Introducing Catapult Innovation.
Last summer, PULL announced a formal strategic partnership with BrandIQ, a leading consumer insight, research and brand strategy firm known for their extensive work in the consumer products and packaged goods category. In the course of working together on some key assignments, Mike Murphy, BrandIQ’s CEO (Chief Energizing Officer), shared an idea with me about how to better help companies in the early stages of product and brand innovation that simply blew me away!
As many of you know, PULL has been working with BrandIQ on brand positioning assignments. BrandIQ is the only brand strategy and research firm I have found that takes the right learning and makes it relevant to our clients business challenges. Over the last half of 2009, we began executing this solution together in a well-defined “left-brain/right-brain” process to help marketers remove the barriers to product and brand innovation the physics of their organizations create. Given 2010 will be a year that business leaders are looking for results through smarter focused business decisions, I am delighted to formally announce Catapult Innovation!
Catapult Innovation is designed to help forward thinking leaders and teams gain greater insight, clarity and velocity to act on their most promising opportunities for creating greater value in the marketplace.
We define innovation as “thinking expressed in a form that creates value”. Just because something is “new” doesn’t make it innovative. Only when discovery, learning and creativity are formed into useful value in the marketplace does game-changing product and brand innovation occur. In a cluttered marketplace, it’s our assertion that leadership is the most compelling differentiation– especially when the value proposition is anchored to what really matters to people.
Barriers to Innovation
In our collective 50+ years of experience building brands, we’ve discovered there are five fundamental barriers to innovation and competitive advantage many marketers experience when they embark on innovating their future:
Insufficient understanding of the market.
Many marketers develop products that are based more in their existing capabilities to deliver incremental change to customers. Innovation is more than understanding customer needs, rather it is the ability to bring game changing proposals to customers. People buy into meanings more than products.
Lack of differentiation.
Increasingly product categories are becoming commoditized. If a product isn’t good and radically different, it better come with a cheap price. And that doesn’t always work either because in a commoditized category, any price is too expensive. Plus, too many marketers focus on functional benefits. More product function adds to the slush pile. You can’t differentiate your brand / product by simply focusing on functions and performance benefits.
Moving too fast.
CEO’s have to make promises to Wall Street. In turn, those promises get turned into financial metrics that product development and marketing have to meet. Consequently, there is no long view, development steps get cut, and the quality of thinking is short term at best.
Poor execution.
Again, this is usually the result of the previous point. Of course there are other areas where poor execution kills success. Positioning and marketing that doesn’t resonate with the right folks–driven mostly by advertising that is centered in entertaining rather than communicating a differentiating selling idea.
Competing priorities and resources.
As marketers develop more line extensions to their brands, they have to fund the marketing for these separate initiatives. As the slices of the budget pie get smaller, and the pace to market quickens, it’s pretty obvious the results will be disappointing. Add to that the strain on human resources in time, talent and expertise to do things well. This results in management having no real sense of confidence in making the business decision on which opportunities they are well-suited to pursue.
The Catapult Solution
We designed the Catapult Innovation process to be simple, flexible and inclusive. We tailor the engagement to a client’s specific circumstances, and bring together (at various points along the way) a diverse group of thought leaders who broaden the expertise and creativity necessary to help client teams gain clarity on pursuing their best opportunities. More importantly, Catapult is a grounded process that includes the rigor of qualitative and quantitative research best practices to test verbal and visual prototypes against real customer needs. The result is product innovation or brand positioning concepts that have proven themselves worthy of the investment for full development and market launch.
If this sounds like a proposition your organization could benefit from, you can learn more about Catapult Innovation by downloading our Catapult Innovation Overview (pdf) here. Better yet, having the experience of putting this idea into practice for several leading brands, we can share with you in a confidential conversation how Catapult Innovation can impact your business for 2010. To start the conversation, feel free to email me here.
