What’s Your Story?

When most of us think of marketing, we think of a department in the company that creates ads, direct mail, commercials, etc. But marketing is so much more than just a few “creative” people sitting around writing tag lines.

Marketing encompasses all activities in any organization – customer interactions, employee engagement, product development and management. So marketing innovation should be a part of overall company innovation strategy. One of the toughest challenges in bringing people together can be the often adversarial relationship between sales and marketing. Helping the two work together and understand that they’re really on the same team could make collaboration a little more feasible.

For the past few weeks, Michael Rupchock and I have been collaborating on innovation (or at least our ideas on it). You’ve read the concepts, examples and theories. But how does one implement innovation within an organization? A good way to start is by engaging employees and customers in marketing strategies and tactics.

Employee Engagement

When you involve employees, you empower them to become an integral part of the company’s growth and success. Some of your best ideas for growth and innovation are already inside your organization – you just don’t know about it yet. They come from the employees “in the trenches” that see the day-to-day issues and challenges you face and can provide some valuable insight to changes you can make to improve operations, customer service or a host of other issues you may not even know you’re facing.

In 2006, Gallup researchers studied employee responses about innovation in the workplace to understand employee engagement. The researchers found that almost 60% of engaged employees strongly agreed that their current job brings out their most creative ideas. Compare that to the actively disengaged employees and that number drops to only 3%.

Customer Collaboration

What your customers could change or improve something about your company and/or its products and services, what would it be? If your organization has no understanding of how you are positioned in the minds of customers and prospects, their buying cycles or what they expect from your company, you might not be fostering a two-way dialogue and could be missing important growth opportunities.

Many companies are leveraging customer collaboration to drive innovation. Cisco Systems uses a program called Customer Collaboration that relies on video technology to help the company and its customers communicate in real-time to share ideas. In a blog entry on customer collaboration, Cisco blogger Doron Aronson writes that “Customer Collaboration leverages state-of the-art video capabilities such as Telepresence to enable meaningful, person-to-person interactions between consumers and on-demand experts.”

Now is the time to align yourself and your organization with your customers. You can be as casual as asking the customer for some feedback on specific ideas/issues, using a survey or even conducting informal or formal focus groups to use the customers’ guidance.
Marketing innovation can be as complex as redesigning an entire product or service and its branding to as basic as looking for a better way to deliver messages to a particular audience. Innovation should be an ongoing process or journey – not a destination. Chances are, you’ve already got some very innovative people within your organization. Engage them in keeping your business ideas fresh. That’s what we try to do here at PentaVision Integrated Digital Media. We like to use a lot of humor and fun to keep everyone engaged in new ideas and strategies. If you haven’t seen it yet, check out Jon O’Sullivan’s video parody of commercials for music compilations.

Let me know what you think – about this blog entry or the video; I welcome comments/critiques and any suggestions you have. Thanks!