Throw everything away.
Stop that shiny new ad campaign you're trying to describe. Run last year's copy instead.
Eye-catching social commerce efforts, stop it. If you have something great to offer, pick it up again.
Co-brand partnership projects are on the backburner. Its influencer, search and ranking suggestions – Long Grass. Throw away those need state segmentation studies with catchy cohort names and safely leave them in the dust.
In a year of worrying inflation, cost-of-living pain, anemic macroeconomic growth, and global political turmoil, my advice to marketers is to quit everything. Except for one thing: it's innovation.
The central purpose of marketing
Innovation is a central objective of our field, given that marketing is about working backwards from consumers' needs and wants and using brand expertise to add value to their lives. This is self-evident. Rest is not unimportant, but it is subordinate to this purpose.
And, to be fair, you probably have innovation projects underway, scattered among other brand-building tasks. But that's the problem. If they are scattered, i.e., one of many initiatives, then the “many” initiatives are prioritized at the expense of innovation.
The reason is simple. Because innovation is difficult. It presents unprepared teams with a unique blend of difficulty and danger. It's better to explain your “big idea” to an agency in hopes of driving the growth your board demands, rather than walking into the agency's door with your own big innovation idea from the start and looking for a spark of sensation. It's much easier than that. It happens when internal ingenuity meets external technology.
And spending time with other peripheral but highly fashionable social and co-branding schemes is not only easy, but also relatively fun. The problem is that they're actually peripheral and do more to drum up industry buzz than build brand share.
Innovation is difficult. It presents unprepared teams with a unique blend of difficulty and danger.
Processing data, while dry, is a more appealing prospect than sitting down with a multidisciplinary team in an anything-goes session without knowing where to start. Of course, I know that an ounce of inspiration deserves a ton of analysis, but if a breakthrough happens, days of strife and torture await before it happens. I also know that What will the regulations make of this? How can we get our operations on board? Where are the numbers we can predict with certainty?
So, being human, you, your team, your department will either put it off or water it down. I have other things to be busy with.
Well, don't do anything else. When you get to the point where the future feels bare, you realize that the only way to go is to remember what marketers are here to do. It discards everything but innovation, but then re-explores within its orbit. And I won't deny anything.
What innovations will happen and when?
When we talk about innovation, there are many different types of innovation.
Marketers, especially their agencies, tend to focus on disruptive innovation as the default starting point. But after reading Clayton Christensen's original paper, I understood that this is about breaking the industry's current norms in a way that simplifies the offer, significantly reduces costs for customers, and achieves existing profits. How many people are there?
It's a noble challenge, but it's by no means the only route to travel.
Incremental innovation may not be as thrilling, but with empathy and imagination, it can make a big difference in your life. One tip is to consider any “workarounds” your customers may currently employ in their interactions with that category. This is often how entrepreneurs receive their first signal that their innovation is welcome.
Another tactic is to find new ways to cross the line between products and services, rather than feeling constrained by the substantive offer itself. In other words, be willing to blur. In China, you can buy Nio electric cars that don't include the battery, which is the heaviest and most expensive part. Instead, you subscribe to the battery and never charge it personally. When you drive into a Nio replacement station, your battery will be replaced in 3 minutes and you can drive on. Also, if you want to switch to a lighter, lower capacity battery for local driving only, you can do that. In other words, the car is not “it”. It's a range of possibilities.
Or you can start with an open mind and proven academic tools and see where it takes you. The best of these is the value curve brought to you by Insead professors W Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne. This simple framework helps marketers plan for brands and their competitors while defining category characteristics. The next step is to investigate whether some of these characteristics can be intentionally reduced to fund dramatic improvements in the characteristics that customers value most. It's not for the faint of heart, but it can be a game changer.
Finally, process innovation is something marketers rarely consider. They will have to do so now, as AI introduces efficiencies and finds ways to reduce costs and hassles for customers.
Consumers prefer brands that don't stand still. Think Apple, Red Bull, Spotify, Zara, and L'Oréal. So, commit. Let's make 2024 the year of innovation. And by the end of the year, you may realize that you have not only better overcome this dark background of economic and social depression, but perhaps in some small way you have actually done something to change it.
