Archive for the ‘marketing innovation’ tag
Is a Rush to Revenue Hurting Your Marketing Innovation & Domination?
Here’s a familiar scenario with many companies that have tactically approached social media marketing: ”Let’s stop wasting time with this social media mumbo jumbo. We need to increase sales, grow revenue and sign up more customers!”.
On the other end of the spectrum you might hear, “Social media marketing is too difficult to measure, it’s early days. So let’s keep investing and eventually we’ll be able to see our return.” Neither attitude has the best long term interests of the business in mind.
Clearly there are few businesses that don’t want to increase sales and conversions, but is a singular focus on revenue, especially in today’s world of connected consumers, actually helping bottom line business results or creating a longer term disadvantage? Alternatively, is the absence of focus on revenue with social media marketing a responsible and accountable approach to the investment?
Winning battles without also winning hearts and minds can lose the war.
Increased transactions and revenue alone are not enough to scale competitive advantage. Investment in prospect, community and customer engagement are also essential, even if they don’t directly generate sales. Investment in digital marketing innovation that keeps pace with shifts in technology and how consumers use digital communication channels to discover, consume and engage with content is essential to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage, especially when both the direct and indirect impact on revenue is being optimized.
Some revenue-only driven marketers will see the progress their social media savvy competitors are making with industry buzz and move towards a social media marketing effort, but it’s often superficial or more mechanical than meaningful. Increasing fans, friends and followers does not automatically equate to more sales or qualitative engagement.
Meaningful social engagement between companies and the communities of prospects, customers, partners, employees and industry media can act as a force multiplier towards gaining market share and improving business outcomes all along the customer lifecycle of engagement from attention to transaction to advocacy.
There are a number of obstacles to qualitative social media adoption within organizations and a recent study by the Economist Intelligence Unit and PulsePoint Group reveals the most common barriers include the inability to prove ROI. I think John Bell from Social@Ogilvy offers a great response to that:
“Don’t let ROI hunger kill innovation. ROI and budget are also a leadership issue. While arriving at ROI measures are important to managing business, they are hard to do in a space where we are all still innovating and proving models valid. Leaders need to guide organizations to be responsible about value without being too ruthless on ROI in the near term lest they kill innovation.”
There is no question marketing needs to be accountable to sales and revenue. At the same time, the direct and indirect impact of effective, meaningful and scalable social media marketing efforts must be considered in that accountability, not just the short term wins. Limiting investment solely to those activities that directly impact customer acquisition and sales leaves a lot of mindshare, awareness and collective brand equity on the table for competitors to take and turn into scalable revenue in the future.
What are your roadblocks to broader and more meaningful social media adoption within your company? Which end of the spectrum do you fall? Pure ROI or Pure Engagement? Somewhere in between?
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The Road to the Future is Paved with Gold (AmEx Cards)
For at least a few years, American Express has been leading its category in marketing innovation. OPEN Forum turned the card you carry into a robust social system membership. Members Project was social before social was hot. By putting the reigns in cardmembers’ hands this program redefined corporate giving and, I’d argue, provided the blueprint for later entrants like Chase Community Giving. While many other issuers still rely on tactical promotions to bump-up fan counts, AmEx is forging deep partnerships with social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare and inventing new ways to transact online. It’s bold stuff from one of the biggest brands in the world, but it’s hardly rocket science. And that’s a good thing.
Yesterday at a Direct Marketing Idea Exchange (DMIX) luncheon in New Yorrk, I had the pleasure of listening to AmEx CEO & Chairman, Ken Chenault, talk to a group of 70 or so seasoned direct marketers about four key principles guiding his company forward. While he barely touched on any of the programs I’ve outlined above, it was clear how the principles he outlined provide a solid foundation upon which to build new marketing, product, and business innovations.
Here are Ken’s four points (bolded) and my interpretations (just about everything else).
