What Is Innovative Marketing?
Innovative marketing refers to the promotion of original and advanced products or services. Innovative marketing uses data about customer behavior, interactions, and feedback to determine the best branding, packaging, advertising, and target markets for a specific commodity.
When using innovative marketing, a marketing operations team will emphasize the following three elements:
- Novelty: This refers to an original and unique idea that spurs creation.
- Execution: This encourages forward momentum and implementation of new ideas.
- Outcomes: This refers to increased business values from useful products or services.
If an innovative marketing strategy doesn’t emphasize these three characteristics, it will be more difficult to successfully create and implement it during the early stages of the creative project management process.
Types of Innovation in Marketing
Innovative marketing needs one-of-a-kind ideas that either use existing technology and markets or create new ones. The four types of marketing innovations are radical innovation, incremental innovation, disruptive innovation, and architectural innovation.
Let’s take a look at these different approaches in more detail.
1. Radical Innovation
Radical innovation substantially changes a brand, product, service, or market in some way — usually through the creation of new technology. In order to be considered radical, this type of innovative marketing must change the way customers view a brand, product, or process.
Amazon is a great example of a company that uses radical innovation. The Dash Button — at the time, a brand-new technology — made ordering and reordering household items a breeze. Simplifying the ordering process changed how customers viewed this online task and the brand itself.
2. Incremental Innovation
Incremental innovation slowly implements changes or updates to existing products or branding in order to improve customer satisfaction. This type of innovation happens slowly and focuses on useful alterations rather than reconstruction.
The Coca-Cola Company — which was founded in 1892 — has used incremental innovation to stay relevant and improve customer satisfaction. New flavors like Coca-Cola Orange and Coca-Cola Raspberry are designed to elevate an already beloved product.
3. Disruptive Innovation
Disruptive innovation occurs as a response to behavior and technology changes. This type of innovation focuses on the customer experience, adapting to user behavior rather than trends.
For example, Uber — and its accompanying rideshare technology — caters to customer behaviors. As the need for accessible, affordable, and simplified transportation increased, new technology responded. Additionally, Uber allows users to be drivers or passengers depending on their needs and availability, substantially changing the public transportation experience.
4. Architectural Innovation
Architectural innovation uses existing technology to create new products designed to reach new users. This type of innovation often rebrands, repackages, or transforms tech into new ideas or concepts.
Take the standalone photocopier, for example. This existing technology was redesigned and recreated into a desktop photocopier, which is better suited for small businesses and personal use. Additionally, this type of portable photocopier frequently performs additional tasks, including color printing, scanning, and collaboration.
Why Is Innovation in Marketing Important?
Innovation in marketing is important because it considers how business and advertising dynamics constantly change during the development of a flexible marketing strategy. While conventional techniques have their time and place, innovative marketing strategies cater to individual customer needs.
Additionally, innovation in marketing is important for identifying current and future target markets, introducing unique products and services, and increasing customer satisfaction and confidence when browsing. Innovative marketing keeps a customer’s market, experience, and needs top of mind from ideation to execution.
10 Methods of Marketing Innovation
If you’re looking to unlock your team’s creativity, there are several marketing innovation methods that will help you reach your goals. The top 10 methods are rebrand, retain, educate, expand, interact, host events, personalize, reprice, partner, and collaborate.
1. Rebrand
One of the most common methods of marketing innovation is rebranding. Rebranding refers to the act of changing a brand’s logo, packaging, target market, or mission based on market research. Before rebranding, make sure your brand asset management is updated to ensure consistency. Additionally, you may need to recreate your brand strategy or update your current approach when rebranding.
2. Retain
Innovative marketing depends on client retention. Marketers may choose to launch customer loyalty programs, coupons, offers, exclusive content or products, or customer memberships to encourage brand loyalty and word-of-mouth advertising in order to create and maintain customer relationships.
