We have an innovation problem, and it is miles and miles of indistinguishable stuff

Video 6 0 00 09-27 I learned today that Axe Body Spray for Men is running an ad in Uruguay where readers sending an SMS to their address receive on their phone the missing bits of a picture of a beautiful woman. (Those bits are clothed, BTW.)

This tells me there’s nothing about Axe the product that is distinctive, and the ad, despite being fun and engaging (especially for teenaged and 20-something males), won’t do much to make people select Axe over one of the thirty other male scent products out there. Video 6 0 00 17-27

I started thinking about this after listening to Jonathan Salem Baskin’s neat Listrak webinar last week, entitled, “Marketing Ideas for the First Post-Brand Decade.” Baskin did a nice job of showing that while customers and markets have moved beyond the days of “Mad Men” – where a well-crafted, creative advertisement could influence us to buy the latest dish detergent or safety razor – marketers, by and large, have not. Even “social media marketing,” like, say, the Axe campaign, is taking the same old ideas and porting them to new technology. Video 6 0 00 22-12 Video 6 0 00 26-07 Houston, we have a problem. Marketers are pushing the same old buttons to sell more variations of the same old products. It’s a negative-sum game. Variations increase cost without enlarging the overall market. Redundancy pushes down prices, invites private label competitors and overloads consumers’ minds.

Clearly, we’ve got to do something different. Marketing needs to pull back from its focus on distribution, packaging, and communication, and refocus on helping create great new products, that deliver distinctive value and make people’s lives better. Then it will be easy to communicate that to prospective customers.

Gary Hamel writes in “The Future of Management” that product & service innovation are near the bottom of the innovation hierarchy, and the pinnacle is “management innovation.” To Hamel, products are easily duplicated, quickly eliminating their added value. But as Roberto Verganti pointed out in “Design-Driven Innovation,” companies that create truly visionary products enjoy long periods of competitive advantage and profits.

Life is too difficult for many and too complex for everyone else. Everyone would like to have more fun. Therefore, there’s lots of need for products & services that allow us to manage our lives better or have diverting or engrossing experiences.

I’ve been reading “Change by Design,” by Tim Brown, and he asserts that companies need to adopt “design thinking” to create great new products and services. I can’t disagree with him, but also feel that design thinking is not that different from what great product managers and developers have been doing and should be doing. So, if your new-product group wants to hand over the reins to design thinkers, that’s their prerogative. For me, that’s the fun part of the job and I’d rather not outsource that.

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Tags: design, innovation, new products, product development, product management

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 9:22 am and is filed under innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

jmcaddell

Guys, thanks for your thoughts. I'm maybe being a little unfair to Tim Brown in saying that his view of design thinking is tilted toward design consultants like IDEO. But those are his examples, and the one example I've read thus far (in the first 180 pages of the book) of IDEO helping a company institute the culture internally is not very successful.

At any rate, I agree with both of you that Innovation is too important to be left to the marketing department. But at the same time if marketing ceases to involve innovation and is limited to packaging, pricing and promotion, I will find another profession!

Russ Hatfield Jr.

As "interesting" as Brown's(and IDEO's) case studies are I am often left wondering just how workable these are on wider scales. We can certainly gain some insight by studying these examples but, as you imply, I agree there are many ways to "skin this cat" ; )

And I sure hope you're leading the innovation efforts as a marketer. Just don't leave it to the engineers, ala The Big Three ; )

Thanks again!
Russ

Russ Hatfield Jr.

Like Wim, I agree with most of your post. Though, "design" does extend beyond the product and should include the entire "experience". So, it's certainly true that product managers and developers have been doing A PART of this traditionally, but the experience is end-to-end so, by definition, also extends outside their scope of work and even influence.

Since reality is perception in many cases, I can imagine that sometimes it's easier(not necessarily "better", but easier) to change the perception of a product/service via marketing than to actually innovate the product/service itself. The TED talk by R. Sutherland speaks to this: http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_life_l.... Diamond Shreddies. Hilarious -- but imagine that!

And what of "demand". That is, as much as we might see me-too, copycat products we also see consumers buying me-too, copycat products and services. There stands great opportunity to differentiate yourself if you can "snap" customers out of this sometimes-lazy, sometimes-pragmatic thinking(see Apple and iEverything). But we also need to change our expectations as consumers. Marketers create the market to some extent, but I guarantee that as soon as consumers truly demonstrate they seek innovative solutions(and are willing to pay for them) we'll see a flow of innovation unleashed.

Great post. Has given me lots to think about!

Thanks!
Russ
Seattle, WA
http://www.twitter.com/russhatfield

wimrampen

Hi John,

Great post. I think you touched some of the most important marketing nerves. I could not agree more with the majority of your post therefor.

I do not understand though, what your last paragraph is about. Tim Brown and many other great marketing, designers, innovators, managers, teachers etc etc, advocate a design thinking approach to problem solving. Nothing wrong with that.

What I am trying to say: Design Thinker is not a profession nor a job. Design Thinking is a mindset, an approach, a way of working (together). On top of that it is a creative process and that makes working the Design Thinking-way fun for me too.

My suggestion: If you do not seem to find the right solutions to your problems over and over again, or you want to test a new approach to see if there is more to gain, you may want some "design thinkers" to support you, or join you, on your journey.

By definition Design Thinkers that take over your problem and solve it for you, do not exist.