Brands are even more important today than they were yesterday. To some, living in a world of unlimited choice might mean that brands matter less. That everything is a commodity when hundreds of similar, suitable solutions are a click, post or tweet away. But unlimited choice raises the bar for informed choice. And brand can play a key role in guiding informed choice – when that brand is trusted and stands for exemplary service. When you think brand, don’t think logos and taglines and corporate standards. Those in fact may not mean nearly as much as they used to. But what those things represent – your culture, your values, the value you provide, the trust you’ve created over time – provides the key to differentiating your business in an age when choice might be limited but trust in corporations is at an all time low. This, for example, is why thousands upon thousands of small business owners not only choose AmEx for the plastic in their wallets but choose OPEN Forum (as opposed to, say, RandomSmallBusinessCommunity.com) as their online meeting place.
Data is king. Well yes, of course it is. Chenault spoke about data as one of AmEx’s most valuable assets. AmEx is (somewhat) uniquely positioned to own the data that comes from what he calls a “digital closed loop”. Because they have both an extensive consumer network and an extensive merchant network they can derive powerful insights about attitudes and actions throughout the entire buy/sell process. Not everyone has that, of course. Even data monsters like Google really only see part of the process — they know what you search for and where you clicked, but lose you before the transaction is made (especially if you end up purchasing offline). But the takeaway for any business is this: own your data and leverage it to forge a deeper understanding of your customers’ actions (what they actually do) and aspirations (predictive modeling to gauge what they’re likely to do in the future). If you’re reading between the lines, you might already have a sense that AmEx’s closed loop data has been a nice bargaining chip in its dealings with top social platforms. It’s also fundamental to the guts of a program like Link Like Love, that uses your Facebook likes to deliver personalized offers.
Scale is being redefined. Here, I was hoping for a microMARKETING plug but instead got quite the opposite. Ken said, “When Facebook has 900 million people, your 10 million customers aren’t enough.” While you might interpret this as one-percenter, imperialist, might-makes-right thinking the underlying premise is that in a world where data is king, the more people you’re connected to, the bigger your data store, and the greater your opportunity for insights. Beyond the data though, the redefinition of scale carries an interesting business insight — that it has become more important to be inclusive than it is to be exclusive. Facebook didn’t really become a business until it opened moved beyond its college student core and opened its doors to everyone else. AmEx has focused heavily on exclusivity for more than a century – and while their Centurion and Platinum card brands and their services that provide cardmember only access to all sorts of experiences aren’t going away any time soon, they are accelerating their move into new products to attract and engage entirely new customer segments. On the one hand this could be pre-paid charge cards, while on the other it could be innovative partnerships with financial service providers in BRIC countries. It could also take the form of seamless integration with Twitter and Foursquare so there is no technical barrier to social transactions.
If you’re going to transform the company around digital, it has to happen across the entire company. For all the focus on social business, the truth is that most businesses haven’t even successfully made the shift from analogue to digital. For many, digital becomes a role. Digital becomes a department. Digital becomes an outpost. Walmart comes to mind – for all their innovation through Walmart Labs, that digital unit isn’t even based in Bentonville where the emphasis remains squarely focused on merchandising the brick-and-mortar stores. To truly thrive in a post-digital world, companies need to converge offline and online, and every employee needs to adopt a digital-first mindset. Your traditional assets – whether those assets are a resonant brand; a large network of customers, suppliers, partners and employees; access to real world transaction data; state-of-the-art physical plants; or well-made products – are no less important today. But it’s equally if not more important to develop clear, actionable plans for leveraging those assets into new, digital-forward initiatives. And it should be the responsibility of everyone in your organization to think about how to make this happen.
I think this is all pretty compelling stuff – but also practical thinking that any company can use. How do you think you might apply these four concepts to your business? What would you change? What would you add?
The Road to the Future is Paved with Gold (American Express Cards)
For at least a few years, American Express has been leading its category in marketing innovation. OPEN Forum turned the card you carry into a robust social system membership. Members Project was social before social was hot. By putting the reigns in cardmembers’ hands this program redefined corporate giving and, I’d argue, provided the blueprint for later entrants like Chase Community Giving. While many other issuers still rely on tactical promotions to bump-up fan counts, AmEx is forging deep partnerships with social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare and inventing new ways to transact online. It’s bold stuff from one of the biggest brands in the world, but it’s hardly rocket science. And that’s a good thing.
