Marketing, as most of us would agree, is about being creative in applying the logic you learn in the B-school classrooms. What most of us can’t figure out is that how marketing innovation can be used as a tool to augment product innovation. Let us take the case of Apple here. Reading Apple here, makes you go on and read further, right? Well that’s what Apple has done. It has marketed the brand in such a way that we always expect a breakthrough product from them. Coming to look at the iPhone, technically it is as good as a lot of high end phones available in the market. A few companies even claim to have better configurations than the iPhone. Then what is it that apple has done so that the iPhone is THE PHONE??
The answer is simple. Apple was already selling the iPods like hot cakes. It just added a phone to it with some really cool technology. And then what do you get? The Apple iPhone. The other companies caught up fast with the technology, but what they weren’t able to match with was the perceived innovation of the iPhone in the customer’s mind. Another marketing innovation is the iTunes store; where you can be the buyer, you can be the seller or you can be a window shopper! What iTunes actually ends up doing is that it generates revenue for Apple even after its product has been sold!! Innovative, isn’t it? Another innovative way of marketing without any product innovation done beautifully by Apple is its iPhone 4. Now this feature was already there in other phones but Apple called it the new revolutionary Facetalk. We all were able to video chat on 3G enabled networks quite before Apple launched its Facetalk. But as Apple always does, it packed the old concept in a fancy new package and the customer is treated with yet another innovation from Apple!! Apple has created such a perception of itself in the consumers’ minds that come every September we look forward to the launch of a newer version of the iPhone.
Another company to whom we know as a true marketing innovator is Intel. All of us must be aware of how Intel made the end users of their product, i.e the actual computer users , want the product in their computers. Intel simply put the Intel inside sticker on the computer in which its microprocessors were used! Thus people began asking for computers with Intel inside! Smart! And of course innovative!
Another recent innovative marketing in terms of timing can be seen from the various hand sanitizer manufacturers in India. The product was there since quite some time, used mainly by medical professionals while going from one patient to another. No soap, no water, just put a drop on your hand and result: Clean hands! This is yet another case of product innovation at its best. Now here comes marketing innovation. People are running scared of the H1N1 flu, and there these people see an opportunity! Market these sanitizers to the scared junta! And as a result today we see people using the sanitizers obsessively!!
There are a number of such innovations in place, one just needs to look at them with a curious eye and try finding the ‘Why’ behind it rather than just finding the ‘What’. The innovations can be either evolutionary or revolutionary. Evolutionary can be the natural transition of the marketing methods to newer and newer methods. This is something everyone has to do in order to survive. But what one really needs to not only survive but to be the best is to be revolutionary! Think Apple and Intel as the epitomes for innovations in marketing. What they did was not the gradual change in the way things are done, but these were path breaking innovations which changed the way marketing was done!
The bottom-line is, innovation drives change, and change drives growth!
Add: To improve is to change. To be perfect is to change often!!
-Winston Churchill
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