8 questions to a marketing project

The 7 Pillars of Innovation

INNOVATION - 7 Pillars

The work in this section is meant to help you master the core principle of differentiation, as you seek to connect with the goals of your segments. Plus, you will use concepts that leverage what marketers’ are highly prized for: our intelligence (information gathering and analysis) and imagination (creativity). In marketing, our role in innovation is in service of growing mind share and market share, penetrating new markets, creating barriers to entry and increasing company value.

Innovation may be the most critical skill in marketing today. It helps your company rise above the dense clutter and competition that are hurdles in nearly every product/service form and category. It helps you consider what would serve unfilled market needs and allow you to compete successfully.

Choice and Access

In developed economies, consumers enjoy an abundance of choices as they seek to resolve nearly any problem, satisfy any desire or act on even a momentary impulse. Consumers’ almost effortless access to an increasing variety of products, services and brands (PSBs) is among the major challenges marketers face, as we launch new PSBs or maintain consumers’ allegiance to our current ones.

Another major challenge is the avalanche of communication overwhelming consumers. Commercial, social and personal messages add up to a mountain of competing stimuli. Some of these messages and media are welcome, because they are appropriately targeted, well-organized or intentionally programmed to be relevant, valuable, entertaining, informative or engaging. However, the majority of incoming communication is unwanted: what marketers call noise and clutter. Spam, irrelevant, and badly executed ads are among the unwanted distractions and time-wasters.

Big Data Works Against Big Innovation

One increasingly troublesome approach to connecting with consumers, especially ones that are buying in our category, is “Big Data.” Acxiom and similar data collection companies are behavioral aggregators. They develop information and analytics by accumulating consumers’ past search, click-throughs, purchases and likes. In a repetition and frequency that is sometimes punishing, automated ads may then appear and reappear, reflecting a consumer’s PRIOR interests, which often were fleeting, fulfilled or simply mistakes. In that environment, communications lose their value and the excitement that would spark or accompany search and purchase is lost.

As you can see, the massive amount of choices and onslaught of communication combine to significantly diminish consumers’ receptivity to engaging with more information. It shortens their attention spans and impair their abilities to recall what they’ve seen or heard.

This is the brutal truth about the current marketing environment.

As you seek to successfully battle these forces and rise above them on behalf of your PSB, Harvard professor Michael Porter provides what may be the most valuable insight in marketing. In effect he says, “You are defined by your competition.”

That would naturally lead you to ask: what is your competition?

What is this “thing” that by comparison defines your PSB? What casts your PSB in a favorable or unfavorable light? What sets the standards that makes your PSB appear to be good, fair or bad, superior or inferior, highly functional or bare bones, elegant or ugly, and desirable or undesirable? Of course, these are general adjectives. The actual comparisons would be more specific, which you can draw from your competitive analysis via your means-end chain work.

In the broadest sense, competition is anything vying for the attention of your consumers, as well as for their purchasing power, loyalty and recommendations.

For example, production values and the quality of animation in movies have raised the bar for nearly every time of communication. Even grumpy cat videos on YouTube have a soundtrack and often some modest special effects.

Understanding the environment in which your messages will be seen and consumed helps you see how your PSB and its messaging fits into consumers’ life, not just their purchase and use behavior. After all, you are competing for a place amid all stimuli.

A Note for Marketers Marketing in B2B, B2G, or B2NP Environments

This concept that the “whole environment is competition” holds an especially important lesson for marketers in business-to-business (B2B), business-to-government (B2G) and business-to-non-profit (B2NP) enterprises. In these sectors, we typically call consumers: customers and clients. Before they buy from us, we refer to them as prospects. However, these are the exact same people who are marketed to as consumers during the majority of their lives and during the majority of each day. They have not morphed into different creatures from another planet. They do not suddenly enter a vacuum where they lose their consumer experiences and the style, taste, goals, beliefs and values that have been leveraged (or exploited) by marketers pursuing them as consumers.

Your ability to see customers, clients and prospects as people who have been “trained” or served as consumers, gives you an advantage for developing and marketing successful PSBs in B2B, B2G and B2NP enterprises.

Of course, “competing with everything your consumer sees” may be too broad a concept as you seek to form a functional competitive strategy for your PSB at this point in time. However, even while you focus on succeeding against direct competition: it may be helpful to look beyond it for the inspiration you need for innovation.

The question for you to answer now is: how can you create a PSB marketing mix that is remarkably different than your competitors, and profoundly more compelling than the alternatives available to your segments?

Your Innovations or New BPS

Dramatically differentiate your PSB by producing innovation in at least three of these 7 Pillars of Innovation (see below) or the 10 Types of Innovation (see Innovation 10 Types Lecture). Your innovations must be meaningful to the segments you have identified and profiled. Remember, you are working with the marketing mix, so your innovation will involve your product or service, and potentially its promotion, placement and price.

You will create a remarkably different, more compelling and better-aligned PSB, that ideally suits the requirements and end goals of your target consumers - better than your competition does.

You may create an entirely new brand or improve the one you have selected.

NOTE: For purposes of our project, a lower price is NOT considered an innovation. That could be a consequence of innovation, but simply manipulating the price will not be awarded any points.

The Seven Pillars of Innovation

Note the subcategories below each one.

1. Emotion

Values

Psychosocial Implications

Motives

Feelings

2. Ergonomics

Comfort

Safety

Ease-of-use

Performance

3. Aesthetics – Design

Visual (See)

Auditory (Hear)

Tactile (Feel)

Olfactory (Smell)

Taste

4. Identity

Personality (Attitude/Style/Aspiration)

Sense of Place (Location/Culture/Status)

Point in Time (Trending/Futuristic-Current-Vintage)

5. Impact - Causes

Social

Environment

6. Core technology

Features

Functionality

7. Quality

Craftsmanship

Durability

Reliability