Yesterday at a Direct Marketing Idea Exchange (DMIX) luncheon in New Yorrk, I had the pleasure of listening to AmEx CEO & Chairman, Ken Chenault, talk to a group of 70 or so seasoned direct marketers about four key principles guiding his company forward. While he barely touched on any of the programs I’ve outlined above, it was clear how the principles he outlined provide a solid foundation upon which to build new marketing, product, and business innovations.
Here are Ken’s four points (orange, bolded) and my interpretations (just about everything else).
Brands are even more important today than they were yesterday. To some, living in a world of unlimited choice might mean that brands matter less. That everything is a commodity when hundreds of similar, suitable solutions are a click, post or tweet away. But unlimited choice raises the bar for informed choice. And brand can play a key role in guiding informed choice – when that brand is trusted and stands for exemplary service. When you think brand, don’t think logos and taglines and corporate standards. Those in fact may not mean nearly as much as they used to. But what those things represent – your culture, your values, the value you provide, the trust you’ve created over time – provides the key to differentiating your business in an age when choice might be limited but trust in corporations is at an all time low. This, for example, is why thousands upon thousands of small business owners not only choose AmEx for the plastic in their wallets but choose OPEN Forum (as opposed to, say, RandomSmallBusinessCommunity.com) as their online meeting place.
Data is king. Well yes, of course it is. Chenault spoke about data as one of AmEx’s most valuable assets. AmEx is (somewhat) uniquely positioned to own the data that comes from what he calls a “digital closed loop”. Because they have both an extensive consumer network and an extensive merchant network they can derive powerful insights about attitudes and actions throughout the entire buy/sell process. Not everyone has that, of course. Even data monsters like Google really only see part of the process — they know what you search for and where you clicked, but lose you before the transaction is made (especially if you end up purchasing offline). But the takeaway for any business is this: own your data and leverage it to forge a deeper understanding of your customers’ actions (what they actually do) and aspirations (predictive modeling to gauge what they’re likely to do in the future). If you’re reading between the lines, you might already have a sense that AmEx’s closed loop data has been a nice bargaining chip in its dealings with top social platforms. It’s also fundamental to the guts of a program like Link Like Love, that uses your Facebook likes to deliver personalized offers.
Scale is being redefined. Here, I was hoping for a microMARKETING plug but instead got quite the opposite. Ken said, “When Facebook has 900 million people, your 10 million customers aren’t enough.” While you might interpret this as one-percenter, imperialist, might-makes-right thinking the underlying premise is that in a world where data is king, the more people you’re connected to, the bigger your data store, and the greater your opportunity for insights. Beyond the data though, the redefinition of scale carries an interesting business insight — that it has become more important to be inclusive than it is to be exclusive. Facebook didn’t really become a business until it opened moved beyond its college student core and opened its doors to everyone else. AmEx has focused heavily on exclusivity for more than a century – and while their Centurion and Platinum card brands and their services that provide cardmember only access to all sorts of experiences aren’t going away any time soon, they are accelerating their move into new products to attract and engage entirely new customer segments. On the one hand this could be pre-paid charge cards, while on the other it could be innovative partnerships with financial service providers in BRIC countries. It could also take the form of seamless integration with Twitter and Foursquare so there is no technical barrier to social transactions.
If you’re going to transform the company around digital, it has to happen across the entire company. For all the focus on social business, the truth is that most businesses haven’t even successfully made the shift from analogue to digital. For many, digital becomes a role. Digital becomes a department. Digital becomes an outpost. Walmart comes to mind – for all their innovation through Walmart Labs, that digital unit isn’t even based in Bentonville where the emphasis remains squarely focused on merchandising the brick-and-mortar stores. To truly thrive in a post-digital world, companies need to converge offline and online, and every employee needs to adopt a digital-first mindset. Your traditional assets – whether those assets are a resonant brand; a large network of customers, suppliers, partners and employees; access to real world transaction data; state-of-the-art physical plants; or well-made products – are no less important today. But it’s equally if not more important to develop clear, actionable plans for leveraging those assets into new, digital-forward initiatives. And it should be the responsibility of everyone in your organization to think about how to make this happen.
I think this is all pretty compelling stuff – but also practical thinking that any company can use. How do you think you might apply these four concepts to your business? What would you change? What would you add?