3. Educate
If your company is planning to use innovative marketing strategies to launch a new product or rebrand, you will want to be seen as an industry leader. Create a content strategy plan that focuses on educating consumers about your industry, its leading products, and your services. Designing customer trainings can also help educate your target audience about your product and company.
4. Expand
Expansion into new markets — particularly those in different regions — is another important method for marketing innovation. New and expanded partnerships can increase a company’s number of potential customers, stretch a product or service’s reach, and influence marketers to envision new ideas for further expansion and innovation.
5. Interact
Innovative marketing also depends on the customer experience, and customer engagement and interaction is no exception. Information about innovative products and services can quickly be distributed across social media and other communication platforms where businesses can interact with client reviews, collect opinions, and analyze other reactions. This type of interaction can also increase loyalty, improve promotion, and encourage customer communication.
6. Host Events
If your company is innovating, you need to consider new and unique ways to advertise your products and services. Hosting events — such as fundraisers or community get-togethers — can strengthen customer relationships and excite them about your company’s new opportunities.
7. Personalize
Besides products and services, customers search for one thing when considering companies to support: an enjoyable experience. Using marketing data, innovative marketers can increase personalized experiences with name recognition, geographically specific products, and segmented strategies. These personalization techniques can increase feelings of belonging and loyalty, which help build consistent and satisfied customer relationships.
9. Partner
Partnering with organizations outside your company can increase transparency while also drumming up positive publicity — depending on who you partner with. Worthwhile and effective partner management is based in social responsibility, community service, and other mutually beneficial activities. Businesses using this method of innovative marketing should use partner portals to connect and work together.
10. Collaborate
While your organization may choose to engage in outside partnerships, it’s just as important to prioritize internal collaboration. A company’s creative workflow process needs to include individuals or teams across multiple departments, including marketing, IT, and sales. Include steps for these teams in your marketing project plans to ensure their inclusion in your innovative marketing efforts.
Examples of Companies Using Innovation in Marketing
Innovative marketing is a growing concept, and there are many industry leaders that have already seen success using innovative marketing methods.
Methods Used: personalize, interact, partner, and expand
In addition to allowing outside organizations to use Instagram as an innovative marketing tool, the social media app has used marketing innovation for its own growth. Personalized results in channels and feeds — including Explore, Reels, and Shop — in addition to video and photo editing options, privacy possibilities, and market expansions have rocketed Instagram to the top of the innovation field.
IKEA
Methods Used: interact, personalize, collaborate
IKEA focuses on the customer experience when creating new products and strategizing new marketing concepts. One of the ways IKEA has most notably invested in innovative marketing is through its augmented reality app. This application lets users place scaled, 3D product models directly into their space before purchasing them. This type of product detail can help increase customer loyalty and retention by providing unique solutions to their needs.
SmartBuyGlasses
Methods Used: expand, interact, and personalize
Virtual try-on tools are changing the eyeglasses industry, and SmartBuyGlasses is following this innovation trend with its own marketing. This company uses technology that allows customers to make educated choices about their glasses options without visiting an optician’s office. Additionally, the technology used by SmartBuyGlasses uses personal videos to identify face and glasses shapes before purchases, so each experience is unique to the customer.
Netflix
Methods Used: expand, interact, reprice, and collaborate
Netflix’s innovative marketing strategy focuses on marketing information and data analysis. By studying customer behavior, this company was able to expand from a rent-by-mail movie company to a worldwide streaming service. Netflix grew its services beyond its original bounds — and beyond its competitors’ — by closely studying its target audience’s wants and needs.
L’Oréal
Methods Used: expand, interact, and personalize
Similarly to IKEA, L’Oréal launched a digital app designed to improve the company’s customer experience options. Customers are able to explore and purchase products from the comfort of their own homes with the help of augmented reality styling and artistry. This new product was able to expand the company’s market reach, interact with and gain valuable insights from customers, and personalize experiences based on customers’ needs.
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