[L/M NET] Adrian Ho "We Build Modern Brands - Defined By What They Do"

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

 

So Ad Fed have asked me to talk about the evolution of Zeus Jones next week.

While there’s a bunch of things that I could cover, I think the most interesting thing about our evolution is how little resemblance the company of today bears to the company we imagined right up to the day we opened our doors. We weren’t just a bit wrong about things, we were dramatically wrong. In almost all circumstances, our imagination around the specifics of our business was simply more naive and (thankfully) much less interesting than the reality has turned out to be.

Our ignorance became clear quite early on when we realised that the financial contracts we had written were acting as “sales prevention.” A little later, one of our first clients told us she was going to hire us despite all of our “gobbledy gook.”

We were saved by the simple fact that the specifics of our business were and are far less important to all of the partners than the beliefs that drove us to start the business in the first place.

So the story I plan to tell, is how our beliefs really created our company. How listening to them and letting them guide us, allowed us to move into areas we’d never imagined. How the lesson we learned from our initial mistakes was to resist defining the specifics. And how our refusal to define the specifics of our business has actually been central to whatever success we’ve managed to achieve.

Hope to see you on Thursday.

Adrian

(ralf says:
Just love the beliefs ... and Zeus Jones' consequences!)

Adrian is founding partner of Zeus Jones a branding company believing actions speak louder than words and that modern brands are defined by what they do not what they say. He speaks (and writes) regularly about non-communications based models for marketing & branding. Twitter: @adrianho