The marketing challenges of innovation
In this month’s edition of Blue Mine Group’s Insights newsletter, we turn our focus to the unique challenges that emerging growth and knowledge-based businesses face when taking their innovations to market. Developing a product, providing a new service, or perfecting a process can be exciting and intellectually rewarding, but the true success of innovation lies in marketing.
Unlike companies dealing in mature markets, emerging growth and knowledge-based businesses must effectively educate an untried audience about their new offering, as well as build credibility, leverage the endorsement of key influencers, and continually develop and sustain mutually beneficial relationships with their customers and partners.
The marketing of innovation requires two essential elements: alerting the public to your presence, and then working to carefully manage its perception of your product or service. So, how do you accomplish this?
1. Educate your market - Even brilliant innovations can fail to capture market share if they are not properly positioned and communicated to their target market. This is especially true for innovations in new categories, since target audiences typically lack any prior understanding of the product’s value proposition and its place within a given industry. Educating the market, then, lies in first educating audiences about your overall industry category, and then introducing your product within the context of that category.
2. Build awareness and credibility - Developing recognition for your unique solution must go hand-in-hand with building a trusted reputation. To maximize efforts, focus strategically on building awareness among the most influential 10% of industry participants, including customers, channels, investors, analysts, and gurus. The buzz generated by this 10% will add credibility to your offering and create invaluable word-of-mouth endorsement. In addition, identify the different stages of your product lifecycle and communicate with various market segments according to their place within it.
3. Win and retain customers - Understanding market needs and objectives is crucial to building a customer base. Start generating initial customers as quickly as possible, in order to gain valuable feedback from actual members of your target market. These early customers will help to validate your core offering as well as provide insight into ways you may be able to modify and improve your product or service to better meet market needs. For innovation, this includes focusing particularly on early adopters, who are likely to accept your solution long before other segments of the market.
4. Develop partnerships - The right partner can help to increase visibility, enhance credibility, and in some cases reduce marketing and development costs. Much like finding, attracting, and retaining customers, developing worthwhile partnerships involves understanding partner needs and goals, and then creating solutions and messaging that speak to these. Identify potential partners for possible strategic alliances in marketing and/or development efforts, and work to meet their needs in order to create a mutually beneficial relationship.
5. Attract investors - Again, attracting investors requires the same meeting of needs applicable in building credibility, reputation, and relationships with customers and partners. Identify appropriate potential investors and investment opportunities, including venture capitalists, angel investors, secondary markets, public offerings, etc. Clarify the desires of each, and target the most appropriate ones by communicating ways your innovation satisfies their needs and interests.
Understanding and mastering each of these steps is paramount to developing an effective marketing strategy. Next month, we will focus on the key success factors to consider when developing your marketing plan.
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