3 ways to take conversions to new heights
It’s been more than 10 years since e-commerce became a truly viable way of doing business — light years by technology standards. eMarketer forecasts that U.S. retail e-commerce sales this holiday season alone will hit $46.7 billion. That’s a significant number, but considering the phenomenal amount of technology and marketing innovation over the past decade, is it what it could be? I don’t think so.
Since conversion rates have been tracked by the industry, the average rate has hovered between 2 and 3 percent. Yet, according to the Fireclick Index, 10 percent of visitors come to websites intending to make a purchase. These numbers overwhelmingly suggest a huge lost opportunity for online brands, and marketers as a whole have not effectively capitalized on their visitors’ intent to purchase.
Thus, the question is, how can marketers improve upon their current conversion rates? One major area of investment to solve this problem is the personalization of existing websites and channels, such as email and mobile, to create a more engaging consumer experience. However, most companies are still failing to see significant conversion gains from these investments.
By following these three simple rules, marketers will be able to take their personalization programs leaps and bounds beyond the status quo in 2012.
Prioritize intent, not past purchase history
When it comes to personalizing the shopping experience, social-graph profiles and historical transaction data provide invaluable insights to a buyer’s taste and preference, but they alone cannot predict what a visitor actually wants in the moment. This can be inferred by looking at micro-behaviors of visitors. Only by taking buyer intent into consideration can retailers best position visitors for sales. Altrec.com, an online destination for outdoor enthusiasts, recently increased its conversion rates by 450 percent after implementing an intent-based personalization approach. Because of the seasonality of its business, it is critical for the company to factor in the real-time intent of potential buyers into its personalization strategy — a shopper may have bought a bathing suit in June but now is coming back in November for a North Face ski parka. The quicker retailers can identify and differentiate between current buyer intent and past buying history, the more relevant their recommendations will be, and therefore the more likely to drive sales and elevate conversion.
Synchronize across all touch points
When it comes to deploying personalization approaches across multiple touch points, retailers must remember the importance of consistency. From the website, to email, to chat support, to internet newsletters, to mobile apps and more, the end-to-end buyer experience is multi-channeled, and the most successful personalization approaches must work in unison across these different touch points. If a customer receives a certain personalized marketing message on a home electronics retailer’s site, but then fires up the iPhone app and sees a completely different message, the first message will be considerably less effective on that customer. It often takes multiple impressions and interactions for a concept to truly resonate with buyers, so consider how to apply personalization seamlessly across all of your primary channels and customer touch points.
Consider the shopping lifecycle
Customers engage with you for all kinds of reasons. Some may be visiting your site to research products. Others may have their credit cards out, ready to purchase. By paying attention to clues such as a visitor’s search terms, method of arrival to your site, and micro behaviors once there, you can often ascertain the visitor’s stage in the shopping lifecycle. With this information, it’s easy to know how to best serve customers in the moment. For example, when visitors are simply gathering information or are in the product-exploration process, providing them with personalized product recommendations with a mix of ratings and reviews might be most useful to them. However, if they’re ready to buy at that moment, recommendations might be an unhealthy distraction, and your efforts should be focused on how to drive the immediate sale.
As the lines continue to blur between brick-and-mortar retail stores, mobile commerce, and e-commerce, it has become more important than ever to truly understand and meet the needs of consumers. By accounting for the intent, context, and shopping lifecycle of each individual shopper, online brands can create profoundly relevant customer experiences that resonate and convert across these newly blended channels. While e-commerce will not solve the conversion curse overnight, personalization is well-positioned to help marketers break the single-digit conversion status quo that has been plaguing the industry for years.
Anurag Wadehra is the CMO at Baynote.
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Steve Jobs: His Unique Customer Experience Strategy
Should we follow Steve Jobs’ example when it comes to the customer experience?
The answer is an unequivocal yes. But not for the reason you may think. Steve Jobs seemed to have an intuitive understanding that marketing, at its core, is saddled with the paradox that it is a consumer discipline that is inherently anti-consumer. The approach Steve Jobs insisted on at Apple resolves this paradox in a resolutely pro-consumer way by embracing the anti-consumer side of this equation, not by dodging it. Yet Steve Jobs’ approach to the customer experience is, perhaps, the one thing for which he is most misunderstood.
