In this episode of the Persuasion Game podcast, Adam and Laura sit down with  Dan Quinn from The Forge to discuss the strategies and mindsets that underpin successful innovation.

Dan is The Forge’s Head of Innovation and has worked with some of the world’s biggest consumer brands throughout his career.

This episode pulls together some key takeaways from leading figures at major FMCG brands, focusing on some of the biggest innovation themes, including (re)framing the opportunity, understanding consumer needs, the different challenges faced by challenger and established brands, and the universal need for authentic communication.

Episodes are released bi-weekly. Follow us on LinkedIn for updates.

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Want to know more about us? Visit our website here: thisistheforge.com

This is an 18Sixty production for The Forge.

CREDITS:

Crafting unique non-alcoholic experiences with Imme Ermgassen, Botivo

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0cnDo3lI1wTkdZoKH8TPsg

Playing the innovation long game at Asahi with Grant Mckenzie

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3Glm247n4qyMFuJoMY7nZq

Breaking through in innovation with Jane Buck, Cadbury

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2GIFf2Ig2kCLomTNez8rEp

The Persuasion Game is available on all your favourite podcast apps: https://link.chtbl.com/PersuasionGame

Episode transcript:

Adam: This is The Persuasion Game, The Forge’s podcast, all about the art of persuasion. Each episode we connect with marketers, business leaders, and beyond to learn how they use persuasion to influence their customers, convince their stakeholders, and drive their businesses forward.

Hello, Laura.

Laura: How are you?

Adam: I am good, thank you. Today we’ve got a very special episode. We are gonna be talking all about innovation again, but this time we’re gonna bring together the different threads that we’ve heard on this podcast so far from our different guests, and think about the big themes that we’ve learned from them across innovation.

And to help us do that, we’ve got a very special guest on the pod today coming to join us from The Forge. It’s Dan Quinn, our head of innovation.Welcome, Dan.

Dan: Thank you for having me.

Laura: Dan, you have been in the world of innovation long before you joined the Forge. Tell us a little bit about your journey.

Dan: Maybe to go right back, I started my career as a qualitative researcher, actually. So I spent the first two, three years of my life driving around the north of England talking to people about all manner of subjects. But really that was a fantastic test ground for learning about, you know, when you kind of switch off the tape recorder and what, what really matters to people, what really moves and drives people.

After that, I was part of a couple of founding and scaling journeys of brand consulting business and an innovation business, which was great. And also spent a bit of time at Accenture as well at the other end of the spectrum. So, you know, huge strategy consulting goliath. Spent most of that time consulting on the energy transition. So, you know a very different kind of scale and order of magnitude of, of challenge or problem, but no less interesting for it.

So yeah, it’s been quite an interesting journey and I’m very happy at The Forge that we get to work on, you know, such interesting projects with, I think with, you know, some of the world’s biggest consumer brands.

Adam: So Dan, we’ve spoken to a number of our guests about innovation, people that have been in the innovation space like yourself for a long time.

I mean, we’ve listened to Grant and Imme Ermgassen who launched Botivo, Grant, sorry, from Asahi. And actually one of the big things that sort of jumps out in all of those conversations is the way that they frame the opportunity around innovation. The way they sort of think about it internally and kind of set their businesses up to sort of take advantage of the different opportunities.

Grant: So relative to beer, this is what we are, but if you position it in the soft drinks category relative to soft drinks, what are we? Then you get a much more interesting conversation. You say to people, let’s take the numbers. You know, these soft drinks have 12 grams of sugar. We have four. They have 110 calories, we have 13. We have a sweet but bitter profile, they’re very sweet. Does any of that sound interesting? And they’re like, “oh, yeah, that sounds interesting”, because you’re positioning it against soft drinks as opposed to, well, it doesn’t quite taste like the other beer. Which might be true, but maybe that’s the wrong positioning.

Adam: So listening to Grant there, why would you say framing the opportunity matters so much at the beginning of an innovation project?

Dan: I guess there’s a few ways to think about this. Probably the first one has to do with why are you innovating at all? Central to any kind of innovation brief or objective should be some kind of growth goal, which typically will enable the business or the brand to stretch into space which they’re not able to tackle with their existing range or portfolio.

How you frame the opportunity is really key then. So an understanding of whether it’s a new occasion that you are tackling, whether it’s a new consumer group that you are tackling. Like what’s the addressable marketspace that you’re going after? And especially if that’s a new one for you or for the business.

