“Innovation is well funded and maturing as a marketing discipline”, says Gartner’s 2019 CMO Brand Strategy and Innovation Survey, and we see that as great news.
At Chaddsford Planning Associates, our long-established view has been that marketing is the creation of outstanding customer value. One key to creating that value is innovation.
There are many ways that marketers innovate for their customers. The best way is providing tools to help customers grow revenue.
Hand-in-hand with increasing revenue is reducing expenses. As marketers, we are often told to stick to our knitting and leave operations and product development to the people who know what they are talking about.
But as marketers we have a unique perspective within our organizations that allows us to see across the enterprise. We provide the tools that our sellers need to build pipeline. We are embedded in process of developing a revenue stream. In doing that, we are the conduit between our sellers, who know the market and what our customers want to buy and our operations and production staff who are responsible for producing the what we want to sell into that market
Besides improvement in the revenue and expense model, another way marketers can innovate is by developing new business model, which more closely mirror your business.
Another way marketers can innovate for their customers is by
improving the customer experience with your organization. One way to improve the customer experience is by streamlining the relationship with the customer.
Another way to innovate is by producing new products and services based on market intelligence gleaned through both primary and secondary research.
As marketers we know the market, strategic and tactical challenges of our customer segments. We understand the buyer and what makes them tick, can assist with innovation through new products by helping increase the time to market for them.
New markets need not be strictly vertical but can also be horizontal, as in the case of geography. But as marketers we know to be aware of demographics. What works in Bessemer may not work in the Bronx