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An investor with a zealous personality, Adam Vasquez is the Founder of Merit. He is the father of Market Invention and a true believer in Karmic Capitalism. He fell in love with Marketing and Advertising when he began collecting Absolut Vodka ads at nine years old. With his vision for business and humankind, he continues to mark his presence in the marketing world.
He graduated from Randolph-Macon College in 1999 with a Studio Arts Degree and along the way was named Defensive Player of the Year in the Men’s NCAA Lacrosse team. A lifelong learner, his future includes more degrees and deep exploration into emerging technologies and their impact on economics.
Timeline of Adam’s Professional Journey
After graduation, Adam got a job as a web designer and marketer, helping to launch one of the first e-commerce enterprises. The business quickly became a force on new auction websites such as eBay. He liked e-commerce but not the industry, and was happy to be recruited to lead the new digital marketing and design group for Robbins-Gioia, a pioneer in the program management industry. While working full-time at Robbins-Gioia, Adam attended graduate school, maintained a 4.0 GPA, and received both a Master of Science in E-commerce and a Masters of Business Administration in Technology Management from the University of Maryland.
While in graduate school, he coached Oakton High School’s Varsity Boys Lacrosse team to three consecutive Virginia High School State Championships (very proud of that). His hard work, performance, and can-do attitude didn’t go unnoticed at work, either. He was promoted to the Head of Marketing position for Robbins-Gioia. During his tenure, Adam helped the organization double in size and successfully exit to Informa Group PLC of approximately 100 million dollars.
After the sale of Robbins-Gioia, he was recruited by Tyco Electronics to lead its marketing efforts for the Aerospace, Defense, and Marine business unit. The division grew from 600 million dollars to more than 1 billion dollars during his tenure.
Adam’s marketing team was the first non-product team in the company to receive Tyco’s Innovation Award for its new, successful approach to marketing he built called Market Invention. After that, the company asked him to lead the company’s digital transformation globally. That included: integrating 13,000 regional, product, and non-product country websites; developing a 360-degree view of customers globally based on the first structured multi-organization implementation of Salesforce.com; and simplifying a taxonomy of 2 million disparate parts into a seamless online self-service configurator in 13 languages. These initiatives achieved more than 4 billion dollars in lead generation value annually, industry recognition as the best digital experience in the category overall, sales and customer service efficiencies, and an increase in overall Net Promoter Scores from the teens to the fifties depending on the business unit.
Then he was asked to move to Germany to help organize and lead a global brand transformation from just another electronic components manufacturer to the industry leader of connectivity using the Market Invention method his team developed. During this shift, Tyco Electronics became TE Connectivity (TE). Taking Tyco Electronics to TE Connectivity meant TE Connectivity became the new industry leader with a market cap north of 30 billion dollars today.
The Turning Point
Adam was recruited again. He was on to Dallas, Texas to help catapult Solera from third to first place in the insurance claims management software industry. As the company’s Chief Marketing Officer, he built a creative and effective team while teaching and implementing a much more refined Market Invention process. In turn, the company invented the Claim Experience market. The Claim Experience market drives a majority of today’s auto insurance mobile self-service and workflow apps across the industry. The adoption of the Claim Experience market from industry actors resulted in Solera becoming the recognized leader in claims management software. This laid the foundation for the company’s acquisition by Vista Equity Partners for 6.5 billion dollars.
After working in key positions and successfully driving the business, he knew enough was enough. It wasn’t what he did; it was the organizations he did it for and the lifestyle that came with big company c-suite jobs.
In 2015, he decided to leave Solera and acquired a small integrated marketing and communications company that Solera had worked with in Harrisburg, PA called Sacunas. Building another team, he looked for people who understood Market Invention because by any other name they were forging new thinking in an agency setting.
“Merit is the first consultancy based on the Market Invention methodology. Now I focus on helping companies find their path, and I can operate based on my Karmic Capitalism values,” adds Adam.
About Merit
Founded in 1990, Merit does everything a full-service advertising agency does. It begins its work by focusing on the epicenter of business vision and that makes its client stand apart from others.
There are lots of agencies that banter about the word “strategy.” Next to the brand, it may be the most overused and misused word in all of marketing. “When we say ‘strategy,’ we mean a directional business shift with intent. Strategy is something we often work with the C-suite to formalize,” affirms Adam.