Marketing is practiced as a discipline that is meant to be “the voice of the consumer,” quote/unquote. The challenge, though, is that other practical marketing considerations are no less important, and these will often, if not always, push marketers in the other direction.
Chief among these anti-consumer considerations is the need for some degree of homogeny in production, distribution and service. If every product were completely customized, costs and delivery requirements would keep them beyond the means and reach of most consumers. Ideally, every product would be perfectly matched to the unique needs and preferences of each consumer. But practical considerations require that marketers be less consumer-friendly than that, and usually a lot less.
For perspective, it is worth recalling that needs-based market segmentation is a relatively recent marketing innovation that was hotly debated throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and even fiercely resisted for many years by several big consumer-marketing companies. It is often forgotten that modern marketing, even in a digital age, is profitable only at scale, so a better matching of product benefits and designs to the needs of consumer segments has to be weighed against the resulting lower economies of scale in production, distribution, media buying, advertising and more. Marketing is a discipline of maximizing efficiencies as much as it is a discipline of being the voice of the consumer.
The other anti-consumer consideration at the core of marketing is one of control. Let’s be honest: To get consumers to buy, we use every trick in the book, including many that deliberately exploit flaws and weaknesses in the ways in which people make decisions. (Hence, the popularity of intellectual fads like behavioral economics.) Consumers know that the only rule that counts is “buyer beware,” so the paradox of control is no mystery. But it is anti-consumer in the sense that the bottom-line interests of marketers often entail working against the best interests of consumers.
Steve Jobs enforced end-to-end control of Apple products. Jobs sealed Apple computers so that hobbyists couldn’t modify them and Jobs refused to license Apple software to run on non-Apple hardware. End-to-end was Apple’s approach to everything, from the original Macintosh to iTunes to apps to Flash to the iCloud, just to mention a few. Steve Jobs ran Apple by the idea that the best customer experience arises from being anti-consumer about customization and control.
Now this is not to say that the secret to success is to be anti-consumer about customization and control. Rather, it is to remind us that customization and control are secondary. What comes first is the customer experience, whatever that means for customization and control. Steve Jobs didn’t care about customization and control per se. He cared about the customer experience, which led to the ways he handled customization and control, not the other way around.
Unfortunately, the business concepts that come and go as marketing fads and conference themes often treat notions like customization and control as if they are the endgame. They are not. We learn nothing from Steve Jobs about open versus closed models for our categories. His battles with Microsoft and Google were only incidentally about that. What Steve Jobs fought for, and what we should learn from him, is that first and foremost success is about the customer experience, even when that necessitates embracing the marketing paradox of being anti-consumer.
Contributed to BSI by: J. Walker Smith, Executive Chairman, The Futures Company
Sponsored by: The Brand Positioning Workshop
How Coca-Cola will double its business by 2020
Everybody tosses around the word “innovation” these days, but it’s hard to nail down what it means, and even harder to bake into the culture of big companies since, generally speaking, big companies like to double down on what they know already works, rather than try something scary and new that isn’t proven.
Then there are different sorts and sizes of innovation: operational innovation, where you do what you already do better; departmental innovation, where one part of the company does something nifty and new — and a lot of marketing innovation happens only within the marketing department and doesn’t touch anybody else; and then there’s cross functional innovation, where stakeholders come from different departments, and where partners like agencies, media companies, and technology companies might have a stake.
At next month’s ad:tech New York, we’ll enjoy a keynote address about brands and innovation given by Wendy Clark, Coca-Cola’s senior VP, integrated marketing communications and capabilities, who will be joined by Renny Gleeson, Wieden + Kennedy’s global director of interactive strategies and the co-founder of PIE (The Portland Incubator Experiment).
Brad Berens: What is your working definition of innovation? Did I miss something big in the three sorts I laid out? What are your goals for innovation within Coca-Cola, both in the marketing department and on a wider basis?
