Three Ways You Can Shape the Future of Marketing

When it comes to marketing innovation, too many companies are passive receivers of technological advancement.  Vendors are always pitching technologies and solutions. But you don’t have to limit the innovation of your marketing to what is being pitched. And taking the approach of adopting new technology only when “everyone else is doing it,” has proven to be the wrong approach time and time again. This approach leaves your company reacting to the trends, not leading them. That is not how you bring world class marketing to your organization. You can shape the future of marketing. 

Here are some suggestions for how to shape the future of marketing for your company.

1. Have a Brainstorming Session - have an afternoon or morning retreat with the marketing team. Discuss what the customers or markets of the future will be like and how it will impact the business. I was doing a project for Disney who tries to make their parks as family friendly as possible. Long before gay marriage was legal, we asked, “what will family friendly mean” given the rise of same sex couples and potential gay marriage?”  What does family friendly mean in light of the rising number of single parents. You will come up with lots of ideas and the challenge is thinking of the role marketing can play and how can we be innovative and take advantage of those trends?

Do the same type of thing with technology. Take a particular technology such as cloud computing and ask how could this new technology help us do some things that we can’t do today, how could it give us competitive advantage, and/or be used to create shareholder value?  Before the days bandwidth being pervasive, we asked, “what could we do if everyone not only had Internet access, but bandwidth wasn’t a problem?”  Well, that day came and those that thought about the future were in the best position to innovate their marketing and take advantage of those opportunities.

2. Ask What If Questions - instead of asking what an emerging technology does, ask “what if we used it this way, or what if we used it to do this?”  When technologies are at an early stage, most likely people have not have thought of the possible applications. Again, think of Twitter as an example, there is no way even the founders of Twitter could have imagined all of the uses. If you find an application for an early stage technology, most likely the company will work very hard with you to make your application work, e.g. provide the API, provide technical support, even provide the technology free as they need case studies and use cases.

3. Know Your Biggest Problems - know what are the biggest strategic problems or opportunities the company faces, and make sure people e.g. employees, partners know you are looking for answers to those problems. You can even task internal or external sources to go and find or build a solution. You don’t need a solution today, but you can start thinking about it. But  if you don’t know what you are looking for, you won’t recognize it when you see it. Start thinking about strategic or future problems today, not three from now, because the future will be here before you know it.

The main point is you can shape the future of marketing for your company and perhaps your industry, but it takes a different mentality. You can’t think of yourself as the passive receiver, trying to keep up and reacting to the changes around you as opposed to leading and shaping the future of marketing.