so if at first you don’t succeed try and try again”…[Listen for More]
More About Allen Adamson:
Neil’s Quote at the Beginning:
“There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right.” Ronald Reagan
Other Quotes From the Chat with Allen Adamson:
- “You got to worry about everything, and if you think you’re on top of the hill, you won’t be there for long, so worrying about your competition, worrying about your consumers changing, worrying about the quality of your work. Complacency and overconfidence are deadly sins in our business”
- “Try to stay an expert in what you do, but see the big picture and the small picture”
- “Once you’ve been shot at on the Neecon delta, having a bad quarter, or missing sales forecasts or having your product fail or having somebody quit is much less dramatic” Friend who was in the Vietnam war talking about business
- “Be more comfortable with the risk”
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