Making the Case for Marketing Innovation

Engaging customers and prospects seems to get more challenging every day. Changing behaviors, new channels, privacy regulations and expanding technology options overwhelm the best of us. To deal with this, high performing marketing teams are adopting the best innovation techniques to do new things in new ways and get ahead of their competition.

Research from Gartner shows that marketing leaders allocate 18 to 21 percent of their budgets to marketing innovation – but what does that mean? Many organizations don’t have a clear definition of what marketing innovation is and how it works. Instead, they throw almost every idea into the same bucket, including ideas that are not the responsibility of the CMO and have no direct impact on the delivery of the marketing strategy.

Defining Marketing Innovation

Gartner defines innovation as the execution of new ideas that create value. To take that a step further, it’s the execution of ideas unique to those experiencing them. The CapabilitySource definition of marketing innovation provides additional nuance to include new things or new ways that create value for the marketing team or to a consumer marketplace. Value to the marketing team is ultimately measured as a reduction in costs. Value to the consumer is measured as meeting a consumer need, ultimately resulting in an increase in leads and conversions for the marketer.

Although this definition of marketing innovation is still quite broad, it is clear that marketing innovation is more than just a new product or service. It includes the way a marketing team interacts with each other and their customers. This focus on both a new thing and a way is essential to establishing a healthy, balanced marketing innovation portfolio. If there’s nothing new about an idea and it does not impact marketers or consumers, it is not marketing innovation and should not be in the marketing innovation program, displacing real marketing innovations.

Read the Full Article to:

• Learn the distinction between the two types of marketing innovation: transformational and operational
• Examine clear examples of marketing innovation from well-known brands
• Gain access to tools to ideate and identify innovation opportunities
• Understand the KPIs necessary to measure both types of marketing innovation success