I think it’s incredibly important that you are quite clear what slice of that space it is you think you are going after. In particular, what is the consumer behaviour that you are really looking to tackle or to target or in some way to perhaps even kind of co-opt through the innovation that you’re looking to pop up or create in that space?

So, it’s absolutely fundamental at the beginning. I think that an innovation team is quite clear on what that opportunity is all about and how to frame it for themselves and also for their stakeholders.

Laura: What kind of examples come to your mind when you think of a brand or a product that’s really done that job of unlocking a new space?

Dan: The ones that come to mind are probably what we’d regard as real disruptors in their space. So Oatly, they took plant-based milk, which felt frankly, like the domain of kind of health food shops. Felt like a very worthy choice for a very narrow segment of the population. And they completely changed the conversation about what it was. They made a decision to activate in coffee culture, which kind of positioned the experience and the quality of the milk as being kind of, you know, barista approved. Just the narrative that they span around plant-based milk, completely changed the conversation. It became something playful, fun, light.

Reframing from kind of something you find in a dusty part of a health food shop to something that was actively desirable for young, urban kind of coffee drinkers was the most kind of genius, sleight of hand. Which of course they backed up then with consistently brilliant comms and just general kind of rule breaking as they built their brand.

Laura: I think you’re bang on and it does remind me of what we heard from Imme, which is when you have that really strong sense of the kind of space you want to occupy, it does become a sort of very 360 proposition quite quickly. You know, you’re thinking about a specific occasion, you’re thinking about ways of executing.

It’s not just a flavour variant and you are gonna push on the old narratives and try the old ways of going to retail, et cetera. You are really imagining a whole different world of experience that you want people to buy into. I suppose it’s that, that classic thing of you’ve got the sense of the idea you want people to buy into, and then the product to buy kind of naturally falls out of that.

Dan: At its core, successful innovation is a behaviour change exercise. You know you need to ensure that consumers are really clear what they’re substituting you for and what you want that new behaviour to be. Because I think if you can’t really decide, there’s a fair chance that your consumers you’re targeting can’t decide either, you know, and then you’ve probably lost the battle before you’ve even started.

Laura: That’s a great point. So often, you know, a part of the journey that you go through internally in selling innovation is making a strong business case, making it provable. But by its nature, innovation is often about discovering the patterns that haven’t been already anticipated, codified within typical research systems.

And that made us think of our second theme, didn’t it? Which is like, where do you actually look? Where do you look for data and insight? We’ve got a little word from Jane here, haven’t we?

Jane: So instant foods, if you have a pot of pot noodle, they taste delicious, but you know, they’re not necessarily that good for you.

But there are moments where you still do it anyway because it tastes so delicious. But I find it fascinating – like Huel. If I watch what’s happened with Huel in the market and how they’ve started life as a protein powder for bodybuilding, basically, and just stretching, stretching, stretching, and then moving into that same pot space, but with a proposition that’s built on pretty strong nutrition credentials. And now they’re, they’re working very hard to say that it tastes great.

Dan: I think Huel is the most brilliant example. It’s a kind of tension that no one needed solving until it was solved and then all of a sudden it all became very obvious, right? It repositioned kind of all the incumbents as being super unhealthy and frankly not all that nice

Adam: And then we had the same with Imme, you know, with the kind of tension between health, you know, apple cider vinegar based product and hedonism, Which is kind of an interesting tension there as well. So like, I think these creative tensions can exist where you don’t expect them. Have you got any other examples, Dan, of where some of this magic has occurred?

Dan: One that comes immediately to mind is Fever-Tree. What they managed so brilliantly was to shift the conversation around what a mixed drink really was. Historically, you know, the spirit was the hero. The mixer was what, 5% of the story at best? So the whole notion of if it’s two thirds or three quarters of your drink, you better pay pretty careful attention to what goes into it.

That came at a staggering premium. Fever tree tonics were three times more expensive perhaps than the kind of existing base.

Adam: And they’ve continued to protect that value as well, right?

