Don’t design your innovation for the market, instead, design the market for your innovation.
Imagine you being the CEO of the next Google, the next Apple! People round the world are waiting outside stores for hours, desperately trying to buy your product. The Financial Times can only mention one thing: “Record profits in a recovering economy!”. You smile, as you turn your chair, for you only marginally changed your product from last years’ model. If only the world your secret, your strength, your mojo: Being remarkable.
Innovation requires creativity, thinking out of the box, being different. To aid this,
you created an environment with a collection of people with completelydifferent backgrounds, ideas and experiences. But while this creates the most ideas, it might not necessarily be the most productive approach. However, going from a creative soup towards productive innovation required only the ‘simple’ step of allowing the inventors to work in an organized manner, as observed in universities and tech-companies.
When you started a small company, you were clinging onto innovation to save you from the fiery competition doing everything to drive you out of the market, solely to protect themselves from the same fate. But now, having the available resources to discern yourself from the competition, you innovate, almost for the sake of innovation. To tend to the market you on which you have spent years to make them accustomed to your technological vision.
Your advisors come in: “Boss, In this environment your ideas are flowing, but not all of these ideas can make it to the general public.” With the small success rate of innovative ideas to marketable innovative products, you realised you needed to think differently. The key to making the difference between an innovation and a successful innovation, lies in its marketing. Instead of creating an innovation for the market, you innovate the market for your creation.
The goddess of marketing is
two-faced, she can either help you to sell an infinite amount of products to the market, but one faux-pas and her high costs will run you into the ground. To avoid this, you ask what the people need. But instead of conducting a humungous poll to the general public, you only include your best listeners: your most loyal customers and earliest adopters. You share your concept of the new product and they run off to tell all their friends about your fresh ideas. It’s something they’ve never heard of, and they won’t admit it, but they might even think it’s too risqué for the current market.
But a few months later, just before all of their friends are almost tired of hearing every detail about the release of your new product, you prepare its launch. And, of course, it will be a huge success. You found the people who cared and listened, and let them market for you. Almost
everybody they know, knows about you and your fresh new product. You risqué product was intriguing, exciting and fresh. People commend you for your brilliant strategy, while you did nothing special. You did what you do best: Being Remarkable.
Olivier Rutgers