Wendy Clark: The Coca-Cola Company has a one-page document that represents our ambition for our company and system called our 2020 Vision. Written clearly as a mandate for the marketers of the company, that document is our remit “to develop the world’s most innovative and effective marketing.” That’s easy to say and harder to do. In a system so scaled (we’re in more than 200 countries), innovation can take the form of margin-dilutive complexity if we’re not careful. So we have to be focused.
We start thinking about innovation for our business in terms of our products, our packaging, our equipment, and our consumer engagement. For consumer engagement, we’re really looking at consumer trends, and how we’ll continue to recruit future generations of teens into loving our brands.
What has much of our attention right now is mobile. Mobile is impacting our total business — certainly consumer engagement, but it’s not limited to that. Mobile commerce (m-wallet) and mobile vault will have profoundly positive impacts on our business.
Focus Groups: Truly Useful In Brand Innovation?
Focus groups have been the go-to method many marketers employ to gain insight on how certain people think, feel and behave. In our social media connected world, are focus groups an effective forum for driving creativity and innovation in brand development and marketing?
Henry Ford said “if I gave people what they said they wanted, I would have made a faster horse”. Mr. Ford instinctively knew then what still holds true about people today–people simply don’t know what they want, or what form an innovative idea should come in to solve a problem they don’t yet know they have. Nobody needed a car. Yet once realized, the automobile was arguably the most significant game changing product innovation of the last century.
A more contemporary version of this example is alive and well at Apple. Apple never conducts focus group research to guide their product innovations or drive their marketing. Innovation isn’t about giving people what they say they want. Asking people want they want or need is not a very useful tactic in driving new ideas for innovation. Yet, many marketers continue to rely on this artificial “laboratory” research to gain insights into what specific segments of people might be thinking about, what products they may use, and why they favor one thing over another. Rarely will focus group research shed any useful light on the deeper needs people have that are, as yet, unrealized in their minds. If we assume this to be true, why do focus group research at all?
“I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgment; they rely too much on research, like a drunkard uses a lamp post for support rather than illumination”.?– David Ogilvy
What do you need to know?
Instead of asking consumers contrived questions to reveal their preferences or their intent to purchase, as marketers, we need to discover what truly matters to people. To break through the slush pile of our crowded marketplace, your marketing must be perceived as genuinely valuable and useful to the people you’re hoping to win over. Beyond product features and use benefits, if you want to engage consumers today, your marketing (not just your product) must improve (in tangible ways) the condition of people’s lives.
Focus groups have become marketers default button.
I have witnessed too many times how quickly marketers jump into focus group research to learn some information they think they don’t have. ( I am as guilty as anyone else in this regard) Truth is, there’s a ton of research out there. Combine this available information with solid intuition, and the collective (paid for) experience already within your organization or industry, and you can find all the information you need to form and support a compelling marketing or brand positioning idea.
Focus groups are artificial settings.
People live real lives. Gathering a group of people into an artificial environment and probing them with over simplified questions only creates artificial results. Plus people usually don’t know what they don’t know. It’s very difficult to get useful insight from people who are not in their natural environment. And there are always those participants whose energy can dominate or influence the perspectives and opinions of others in the group. The results in this artificial setting are almost always biased.
A focus group is not quality time with consumers.
The reason focus groups are so commonly used is because they are easy and cheap to execute. However spending an hour with groups of 6-8 people in a room can hardly be called quality time. Chances are the thoughts going through participant’s heads during the session go something like this:
I don’t like the guy next to me… I really don’t care about this product, but they’re paying me $75…I don’t feel comfortable sharing my real opinion in a group…this is boring!
Get out in the real world and be with people.
Instead of sitting behind the glass, get out into the real world. Be everywhere your tribe is gathering online and off, be where they do their laundry, shop, eat, play, relax. Spend quality time with them in real-life settings. Learn how your target customer not only uses your products, but how they live in their real lives. Much of what we humans think about is unconscious, and our emotions are intertwined with our reasoning. It comes down to understanding basic human nature, and what higher level emotional needs are currently unmet within the context of your target consumer’s overall life.
Put your efforts toward spending quality time with real people in one-on-one natural settings. Through these interactions, you’ll gain far richer consumer insights that will directly lead to more relevant, compelling, meaningful and valuable brand building strategies.