Dan: They’ve continued to protect that value. And now they’ve branched into the cocktail space and actually position themselves as being the ones offering the mixing genius and the flavour credentials and so forth to be stacked up against the kind of base generic spirit. Quite a magical reinterpretation of their role in that mix. Again, it’s an example of something which when you say it, it seems obvious, but prior to that, that wasn’t the discourse. That courage and that kind of willingness to flip the narrative, I think is what so very often sits at the heart of, you know, real value creation. And yet, the genius is in stitching it together in a way that feels quite intuitive. You know, once the genie’s out of the bottle, it’s like, yeah, of course! How could I have ever thought otherwise?

Laura: What I love about that example as well is it links back to what we were talking about- about opportunity framing. I think it’s very tempting that we go, okay, so we’re innovating within our category, and actually Fever-Tree would not be in the position to talk about premiumisation tonic unless alcohol had been slightly destabilised. If people were not falling slightly out of love with alcoholic spirits. I don’t think they would be as open to, you know, having conversations about paying more for the non-alcoholic part of the drink. So, looking at those trends of the growth of low and no, as well as looking at elevated premium experiences. It’s not just sort of one tension versus another. It’s really about looking at a sort of a shifting world and your place within it.

Dan: One of the reasons why I really love working in innovation and really cherish a great innovation challenge is partly because innovators are such interesting people. I may be a little bit biased, but genuinely. I think inside any business they are very often the ones who are simultaneously attuned to culture, have an evolving view around maybe how their consumer’s worlds and needs and aspirations are changing, as well as kinda hard commercial reality.

You know, the fuel, if you like, behind all of that is just simply curiosity. You know, you can codify it or make it sound more elaborate than that, but I believe at its core, that’s what it’s about. It’s just about the urge to want to find out and to explore. And as you say, be willing to accept that maybe the answer doesn’t come straight away. Maybe it’s just a hunch that you have to sit on, you know, in order to, I guess, start to find kind of meaningful answers. And, that joining the dots kind of making connections between all these different data points – there maybe an element of it, which can be codified or can be made a little bit scientific if you like, but I, I firmly believe that most great innovation breakthroughs owe every bit as much to kind of serendipity or art as they do to science.

Adam: It reminds me of the, um, conversation with Grant about his time working in the beer category in Spain, and he just noticed that people were drinking beer in a totally different way in Spain to how they were drinking it, say in the UK market where he had come from. He’d notice that people were drinking non-alcs, you know, having one drink would be a beer, one would be a non-alc. And it just planted a seed for him, which I think it was 10 years later that he finally kind of managed to convince the business to kind of take advantage of the opportunity when he was at Asahi. One thing you’ve described there is identifying different needs that might kind of emerge. What can we do in terms of looking for different solutions that might be out there?

Dan: Again, great innovators I think are really adept and we preach this quite strongly at The Forge, drawing a distinction between the process of understanding consumer needs and the process of understanding solutions. Those two axes, if you like, can operate quite independently from one another. The first and most obvious place to start is in adjacent categories. You know, if you are in ready meals, you might want to be looking in snacking to see what’s going on. You might want to be looking in, ready to drink beverages to see what’s going on. Because they’re addressing similar consumers, in similar sorts of occasions, albeit with a slightly different solution.

So the sorts of cues that they might be reproducing and they can be more graphic cues or structural cues or product experiences or whatever are all potentially ripe for creating new value in your category. Beyond that, to your example about Grant in Spain. I think one of the most powerful things that every innovator will tell you is- travel is just massively eye-opening. Because every single market has its own relationship with every category. Which will be a combination of all sorts of historic taste preferences, cultural habits, attitudes, and so on. But it’s amazing because all of a sudden you see that a category can operate or play by a very different set of rules than those that you had always imagined it would have to.

Adam: One of the things we spoke about offline, Dan, which I thought was really interesting, and I’d love for you to just reflect on here, was the conversation that we had with Imme and about where the kind of idea for Botivo came from. And why that is such a rich place to look for innovation ideas? Do you wanna just share a little bit about why you found that interesting?

Dan: Botivo in its original form, was a solution for catering – for frankly the rich and famous. So if you were Kate Moss and you wanted to put on the ultimate party where you knew that everyone who walked through the door would want to be surprised and delighted and have experienced everything there is to experience, what sorts of beverages would be on the menu? Like, oh my goodness, if that’s not a lead user environment, I dunno what is. So being able to take that as a kind of the ultimate r and d space. Take those solutions and some of the thinking that came out of that and then start to think about how to commercialise that in the knowledge that you have an absolutely extraordinary product experience. I thought that was very exciting and very inspiring.

