Innovation and Marketing

Would you like to destroy the competition in your field?

That should be everyone’s aim, but how to go about it!

Read what Steve Tobak has to say about this important subject (June 2009). He is a marketing and strategy consultant based in Silicon Valley -- a 20-plus year high-tech industry veteran and former senior executive of a number of public and private companies:

“An exasperated CEO stood up in the board meeting and exclaimed, “Is that all you marketing &#*$s know how to do, compete on price?!”
Before you get too excited, that CEO was cursing at me. And no, that wasn’t all I knew how to do. But he did have a point, and it’s even more relevant now than it was back then. In today’s marketplace where everybody’s competing for the same shrinking budget and differentiation is hard to come by, marketers often think of price as their only lever.
That’s just incompetent marketing, plain and simple.
There are lots of ways to differentiate a product. You can even create the perception of differentiation, if you’re creative enough. It’s called product positioning and it’s something of an art.

Here are Five fundamental product positioning principles that will help you destroy the competition:
1. Find a product attribute that captures the customer’s imagination.
2. Market share gains are expensive.
3. Reinvent the “customer experience”.
4. Only target up, not down the totem pole.
5. Infrastructure (or ecosystem) as a competitive barrier.”

(To read the complete paper, go to http://blogs.bnet.com/ceo/?p=2316&tag=nl.e713)

What does this have to do with innovation?

Everything.

Innovation is not just about creative thinking – it is about making it real, making it possible.
It is about finding strategies to create products that will achieve the desired product positioning.
It is about more than price.
It is about working in a team -- not in isolation.
It is about multiple disciplines and numerous perspectives getting the job done.
This is the role and importance of "Innovation" -- and NO -- it does not just apply to the automotive industry. It is true of any innovation in any industry -- also the food- and beverage industry.