In this interview, Adrian Ho, CEO of Zeus Jones, talks about how his company collaborates with clients on the simultaneous development of products and their branding—specifically by integrating service and experience into product design, facilitating customer engagement with the client, and developing ways to make it easier for customers to do business with the brand. Food and health-care-related companies are key verticals for Zeus Jones.

What is a marketer to do when s/he stops believing in advertising and stops believing that advertising is the right way to build brands?

Four employees of Fallon, a "world class agency in the middle of the prairie," spun off Fallon's digital marketing department when it no longer "fit" with the larger agency. They founded Zeus Jones with the vision of creating an agency focused on building branding into products and services, rather than wrapping advertising around those offerings when the products were ready to hit the market. Adrian refers to the idiom, "Actions speak louder than words," and notes, "If you can build remarkability into the products and brands, obviously you have to spend a lot less trying to create remarkability afterwards."

Three services Zeus Jones provides are:

1. Service and experience design – designing better ways for customers to engage with companies
2. Marketing innovation – building the marketing into the products and services
3. Brand and product innovation – working with product development and R&D to build branding and product at the same time.

Adrian presented "Bridging the Gap between Brand and Experience Design" at HubSpot's Inbound 2018, where he discussed how brands could be defined by experience, and how to bring that about. He believes a "new kind of marketing" is emerging. Patterns of this are evident, but he feels it is not yet understood . . . nor has it been mastered.

Adrian can be reached through his company's website at zeusjones.com or on Twitter @adrianho.