And of course there are many more examples of solutions, be it technology or be it food and beverage for that matter, which is developed in an incredibly demanding environment, which forces the kinds of breakthroughs that then have potential to be scaled out to a kind of wider audience.

Adam: And I think it segues really nicely, actually into the next thing we wanna talk about, which is about authenticity, about creating with authenticity.

And I think there’s almost no better example than the conversation we had with Imme about creating with authenticity. So just gonna pull this quote out here for everyone to listen to.

Imme: I always believe that brands need to ladder up from the product itself. They have to be connected, right? So if you are a really punchy, powerful flavour, you have to have a really punchy, powerful brand and, and sort of vice versa.

You can’t authentically have a really loud and brash brand if you are a really weak, thin taste. So they’re kind of always connected. And the kind of key thing that from the beginning when we launched Botivo was that we are not a moderation brand, you know, we’re a pleasure brand and that feels really different.

Adam: It’s really obvious when talking to say a craft up and coming brand about why authenticity is really important. And also, it’s obvious as to why they can do it really really well. But for the bigger brands that might be listening, you know what role does authenticity play for them in innovation?

Dan:  There is a very literal kind of crafty interpretation of authenticity, isn’t it?

Which if you’re working in, you know, spirits or premium beverages or premium fragrance, we can all kind of visualise what that is, like the maker and their craft. I feel as though there’s a version of this which is more applicable perhaps to the more, you know, mainstream brands, which us probably more about integrity.

We are in an environment where bit by bit, I think consumers trust in big brands to deliver best in class experiences and efficacy and taste and ingredients and so forth. It has been progressively kind of chipped away at through, you know, cost engineering and so forth. And so actually, I think consumers are becoming increasingly skeptical towards innovation, new products, new claims. And in that context, they’ve developed a really keen eye or nose for something that feels like a real benefit, that comes from a real place that really will and is intended to create value in their lives, versus something that’s just an attempt to kind of steal a quick march on the competition.

So in a kind of climate of, I wouldn’t say mistrust, but where there certainly has been an erosion of trust, brands that act with integrity and are willing to explain, sometimes with humility, why they’ve made the choices they’ve made, I think is something that is increasingly rewarded by consumers.

Laura: I really like that idea of integrity because I think, like so many things, the whole notion of purpose has become this sort of political bellwether, you know – should brands have a purpose? But essentially I think the origin of the conversation was products should exist for a reason other than making people money, right? And, and essentially that comes down to integrity. Like, are you proud of the product you’ve created? Could you stand by like how it was made, what it was made with, and its impact on the planet? And those are all foundational questions that we’ve had ever since products existed, right?

Dan: It should be. I mean, why do brands exist? Brands exist to make people’s lives easier because it’s a proxy for kind of quality and, and trust.When those things are in any way damaged, it can be really tricky. But I think you’re right. And it’s interesting how aspects of integrity, so virtue and even justice in some cases become quite ripe, fertile ground for innovation.

So if you take a brand like Tony’s Chocolonely- who would’ve thought that you could take a category, which previously was kind of about easy indulgence, whether that was a bit more grown up or a bit more family or whatever, and introduce justice? With a kind of quirky personality, delivering a fantastic quality product. I mean, they broke just about every rule going in their sort of origin story, and yet over time have proven to be incredibly successful and to have entirely kind of rewritten the rules of the category actually.

Laura: It is harder though, isn’t it, when you’re a big brand to sort of cue that sense of craft and story in a way that actually feels sort of resonant and relevant. Do you have any examples or any thoughts in your mind about people that are managing to cut through in that way?

Dan: Yeah, I think so. I think there’s some heritage brands in this space who’ve done a really fantastic job. Heinz, or a brand like McVities. Partly through smart activation, partly through new product development. I think they’ve done a tremendous job at building a conversation with their consumers in a way that you don’t necessarily expect mega brands to do. I dunno if you’ve seen the Heinz Drip. They had a range of clothes, which all had kind of strategically placed like ketchup splodges on. Or McVities, I mentioned already, took an awfully long time to get round to it, but McVities’ white chocolate digestives, I mean genius, right?

Laura: I haven’t seen those. God I need them.

Dan: It’s so simple. And yet it’s the kind of thing again that just kind of brings a smile to your face. It feels like a very sincere piece of innovation which builds on the heritage and, you know, the simple trusted relationship that people have with the product.

