Marketing Innovation or Marketing and Innovation?

Recently I did a search on LinkedIn for people who had marketing innovation as part of their title and found two types of people, those who had marketing innovation and those who had Marketing and Innovation. So what is the difference? Those who have the responsibility for marketing and innovation have responsibility for the growth areas of the business.  In other words, the company will grow through sales and marketing initiatives and though innovation. This is as opposed to growing though acquisitions.  That is not to say in a larger company they might also have someone responsible for merger and acquisitions as well.

A company that has someone responsible for Innovation such as a Chief Innovation Officer is making a statement about how important they believe innovation is at that company. Hopefully they support that priority with budget, tools, strategic direction and clear objectives.

A company that has a chief innovation officer sees its future growth tied to its ability to develop breakthrough products and who better to lead that effort than the head of marketing, working with engineering, R&D, product development? When the person responsible for marketing and innovation looks at innovation, most likely they are focusing on product not process innovation and not looking at the broader issue of innovation throughout the company.

In a company where there is no chief innovation officer, the chief marketing officer needs to lead the innovation effort as it relates to developing new products and services. He or she should have a system set-up that incorporates the understanding of customer needs and changing market opportunities so product development and R&D knows where to focus its efforts.

The person responsible for marketing innovation has a much narrower charge.  He or she is looking at how to innovate the process or sub process of marketing. In other words, marketing is made up of many activities and sub activities e.g. strategy, communications, research, operations, analysis, administration, etc. How do we improve those activities so marketing becomes more innovative? However, too often companies take more of a re-engineering approach to the marketing process, with the focus on doing more with less, so the focus is on cost cutting, efficiency and near term improvements. Improving productivity is a legitimate goal for innovation, but as an author once said, you can’t cut your way to greatness.”  You are not going to get breakout marketing with a continual focus on improving efficiency.

Innovation requires risk taking and some risks will pay off and others won’t. With a focus on efficiency, you become more risk adverse as you don’t want to waste money on things that might not work. What you can do is continually adopt best practices developed by others. But that is hardly the definition of marketing innovation or having an innovative marketing department.

If you are responsible for Marketing and Innovation, you need to make sure you are embracing innovation in the marketing department and not just focusing on new products and services. If you are responsible for marketing innovation, you need to make sure you are not just looking at business development opportunities regardless of the type and focus some of your efforts on improving your ability to market those new opportunities.