Sponsored By: The Two-Day Brand Positioning Workshop
5 Actionable Skills to Improve Inbound Marketing Innovation
This is a guest blog post written by Jamie Turner, founder of the 60 Second Marketer. He is an in-demand marketing speaker who is currently writing a book entitled “Go Mobile” with Jeanne Hopkins, director of marketing for HubSpot.
I’m currently at Dreamforce in San Francisco reporting on some of the new and innovative concepts that are being discussed here. Dreamforce is hosted by Salesforce.com, which is an unusually forward-thinking organization that was recently ranked by Forbes as the most innovative company on the planet.
As you know, innovation is the fuel that drives any successful company. Oh, sure, there are other things that make a company successful, like a great sales force, a terrific marketing department, and a finely-tuned lead generation program. But innovation is what keeps successful companies one step ahead of its competition. Without it, the company will gradually lose steam and, eventually, fade away.
When Forbes was analyzing the world’s most successful companies, it arrived at five key skills that separate the most innovative companies from the rest. Which of these skills are you incorporating into your corporate DNA? The more of these you’re practicing now, the more likely you’ll be successful in years to come.
1. Questioning
This skill allows employees to challenge the status quo and consider new possibilities. Do you encourage your employees to ask “Why?” Do you reward them for coming up with new ways to solve old problems? If so, then you’re practicing the art of questioning, which is a skill the most innovative and successful companies use to stay ahead of their competitors.
2. Observing
Are you so focused on meeting deadlines that you don’t have the time to observe the activities of customers, suppliers, and other companies? If the day-to-day grind is pre-occupying you, then it might be time to step back and observe how companies outside your industry are solving problems. Forbes found that the world’s most innovative and successful companies took the time and the trouble to step back and observe the world around them.
Are you using certain inbound marketing techniques simply because it’s what your competitors are using? It’s time to question that tactic. Better still, try exploring what it would mean to do the exact opposite.
Furthermore, when was the last time you observed what it was like to be one of your customers? Have you called your customer service line to see what your customers are experiencing? Have you conducted a secret shopper test to see what it’s like to buy your product or service? When you observe all the little details, you’ll find little tweaks that can make a big difference in your customer’s satisfaction.
3. Networking
This is a form of idea-sharing that can help your company grow significantly. Networking allows you to generate new solutions to your problems by sharing ideas and swapping concepts with others. The trick is to network inside and outside your industry. After all, if you only network with people inside your industry, eventually you’ll just be sharing the same ideas. The big idea is to get outside your industry to see what you can incorporate from unrelated professions.
If you’ve only surrounded yourself with people from your company or your industry, you’re missing out on one of the best ways to generate new ideas for your inbound marketing program. Network with people outside your industry, and see what’s happening. Then, incorporate those ideas into your own strategies.
4. Experimenting
The most innovative companies are constantly experimenting with new concepts and new ideas. They’re taking things apart and putting them back together again in unexpected ways. Do you encourage experimentation within your organization? If so, then you’re practicing one of the skills the world’s most successful companies use to grow their businesses. Keep it up!
5. Associative Thinking
This is the technique of drawing connections between the questions, observations, networking ideas, and experiments you came up with in steps 1 through 4. Associative thinking may be one of the more challenging items on the list, but it can also be one of the more rewarding because it’s how awesome things like the iPhone, Wikipedia, and Netflix were invented.
Associative thinking happens when you’re able to step back and take a look at how everything fits together. Sometimes, the best way to do that is to take a break and get away from the office. In fact, many of the world’s most successful CEOs make a point of taking extended vacations – it’s where they’re able to put associative thinking to work for their business.
Putting It All to Work
It’s one thing to understand the skills and concepts outlined above, but it’s another thing entirely to put them all to work. In the end, you can talk about innovation all you want, but if you don’t put it into action, then you’re just blowing hot air. The truly successful companies do two things: 1) They generate innovative ideas, and 2) they execute them.
What are you doing to encourage a culture of innovation at your company? Better still, how are you using your new and innovative ideas to drive new leads to your business? That’s where the truly innovative companies stand out from the rest.
Image Credit: Matthew Wynn
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