Marketing: Innovation’s best kept secret
I have been a Global CMO. Whilst amazing, whilst very senior, it can sometimes feel you aren’t as close to the core of the business as you’d like.
Don’t get me wrong, there is no doubt that marketing is important, the organisation will inevitably acknowledge that it is a key engine in bringing business through the door.
You are useful, important, but you aren’t quite at the highest table. Your discipline isn’t taken as seriously as you’d like, not really.
This isn’t always the case, but it is often the case.
The most obvious symptom comes in funding: when economic times get tough, it seems almost inexorable that the marketing budgets are reduced, sometimes including some of the department itself.
It is a fat that can be cut. The organisation can survive, at least for a while with less of it.
There are lots of reasons this a bad idea, these are covered in great depth elsewhere.
But what intrigues me more is this - as I have spent less time in marketing and more time in business strategy and the innovation that is integral to its success, the more I have come to realise how useful its skills are beyond its traditional remit of engaging customers to help them buy more.
Sense - Shape - Seize
Right at the centre of that usefulness is also at the centre of any successful long term business strategy: the ability for the organisation to do what Management academic David Teece first defined as Sense-Shape-Seize.
The argument goes like this - For an organisation to keep evolving with the times it needs to be able to Sense: changes in the environment, in technology, in culture, in customer needs and competition. Then Shape: a response to that change. Then Seize: on that challenge or opportunity in a timely manner (before someone else does it for them).
This is much harder than it sounds, and one essential ingredient is that the ‘Sensing organs’ need to be close to the ground, need to be at the coal face, seeing nuances, especially so in what Clayton Christensen called ‘Jobs To Be Done.’
This is looking for what Behavioural Science calls ‘The Real Why’, the underlying motivation that are essentially solution agnostic.
The basic idea of JTBD is this: People "hire" products or services to get a "job" done: This means understanding the underlying need or goal that drives a purchase or action, rather than just focusing on the product's features.
Those jobs are functional, social, and emotional: JTBDs acknowledge that people's motivations are complex and encompass more than just practical needs.
In finding them you need to focus on the "job," not the "customer": This allows you to identify opportunities that might be missed by traditional market segmentation.
There are lots of tools to do this, from Job Mapping, "Hiring" vs. "Firing" Analysis, you can find out more about these here:
Alongside Sales, Marketing is probably the best placed to sense. It is arguably more fluent in evolving customer needs, in culture, and in many places, new technologies than any other discipline.
It can sense like few other parts of an organisation.
Idea literacy
It is also able to understand and build interesting ideas.
By its very nature, when it is done well, it looks for novel solutions to problems. This is because whilst interest can be bought, it is much more effective to also earn it. In marketing dull is dangerous as well we costly.
If you are in the business of finding new ideas, having an internal group of people who have great idea literacy is very useful indeed.
Idea Brokering Systems
Because of this literacy, it also has credentials to do something else very important in innovation: an integrated ‘Knowledge brokering cycle’, (Hargadon & Sutton’s great work).
This is where the organisation has a system that is able to not just come up with ideas, but then keep them alive so they can either be used in the same way in different conditions (as the worlds changes around them), or, find new roles in different places.
Marketing would be well placed to set up and manage these idea brokering systems.
Market Creation
Lastly, is oddly one of the things that Marketing rarely seems to talk about: how markets are born and how they die.
When the innovations are radical in nature, where they challenge the basic dominant design of a category or industry (think fours wheels, chassis, drive train for automobiles), how the market is created and shaped is critical.
Much of that is the domain of Marketing.
Santos et al provide a potent model for how to do this, it is something I come back to time and time again: Claim. Demarcate. Control.
Claim: is about becoming ‘Cognitive reference point’ for the new category. About creating stories around which the customers understand the new category, its boundaries, how exactly value is defined.
Demarcate: This is also about defining who does what, how the players: the suppliers, the distributors, the competitors think and act in that new market
Control: This is about how you then keep shaping these new boundaries and relationships in a way that helps the company and its products and services.
Whilst Demarcate and Control also includes M&A and partnerships, much of this is about positioning, posturing and persuasive storytelling.
Marketing, when at its best is very, very good at that.
So, there feels like a pretty strong argument that the meta skills found in Marketing departments, can and should be a key weapon in the innovation that keeps businesses thriving overtime.
Some businesses treat Marketing this way, but many more do not, perhaps it time that should change.
I like how you're bringing together JTBD with the idea of sense-shape-seize and Marketing having their ear to the ground as a sensing organ.
And surely, at the heart of this post, is Drucker's phrase: "Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic marketing and innovation functions. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business."