The new vision, the new direction is something Merit does not take lightly. Yes, of course, the company has all the tools, resources, and people to sell a client’s products tomorrow. In fact, for an agency of their size, a client would experience a level of professional service and platforms available to large agencies (meaning, if they have a brand consultant and/or marketing budgets under $5M, they will be able to sit at the expert table here, and not get a junior team or junior capabilities).
Laying a Meritorious Foundation
Agencies and companies continue to reinforce the Market Follower’s Paradox that states when you’re not the recognized industry leader, the marketing efforts of smaller competitors only reinforce the recognized sector leader. This means that trillions of dollars, especially for small to medium businesses, are spent effectively promoting their competitors.
Here’s an example: Coke vs. Pepsi. When Coke sponsors the Super Bowl halftime show, online activity (correlated with sales) shows a decisive peak. Pepsi’s activity remains flat. When Pepsi sponsors the Super Bowl halftime show, the activity online spikes as if Coke’s sponsoring, however, so does Coke’s. This is the Market Follower’s Paradox.
The solution? Create a new market, and lead it. This is Market Invention. After successfully leading inventions brand-side, Adam wanted to share the protocol with the world. An agency was the best way to do it.
The Golden Accomplishment
Being an entrepreneur and starting the agency has been both the greatest challenge and accomplishment in Adam’s work life. He transformed his role from thriving in large companies to helping others achieve abundance through consciousness and Market Invention.
The USP of Merit
Market Invention is of course a differentiator. If a business or organization wants to truly break out to be something different, and be a leader, then there is no better place to be than Merit.
This is a long-term play that is methodical. While the company executes long-term marketing, it also delivers short-term marketing that meets immediate needs and lays the seeds. It conducts by way of Universal laws, not man-made or cultural laws. This means it vibrates high and attracts high vibrations to everything it does.
“This purity of thought is a practice, and we all are students. No fear-based or scarcity designs. Truth in all we do or say. Advertising today has one foot in deception. Metaphor is how people learn, but deception is not in our toolbox,” states Adam.
A Solid Stance about Marketing
Marketing communications has changed so much, especially recently, that it is hardly recognizable when people return from a long vacation. There is a lot of machine learning, which is good. There is real-time analytics, which is also somewhat good, but it sometimes makes clients fixated on immediate results. Everyone must remember that humans take their time to connect with a brand.
For example, Seinfeld was a brand that had such poor ratings in the first season the show’s producers fought to keep it on the air. Seinfeld changed the culture. When you are out to change culture, change habits, or change minds, it takes time. The change this industry needs is for everyone to stop being so knee-jerk. Real-time analytics, just because it is available, does not predict the future.
Adam and the team at Merit have created an extremely future-driven agency that goes beyond simply predicting the future to impacting the future. They say the industry itself needs to stop advancing short-term marketing strategies as “only” strategies. Often those strategies have nothing to do with the core business at all but are designed to deliver immediate lift that is not strategically sustainable. This includes the agencies who work for clients and the clients themselves who ask for miracles.
Adam’s Success: Driven by Purpose, Passion, and People
Adam believes that if we are all in it together, we are all responsible to each other. Maximizing his potential as a human is important to him, and maximizing the potential of everyone in the business and the community is as important. He is committed to helping others see the opportunities available to them and helping them get there.
A Thoughtfully Curated and Commendable Future
Merit is evolving, he says. Karmic Capitalism, which goes one step further than shareholder capitalism or even conscious capitalism, is a pillar of his company’s brand. For Adam, Karmic Capitalism starts with high vibrating “what ifs.” What if a company’s decisions were based on the vibrations platform common in self-discovery and enlightenment teachings? Low vibrations are associated with limits, judgment, and fear. Much of advertising and politics live here. Merit focuses on empowering vibrations that correlate with integrity, choice, clarity, accountability, and love. Can positive advertising and marketing live here? Yes. Can the relationships agencies have with clients live here? Yes. The mastery level is the ultimate Karmic Consciousness, anchored in selfless service, abundance, freedom, and peace.
Adam, as a continuous learner and futurist, continuously looks to what’s next. He sees a move to micro-economies, made possible by blockchain technology. Through technologies like blockchain, organizations can create their own values-based ecosystem. Putting their “money where their mouth is,” Merit is partnering with blockchain companies to make this happen as a model for other organizations. As the system grows, so will the community of Karmic Capitalists. Is Merit’s future aspiration to transform the world with a higher vibration? Why, yes. Yes, it is.
