Two interesting articles on presentations at the Advertising Research Foundation annual convention were recently put on WARC (www.warc.com, accessed on April 4). Both are by Geoffrey Precourt and tackle the subject of innovation. One concerned how Wrigley uses research to predict what breakthrough innovations might be coming. The argument is that many breakthrough products build on ideas already seeded in the customer’s mind by previous products. Previous products that might have been ahead of their time or the customer’s comfort level at time of launch. Thus many digital music players preceded iPod and other search engines Google. And the astute marketer who watches how the “tree” of innovation grows can predict what the next breakthrough might be.
This is a good point and builds on a large body of research evidence. Pioneering is difficult and many fail. The classeic example here is Palm's PDA. This built on the spectacular failures of Apple's Newton, Motorola's Envoy and Tandy's Zoomer. Palm just listened to what customers said about these pioneers, figured out who the right target market was (road warriors) and designed a product for them with the right features. More critically Palm chose connectivity as the feature to position the product on. That grabbed the road warrior's attention and the rest is history. I look at how you can repeat Palm's success in Chapter Seven.
The second article concerns how P&G has learned to listen to customers rather than ask them questions in the old-fashioned way of much market research. This is also a good point. There are many ways to gain insight into your customers, above and beyond asking them closed-ended questions in a survey. If you watch what they do in natural settings, listen to their conversations on FaceBook or Twitter, or engage them in dialogue you can learn so much more. But note this is not an argument for replacing surveys with focus groups. Proper observation, listening and dialogue need science, structure and planning, and a notable investment, especially in management time. In the book I argue it is the managers in charge of innovation projects that need to do much of this, rather than delegate it to an agency. Only they can see the opportunities the customer insights provide. This is in Chapter Five. I also argue that you must be careful to listen to the right customers at the right time…which is a good subject for another blog.
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