Adam: So Dan, one of the things I absolutely loved about having Imme on the podcast was that we actually got to try some of the Botivo. I don’t know if you’ve tried it yet.

Dan: Not yet.

Adam: But you get a –  the bottle will arrive. So basically the bottle arrives and it’s got like a kind of wax top. It’s got a beautifully designed, front of the bottle. It feels like a very, very premium alcoholic drink, to be honest. And it’s only in very, very small writing at the bottom that says, you know, this doesn’t have any alcohol in it. And obviously Imme, with her branding background, had thought very carefully about this. Let’s just hear what Imme has to say about it.

Imme: How do you make the whole experience from like, you know, the website and how you order it and the images on there, through to the unboxing experience when it arrives, through to the unraveling of the wax when you make the drink and cut the orange as part of the ritual?  Really thinking about how do you make every single touch point of that journey feel like really magical and really pleasurable and really considered, like this is something quite sort of magical that’s unfolding before you serve it. And for me, that’s kind of sort of what, what it was all about is like, how do you make this feel like a moment that is demarcated from the rest of your day in the way that alcoholic drinks do?

Adam: So one of the things I loved about that clip is that she clearly had thought about the full end to end experience and enjoyment of that product. And we’ve since ordered some at home and it arrives in a kind of very very colourful box so even the postman can see this kind of beautiful artwork.

Laura: I’m on bottle three

Adam: Oh you really really?

Laura: Yeah it’s really good, yeah

Adam: I guess the question here is: What can our clients that have bigger brands do around this kind of end-to-end experience idea?

Dan: What I loved about how Imme expressed that is, her use of the word magic. Probably all marketeers aspire to create a little bit of magic around how their consumers interact with their products and propositions. And I think the challenge here, of course, is about making it feel unforced. I guess what sits behind it is the desire to encourage consumers to carve out a little bit of space for the product and to interact with it and to give some kind of deeper resonance, which cues the need or the benefit that you are satisfying.

So if we think about Kit Kats, you know, the kind of thumbnail down the Kit Kat and you break it and how that signifies taking that time out. So it kind of reinforces and echoes and amplifies the benefit that the product gives. If well judged, of course it can be phenomenally powerful, but it doesn’t do itself. It requires very tight choices about exactly what you want that asset to be as a marketing team, an unbelievable investment in activation and comms in order to make it stick.

And I think that’s ultimately what we’re searching for here is- how we can not just thread the needle of weaving something into people’s lives, but how we can give it a space and encourage people to take a moment to make the most of and re-engage with the product experience that you’re delivering.

Laura: That’s such an interesting balance, isn’t it? Because when you’re living and breathing a brand, it’s very easy to kind of overestimate your role in consumers’ lives. I think what you’re saying is like, rightly, sort of pushback on the other thing, which is that you’re just background noise, that there is a role for you to somehow tap into something and offer something different in the experience and elevation of some kind. And actually, identifying what that is and how that is communicated through all of the touch points is, is what’s so critical.

Dan: And to bring it back to behaviour change, which, and as I said already, ultimately all innovation has to work in service of behaviour change. What are all the little nudges you can employ in order to make that happen? And one of them has to be about seduction. You know, people have to be kind of drawn into the relationship that you’d like them to have with the product. And part of that can be around a little bit of a ritual around it. But the mistake that marketers often make is to assume that what people are really hanging out for is more rituals in their life, which is not the case. I don’t think there are consumer needs called, you know, give me some more rituals, please. It’s something that has to feel natural, unforced.

Laura: What I want more is a to-do list!

Dan: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Can you make it really, really hard work for me to, you know, enjoy your product, please?

Adam: Yeah, I mean it’s a bit like, well actually away from rituals, pack design as well. Like it’s a bit like the fairy liquid with the very, very small nozzle that sort of cues, you don’t really wanna put much of this in the bowl ’cause you’ll have a whole, yeah, a whole bowl full of suds, ‘cause it’s extremely strong this product.

Dan: No, I think that’s a great example and you know, they’ve done well. It creates a sense of ownership. You know, it feels like my product and I enjoy it the way I want to. Only actually someone else really cued how you would be enjoying it, but over time it starts to feel like your way. And yeah, a sense of, I don’t know aspiration might be a bit strong around, you know, washing up liquid. But there’s still a sense of, when I do it this way, I am doing it the right way.

