Innovation: a matter of life and death

I don’t think so. For every Blockbuster there is a Netflix. A company reborn and revived through innovation.

Every business that dies is sad testimony to a management that couldn’t see the future, couldn’t imagine a different world, couldn’t muster the creativity to reinvent.

The innovator takes a different view from most and challenges the grim reaper to a straight fight. The innovator sees the job of management as to create the conditions for the company to live forever, renewing itself through creativity and perspiration with new ideas.

The marketing services industry is where businesses turn to find salvation, to seek ideas for growth and reinvention. So, it is welcome to hear that the AAR is expanding its service to help find the right partners for those seeking to rekindle growth through innovation.

You don’t have to go far to realise that for marketing services businesses, innovation is the new buzzword. It’s talked up, worked into every presentation and pitch.

But we have to be careful. Innovation has to be more than a buzzword. I would ask the industry to look in the mirror and ask itself the question: have you reinvented yourself sufficiently to provide a genuine, lasting second life to declining brands or businesses?

Is the marketing services industry truly alert to what it takes to find growth when all around is decline? The simplistic view that marketing is somehow a black art detachable from the fundamentals of a business is too often a convenient fiction against which to sell marketing services.

We will all have seen how certain marketing disciplines are being talked up as innovative, breakthrough ideas. Yet none will reinvent a brand or business that is already on a trajectory of decline. There’s a deep irony in much of the heat and light around innovation. It often achieves the goal of new revenues: but for their creator, not their paymaster.

But to innovate for the client requires more skills, more thinking power, more awareness of the financial imperative of running a business than typically seen from most market services businesses.

Innovation is the discipline that businesses turn to in the expectation of increasing higher quality earnings. That expectation is a heavy burden, not easily answered. Get it wrong and you bring forward judgement day. But get it right and you will have granted longevity to a corporate lifespan.

Innovation demands that the marketing industry learns some new skills. The starting point has to be the creation of revenue: how much do you have to find, and by when to keep all the stakeholders happy? In five years’ time, what will you be selling, to whom, and for how much? And why will they be buying yours, rather than a competitor product or service?

Then there’s the problem of culture. Daniel Kahneman’s seminal book ‘Thinking, fast and slow’ sits at the top of a large and growing recognition that human beings don’t make rational, objective decisions. We are all limited by our experience, biased by our perspective, by the prevailing ethos of our daily lives.

We all live in our own bubble. Companies are no different, and when it comes to innovation, we must burst that bubble. Innovators have to think freely, without constraint. They must interpret the world through the fresh eyes of the entrepreneur.

How do we create the conditions required to allow such courageous creativity? How do we engage the business at a senior level to take it seriously, to recognise the bubble they live in? To get sufficiently crazy to believe in a different future? Our aspirant innovators have to be expert at the dynamics of corporate culture and psychology, to find the way to introduce and nurture new ideas.

And finally, innovators must take out a blank piece of paper and write down ideas that will help achieve those vaulting revenue goals that will keep the organization alive. A profound, entrepreneurial creativity married to analytical thought and careful risk assessment.

We hope the AAR will promote these ideas as it brokers marriages for those businesses seeking the growth ideas to keep them alive. Innovation is a matter of life or death. Far-sighted clients are recognizing that, and thus it is a heavy expectation they place on those who profess to be innovators.

If the marketing services industry can change and adapt, it will extend its own useful commercial life. If it fails, then the echoing laughter of the grim reaper will be heard from the pages of The Drum.

So, let’s make sure we give innovation the respect it deserves.

Ben Little is a founder and director of Fearlessly Frank