Marketing Malpractice - Innovation, Ho!

The best session I’ve been to yet was “Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure” with ARF Chief Strategy Officer Taddy Hall, who presented a number of ideas he’s worked on with Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovation’s Solution, The Innovator’s Dilemma, and Seeing What’s Next. At the very least, read the third of these books. It’s pretty deep but damn insightful. I also wrote about it in MediaPost.

Taddy’s bold assumption: “Marketers aren’t stupid.” So why are people making so many wasteful decisions? And what are the keys to brand success?

“A brand with no purpose is an empty shell, no matter how clever its personality or catchy its advertising.” He asked, “What’s the job spec your brand is filling?”

He cited three popular research mistakes: segmenting based on product attributes, segmenting based on consumer attributes, and targeting a large market.

Good questions: Are there unmet consumer needs I can satisfy? Can I create customers by satisfying those needs? Is there a whole new category I can create? Can I redefine an existing category? The right questions focus on CREATING a market, not ENTERING a market.

So how do you find disruptive innovation?

Test 1: Does it target non-consumers who want a simple product? Example: Sony transistor radios, Kodak EasyShare, Charles Schwab.
Test 2: Does it help customers get done what they’re trying to do, or does it depend on customers wanting to get something done they haven’t already prioritized?
Test 3: Does it enable a larger population of less-skilled or less-wealthy people to do things that previously had not been possible?

There was a lot of other stuff that went even deeper, but you can get that from reading my article, reading Seeing What’s Next, and looking for the presentation online.