Laura: Okay. So we’ve all got this sense of what it is to actually create these experiences, to feel excited about the potential of the magic. And then honestly, this is probably where the work really comes in for the people that are innovating in-house because it’s a question of resilience, creativity, tenacity, and in selling that idea into various different stakeholders, all of whom are gonna have builds, objections, suggestions as you go through it. And I think Grant has some interesting things to say here.

Grant: The first eighteen months to two years, it was a constant battle to keep alive the support. Year two got better, but year three, the volume started to like treble, quadruple. So you’re talking about 200% growth rates. And then it started to, when we did the analysis of who was buying it.

Laura: Yeah.

Grant: And then we started to see things like at lunchtime where we first went to the retailers; “Can we do like a meal deal at lunchtime?” and they were like “Are you, are you nuts?” And by year three it was regularly on promotion at meal deals and selling better than any of the soft drinks.

Adam: So Dan, I mean, you’ve worked with a lot of big brands over the years that you’ve been innovating. What role does vision play in making the innovations happen inside these big businesses?

Dan: I think all of the interviewees you’ve spoken with around the topic of innovation have just underlined in all sorts of ways how important it is to have a powerful vision about the potential that’s contained in, you know, whatever your big ideal is for the organisation. A clear vision of the future, what it will look and feel like, ensure that it’s evidenced, but acknowledge the fact that really what people love is a good story. So there are environments in which, you know, data points are going to be important and will be interrogated. But it all needs to be wrapped up in, in a compelling human story and a mission that you, you can sort of never stop trying to recruit people into. You know, every amazing external campaign will start with a whole series of equally potent internal campaigns. And that might start with the innovation brief and all the people you need to get on board with that, purely in order to create the mandate for the work, when perhaps the idea sort of coalesces and you need to bring other people on that journey with you. A rolling momentum building kind of journey through the business, I guess, before it even sees the light of day. So yeah, I think all great innovators are incredibly resilient people by nature. So I remember someone saying this to me that, you know, the art of a great innovator is to be able to simultaneously care very much about something but also kind of not care. Need to be able to be kind of dispassionate about the thing that you are fighting for. To be able to step back and to look at it from new perspectives and if needs to be to let it go in the knowledge that there’ll be another one coming in time as well.

Adam: Yeah, I think that’s so interesting, Dan. I think that point about being dispassionate, I think that’s where the data comes in, isn’t it? That’s where like being really honest with yourself about what the data is showing you about; Is this succeeding? Is it not succeeding? If it isn’t succeeding, what are the reasons why and what can we change? And the storytelling being, how do you then sell in the next phase or the next stint that you wanna make with the product?

Dan: Resilient. And also, I mean, I think the other word that comes up time after time when analysing businesses that are successful when it comes to innovation is about patience and a willingness to play the long game. You know, some of the most powerful innovations that we could point at, Nespresso, for example, was not an overnight success story. You know, it took decades almost before they developed a large enough installed user base in order for retail stores to start to become viable and so forth. So some of these things which fundamentally change the landscape of a category, it takes a really long time to make happen. I’ve the utmost respect for in-house innovators. It’s a contact sport, you know, and the ones who are successful kind of, you know, play it like they mean it every single day.

Laura: Yeah absolutely

Adam: What a great note to leave it on.

Laura: Well that was really fun wasn’t it?

Adam: That was really fun

Laura: I have to say, of all the people that I was thinking would be great on the podcast, Dan is always so articulate at saying things, when you’re like, yes, yes, that’s how I wanted to phrase it! And he just has such a lovely way of looking at innovation.

Adam: Absolutely. And I think actually when we started this podcast, I didn’t actually realise how much we’d be able to kind of group a lot of the discussions that we’re having into themes. I feel like quite often you’ll be speaking to one guest and they’ll talk about the subject and then that subject will come up again with another guest. And I think that’s really interesting, seeing the same things kinda surface. And doing more of these episodes where we bring those things together, I think could be really valuable.

Laura: Absolutely.

Adam: Thanks for listening. If you’d love to hear more from marketers, entrepreneurs, and business leaders about how to use the art of persuasion to drive your business forward, then make sure you’re following the podcast in your favourite podcast app. And just the last ask from us, this is a new podcast and we’d love it if you could be persuaded to help us spread the word by telling somebody else about it, leaving us a review, or even better sharing an episode on social media. Search The Forge on LinkedIn.