Very rarely does one member conversation spark a complex web of issues, but one yesterday with a senior marketer at a consumer firm in a mature industry did just that.
The firm has reconfigured its entire new product development process, from stage gates, to resource allocation, to organizational structure and ultimately, the locus of innovation – a conscious shift from incremental to disruptive. Simultaneously, the company placed brand management among its top priorities for the year. Our dialogue quickly turned to the intersection of the two and which was actually driving the bus.
The mixture of brand and innovation creates multiple thorny dilemmas:
1. If a company needs innovation to survive coming out of the recession, how does it reconcile a brand image that may be out of sync with the new technologies it develops?
2. How far can you push the envelope on brand positioning in advance of worthy innovations that demand a tweaked or entirely new value proposition?
3. Where does the customer fit? For B2C indirect firms like this one, innovation must satisfy end-consumer needs while also enabling retail success – a retailer not entirely focused on your one category.
4. With customers having more control over the brand and product experience through social media, how can companies bring external sources to bear on innovation without undermining the brand essence?
As we hear more from members that innovation is re-emerging from its two-year recession hibernation, there is an unfortunate pull toward playing product catch-up. ‘We need to find the next great product,’ or so the story goes (unfortunately, Apple’s iPad may fit here). Not so fast. Progressive firms seem to be taking a holistic approach to innovation that anchors all efforts in the brand and consumer. The brand leads, innovation quickly follows.
This is not to say your brand is a roadblock to blue-sky thinking; it does mean that the strategic focus of the brand has to be incredibly precise and internalized by all those that touch innovation. In both B2B and B2C, pushing the brand to an emotional level – be it through a shared value or unique benefit – opens far more innovation doors than brands that stand for functional features that may be obsolete by the time you blink.
MLC Members, check out these case studies that can help manage this brand/innovation dichotomy:
- Philips Oral Healthcare uses a segment-focused roadmap to enable long-term consumer-centric innovation
- Lego harnesses the enthusiasm of consumers to improve NPD
- Wrigley’s creates a separate innovation process to ensure non-standard sources of insight lead to potentially disruptive innovations
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