Marketing is a term that’s described very loosely. Very few truly understand the essence of the word. Ditto with the term Innovation.
What do they mean essentially? A simple definition would be that the two of them produce results. Period.
A business needs to do two things well to succeed: Marketing and Innovation. All the rest of the business support these two functions.
Jack Trout pointed out in an article that he wrote on Forbes a while back: “Today, when top management is surveyed, their priorities in order are: finance, sales, production, management, legal and people. Missing from the list: marketing and innovation.”
So, why are these two key functions at the lower end of the priority list? Perhaps, there is a lack of comprehension about the real meaning of marketing and innovation and the nature of management activities that are necessary to drive and manage these two functions.
Marketing and Innovation are the only things that can sustain a company’s continued growth. There are countless examples of companies who could not see opportunities beyond their noses. The Big 3 auto makers in the US ignored innovation and marketing, resulting in increased market share for Japanese car makers. Microsoft ignored innovation and efficient marketing allowing a competitor like Firefox to enter and grab browser share. Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center were innovative but failed to market (or failed to exploit many of the technologies they developed) many technologies now in use by Apple and others.
Fundamentally, marketing and innovation is a philosophy of doing business. It about developing a mindset or a way of thinking that searches for external opportunities and develops an outside-in orientation. All other business functions such as finance, production and distribution, customer services, R&D etc support these two disciplines. Marketing is not just advertising and promotion – it means bringing market focus into business decision making.
Innovation is not just exploiting technology for marketable products, it is also about changing the internal processes of an organization to serve customers better and to create sustainable competitive advantage. The need is not to grow bigger but to grow better.
Innovation is a constant in technology as well as business. But not all innovations are the same. Most innovations can be divided into two broad categories: an evolutionary change (e.g., from the phonograph record to the cassette tape) or a discontinuous innovation (e.g., from the cassette tape to the iPod). Discontinuous innovations are new products or services that require a combination of the end-user and the marketplace to effect a dramatic change in past behavior, with the promise of gaining equally dramatic new benefits.
Innovation bring out the ‘New’ or ‘Better’. Marketing commercializes it. Both of them work hand-in-hand. A caveat however, both these disciplines are philosophies that need to be intrinsic to the workings of an organization to succeed. Which means that they need to be fostered from the top.
