When we talk about innovation and being future-focused it is important to make the distinction between having our products being considered ‘innovative’ by prospective users and having our brand perceived as being innovative.
Herein lies the dichotomy that most established brands face, particularly those selling technology into the enterprise space. Their customers want to work with innovative vendors, but they don’t want to take any risks with the product, valuing mature, well developed and well-established solutions.
What does the research say?
The research into what measurable factors are taken into account by consumers when making a judgment about whether a product is innovative is inconsistently defined in academic research. However, a 2015 study by Ben Lowe, Professor of Marketing at Kent University into CPI (Consumer Perceptions of Innovation) offers the most comprehensive view and can be summarised thusly: Perception of innovation can be measured over three horizons: time since launch, originality of solution and the perceived difficulty (by the customer) of delivering it.
The study also points out that consumers see marketing-led innovations as easy to deliver and product technology-driven innovation as difficult, Therefore product-led innovation is far more valuable in delivering a long term perception of innovation for the business. In essence, if you aren’t walking the talk you aren’t in the game.
The Product Team must lead the charge
A true effort at changing perceptions of innovation must be driven by your new product development team and not your marketing department. As anyone who has spent time in the marketing or sales departments of a brand that isn’t exactly at the forefront of the market will endorse!
The role of the marketing function in changing consumer perceptions of innovation is to act as the conduit between customers and NPD, both as being the voice of the customer, but also being the guardians of the go-to market strategy, melding together the product’s features and benefits with the goals, challenges and pain points of the customer by means of clear positioning.
Don't underestimate the role of user-interface design
As a slight adjunct to this point, it is also worth noting the role that user interface and user experience design plays in the perception of product innovativeness. Many a wonderful technology product has been unseated by being difficult to navigate and unattractive to look at.
Consider apps like Monzo and Pensionbee in the financial services industry and the way they have stolen market share from high street banks. Not through having better lending products, lower APRs or more experienced staff, but through simply having a far better and more consumer-centric interface that focuses on taking friction out of the process of doing business with them.
Working now under the assumption that our product team is providing us with a steady stream of market-leading products, with beautiful, well-considered user interfaces and we have in effect answered question 3 from the list above. The role of the marketing and sales team is then to ensure they are well received by the market into which we sell.
Measuring success
Working backwards through our list of questions (and viewing the question primarily through the lens of changing brand perceptions) our next challenge is to establish a basis of measurement. Where are we now and where will we be when the job is done are the main hardpoints.
This can be a challenging thing around which to construct meaningful metrics as perception of innovation is just that, a perception, something felt by the customer that in most cases they cannot reliably articulate the root cause of. In larger brands, brand tracking studies have become the norm to measure the impact of marketing spend on ‘brand’, but in practical terms, these are inaccessible for most B2B businesses on grounds of cost and the size of their customer base being too small to draw statistically significant conclusions from.
Our suggestion is that it be included as a standalone question in regular CSAT/NPS type surveys, where perception of innovation can be tracked over time. In brands with a PR strategy that generates significant column inches, sentiment analysis techniques can also be utilised to scan text for instances of words and constructs that imply a heightened perception of innovation.
Coming back to the dichotomy faced by enterprise technology vendors, weighing the relative merits of being perceived as an innovative brand against the potential risks of having a product development strategy that is pushing boundaries to substantiate this brand positioning. The challenge here is clear: how do we mitigate against the risks associated with perceived product newness, whilst enjoying the benefits of perceived brand innovation? This is a challenge that can, at least in part, be answered by an effective marketing strategy.
How to build perception of innovation, safely.
In a 2008 study by Alexander, et al. they performed qualitative research to define what consumers judged when deciding if a brand was innovative. The answer was remarkably simple, the brand's products needed to be new and they needed to move the game on. Incremental benefits needed to be delivered (and demonstrated) over and above the competition.
To reinforce the findings from the first section of this piece, the marketing strategy that successfully improves the perception of innovativeness of a brand, is in effect a product-market strategy. We would therefore proffer the following characteristics of a marketing strategy that should get your CSAT scores moving up and to the right where innovation is concerned: