Five ways to take innovative marketing from start-up to scale-up

Without an approach to innovation, marketers will see their most forward-looking ideas gain little traction with executives and consumers. It is not enough to build a business case for marketing innovation on disruptive campaigns - instead the foundations should be built through a customer lens.

Unilever is some way into maturing its own interpretation of this approach, founded on the belief that projects should combine innovative technology with great creativity and a solid brand strategy. Through its start-up accelerator the Foundry, the FMCG business has spun the traditional innovation model on its head. Normally “agencies come to us with the brief and we look at the creative solution,” global marketing strategy director for the Foundry Jeremy Basset told delegates at a Big Brand Week panel.

“[At the Foundry] we say what’s that challenge? What’s in creative technology that can inspire a solution to that challenge and then we look for the creative execution that we can put on top of it.”

A big part of this understanding comes from differentiating between innovative activations and long-term innovation. The danger is when an execution starts to grow exponentially and has to be dismantled because it was never designed for that scale. Speaking on the same panel, Tom Chant, head of customer innovation at Telefonica said that the business is improving its ability to differentiate between “quick and dirty executions” and those it needs to “industrialise” to overcome these issues.

Get comfortable with complexity

For the likes of Unilever and Telefonica, which pride themselves on their entrepreneurial sprit, innovation is happening at multiple flashpoints internally. The risk is that without a flexible framework in place to nurture innovative ideas, pilots won’t be set up for success.

“The more you try and be structured and have a very fixed process then the more you’re going to fail at [innovation],” warned Unilever’s Basset. “We don’t have to have everything lined up before we go live. We have to be very comfortable that 80 per cent [of a project] is good enough and that we can iterate in market and don’t have to have everything lined up before we go live.”

Complexity can also lead to a lack of coordination, an issue Telefonica recently encountered within its innovation team.

“I’m not sure we’ve solved that problem yet,” added Telefonica’s Chant. “We still have massive challenges where you’ll look at two pieces of innovation that have come from different parts of the business and overlapped and have had to ask how both didn’t know what the other was doing.”

With start-ups becoming a pivotal part of making innovation sustainable, companies need to get good at managing complexity. Whether it's landing the sweet spot between brand, agency and client to creating a framework for responsible risk taking, the likes of Unilever and Telefonica are starting to rethink their business models to make it work for all parties rather than shy away from it.

Innovation needs to come from a very senior place within the business

For innovation to flourish, marketers need to have air cover from the top of the organisation to go and execute the more pioneering ideas. If they can’t secure C-level support then companies won’t know what success in innovation really looks like. It can slow decision-making, which can seriously hurt start-ups unsure whether to stick or twist when it comes to securing investment.

Start-ups need to do more also to win over executives. Rather than just touting technology in presentations, they need to use their entrepreneurial flair to show that they understand the business and more importantly its customers. “Doing our job for us is a huge strength for start-ups,” added Chant, who recounted an incident when a business tested a digital queue management system in one of its stores before presenting the results back to him as part of their pitch.

Rose Lewis, co-founder of accelerator Collider, attributed this attitude to the difference between those start-ups prepared to “hustle” and those that “do very little”.

“What start-ups need to think about when speaking to brands is what’s the measurement and the metrics that their product can be measured on,” she continued. “Bringing start-ups in is just not enough. Support from very senior people is key but they also have to be mindful of the changes that you need to make internally.”

Lawrence Weber, managing partner at Karmarama, noted that agencies had a crucial role in steering their clients on the road to innovation. “Some agencies are worried that clients are going to go direct to a start-up, meaning they’ll no longer have the ear of the client. I think what we try to do is be collaborative and see where that takes us rather than shutting the door and making ourselves the only entry point,” he added.

Think big, start small and act fast

The reality is that most global companies are geared operationally and not to pioneer the future. It makes fostering innovation difficult but for both Unilever and Telefonica thinking big, starting small and acting fast is easing this process. Some 60 pilots in the last 12 months and over $5m spent on those projects is reflective of Unilever’s belief in the mantra and its commitment to nurturing disruptive marketing rather than forcing it.

But this mindset can only truly have an impact when the project is distilled through the customer first rather than the technology. Unilever’s Basset said its start-up partners are teaching its marketers about new consumer segments, unearthing technology that finally allows it to forge direct relationships with people after years of selling to them through retailers.

“If we could find a way where we can deeply and meaningfully engage with people one-on-one at scale and take them on a journey that results in growth for the brand as well as helps to change their behaviour in way a that brings in our sustainability innovations then that’s really what we’re looking for.”

Marketers should be careful when ensuring that acting fast on innovation does not end up hurting the project. “Pilots are where you can try stuff out quick and dirty whereas scale is where you plug it into the giant big machine”, warned Chant.

“I think the burden on brands is not to do any harm [to start-ups] by effectively getting them to re-architect their business for this potential opportunity that in the end doesn’t work when we connect it to our big machine. Remember that a successful trial that sticks to the end and meets some metrics is something you can take forward in other places as well.”

Remember: what does innovation mean for your people?

Customer insights and share value are both strong yardsticks for innovation though neither is as hard to quantify as what it does for staff.

For a company with relatively low staff churn like Telefonica, innovation’s rise as job differentiator has left it in a risky place. Chant said: “Historically, in marketing you would say you always looked upwards for the answers to the sages who had been around for a long time. That’s changing now and we’re looking down to the people arriving in businesses who have the native, digital skills.”

Agencies are facing similar problems in their efforts to overcome fears that some of their brightest talent are being lured by the liberating world of start-ups. Karmarama’s Weber said the solution has to start with creative shops working out the “value of innovation to themselves”. Agencies need to have the confidence to make the “small bets” in the belief they will pay off much further down the line then an “annual balance sheet” is going to show,” he continued.

“We have to create some vehicle for letting people who want to start businesses internally to do so. The problem is that an investor can make 20-30 bets depending on how much money they have and it’s difficult for agencies to get that closely involved in start-ups and give our time because then the people who pay the bills will ask why we’re not spending more time on ads for them.”

Brand, agency or start-up, innovation does not rest in one creative hotspot. But rather a mix of three that is continually changing the way companies change and balancing customers’ current needs with their future wants in order to monetise a fragmented ecosystem.