Marketing Innovation or Marketing Innovation(S)

If you look at discussion groups or forums on marketing innovations, what you will see is a long, random list of topics, that include tips, ideas, suggestions and best practices that involve some aspect of innovation in marketing. If you read Techcrunch, SmartBrief and Mashable, then you will see there are new innovations taking place in marketing daily. Perhaps you have collected a laundry list of key takeaways from a conference. Adopting these techniques, often tactical can improve the performance of your marketing. Implementing ideas from social media, mobile, marketing automation, or wherever can’t create an innovative marketing department or an innovative marketing practice.  It’s like landscaping by buying interesting looking plants and planting them  plant by plant with no thought of the overarching design or landscaping needs in mind.

Marketing Innovation requires a strategy, management and methodology. Marketing Innovation is different from marketing innovations such that there is a strategy or plan we are executing against. From a marketing innovation management perspective, we have specific targets and objectives we want to improve, we have budget, and human resources allocated, we have specific innovation methodologies we are following.  We may even have a portfolio of initiatives balanced according to our strategic needs.  Because we have clear goals we can be proactive as well as respond opportunistically. So sources of innovations that can help our marketing practice, support our objectives, but don’t drive them.  So if we see a great idea in the business or technology press, we can understand where and how it fits in our context and strategy.

In order to be effective in marketing innovation, you need to be collaborating with IT, the CTO and R&D if these people exist in your organization.  They aren’t as interested in your tactical issues as they have enough of their own. But they do have a vested interest in understanding what you are trying to achieve strategically, what your objectives are and they can’t really support you if you are moving from one tactic to the next.

Bottom line, implementing a series of innovative marketing practices does  not make for innovative marketing, nor marketing innovation. It might make you better than those who don’t innovate at all or at the same rate, but it can also contribute to you doing the wrong thing for too long.  It is like trying to navigate your way through a forest tree by tree, instead of having a view of the big picture, which is the forest and a sense of direction.