INNOVATION

The sure-fire marketing strategy that outlasts competition

In today’s business world, innovation isn’t just an option, it is a necessity. The market is a highly competitive and busy place, hence, the much importance placed on innovation especially by businesses who want to gain competitive advantage and remain market leaders.

Innovation by definition is the process of translating an idea or invention into a good or service that creates value or for which customers will pay. To be called innovation, an idea must be replicable at economic cost and must satisfy a specific need. Some say that innovation is not only restricted to bringing into existence something entirely new altogether, that it could also mean improving the design & function of existing products as well.

There is nothing riskier than staying idle while the competition develops and introduces market domineering products into the marketplace. Sadly, many companies are too paralyzed by uncertainty, lack of innovation and experience to do anything about it. The innovation culture enables brands to meet wider business objectives and maintain its competitive advantage in a rapidly changing marketplace.

When Steve Jobs was introducing the first iPod back in 2001, he had the apt attention of the audience in that hall because he wasn’t just introducing something new & interesting, he was introducing something ground breaking! That’s innovation- Ground Breaking and moreover, the iPod wasn’t the first music player after all. Lots of things are novel in business, sometimes they are inventive too, however, when you take an existing business model and break all the rules, then it is more than novel, I call that innovation!

It might not intrigue you now, but back then, you had to carry a CD player around in your hand, with a collection of different CDs of which one could only accommodate as much as 15 songs. Then someone introduces a music player that can accommodate about 1000 songs and fit in your pocket! Steve created a revolutionary product, an invention whose introduction significantly affected the way the market functions. No more CDs, no more red cell batteries and some other tech stuff his invention affected.

Take for another example; the internet. Although its invention is not attributable to just one person, its introduction, however significantly altered the way companies did business back then and even now. Innovation doesn’t just create uproar in the market place, but significantly affects how the market functions in the long run. Also, successful product innovation can lead not just to products that satisfy the existing needs of consumers – it can also lead to further introduction of market expanding products. The invention of the internet gave room for further innovative thinking and hence, the introduction of products & packages that through the use of the internet, alleviated customer pain points and thus expanded the market.

In 1992, IBM Simon was the coolest thing in town. It was the first true smart phone with a touch screen included. Basically, it combined the features of a cell phone with a touch PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) to create what was then cutting edge technology. Sometimes, disruptive innovation is short lived as we have quite an amount of imitators around, but it is definitely highly lucrative.

Innovation requires critical thinking, all the creativity there is, and trusting your guts in taking that big a risk. Inventing a product that disrupts the target market can greatly improve market share, cause your brand to maintain market recognition and gain you customer loyalty. It can indeed be an exciting competitive advantage to use for continuous excellence as long as the firm is set up and maintained in a way that internally supports change and identifies strategic target customers who will benefit from its offering.

It’s a really really large market out there, too large for your brand not to have a place, you just need to ‘create’ your way there.

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