It is not possible to write a blog about inspirational stuff around innovation & marketing and not talk about Seth Godin (similarly, you cannot call yourself a marketeer and never have heard of Seth Godin either). Most probably you have all heard about or read his book "The Purple Cow", what Seth is calling the 6th P in the marketing mix. It is about why mass marketing is dead and that you have to be remarkable nowadays to survive. Doing something that stands out. Don't be boring. Safe is risky. Being very good is bad, you have to be excellent. Another great quote I saw in a presentation flips it around: “Advertising is the price companies pay for being unoriginal” by Yves Behar. Seth is also very passionate about spreading your remarkable idea, by telling it to the sneezers; the innovators and early adopters, who want to be remarkable, look for remarkable things and who will be telling their friends about it. There is a nice clip on TEDtalks where Seth very inspiringly talks about The Purple Cow, nice to refresh all of our memories once in a while: Seth Godin on sliced bread While searching for inspiring video's I came accross this talk from Seth Godin on the topic "this is broken" - about organizations/people offering customer experiences that do not work. Here also a link to the blog with more great examples Blog: This is broken
During the past years I have been leading marketing and product management teams with a continuous drive to improve performance and develop the department to highly performing teams. One consistent factor in these roles have been the search together with the teams what our mission and role is in the organization. That is how I found an inspiring document with a great view of the added value of Product Management or "How a market-driven focus leads companies to build products people want to buy". I have always believed that a product manager is the "CEO of the product" and that the role of PM is a management role not an operational sales support or marketing communication role. In my efforts to define the most optimal marketing organization in the medical device industry, on element always stood out and that is the fact that it is impossible to integrate all aspects of product management - strategic, application, technical, commercial and marketing communication - into one person. There should either be sufficient expert support roles or it might be an idea to split the PM job as suggested in the article: Strategic Role of Product Management
In a previous blog I mentioned that predicable innovation is not rocketscience. Here is a link to a presentation that has some inspiring content on that topic:
An idea-first approach leads to failure in 70 - 90 percent of the time
The truth is when it comes to innovation: voice of the customer practice does not work
Companies do not know how to listen to customers
Markets consist of people who are trying to get a job done…the goal of innovation is help customers get a job done better
Products come and go - the job is the stable, long-term focal point around which value creation should be centered
Occasionally I have been in workshops creating Personas and every time I realize how easy and powerfull this tool actually is. A persona is a description of the identity of your (target) customer, the user of your product, a stakeholder or even your own company etc., in the form of an actual person. I have used Personas to create brand identity and positioning, as input for marketing communication, I have used it for insight generation and concept development (in the fuzzy frontend), during product development and for usability design. I have seen it being used to characterize how a brand is perceived today versus the desired perception in the future. In a workshop it is a very good tool to step into the shoes of your customer, and have a discussion with your team and share knowledge. And a persona is a nice communication tool for internal communication purposes. I like the description on Wikipedia: Persona - wikipedia Here an example that you could use as a template to create your own:
Last year I received the book "Inside Steve's Brain" for my birthday. In this book Leander Kahney reveals the secrets of Steve Job's success and takes a dive into the reasons behind Steve's success based on his personality traits. An inspirational book and very practical as Kahney ends each chapter with a list of key learnings, although when reading, you do wonder whether Steve himself would actually confirm these key learnings. An important factor for being innovative is shifting your paradigm, look at things from different perspectives and think out of the box. For me, these books facilitate this where sometimes even the way some obvious things are described gives a slightly different perspective then you had before. Let me share with you some key learnings fromt the book that I like:
Saying no saved Apple. Be selective and learn to say no. Focus on the few things that you are good at.
Be perfectionistic and go for highest quality, do not accept compromize: in your product, your people, your processes etc.
Design is function, not shape.
Create prototypes and test.
Combine & steel: often great ideas come from combining different things, look at integration of technologies. Sticking to vertical integration, Jobs created unique innovation opportunities with a relatively fast time to market.
And, my favourite: do not ask your customers, they do not know what they want.
