Don’t worry, this isn’t a F1 related blog but welcome to sports confusion …as we delve into a blog of 2 halves!
Starting with creativity to which the marketing world likes to owe its existence. This can range from the latest squeakiest, shiniest, tastiest, hottest item through to products that fillet, chop, dice, slice and even mow your lawn and deliver your pizza after picking your kids up from school!
Creating products and services are given higher profile and precedence since they generate the novelty factor needed to fuel the human spirit. This of course helps to maintain our superior position within the world order, by delivering a point of differentiation. As someone who worked for over 15 years in R&D for large corporations, it often felt like the provision of “the new” maintained the aerobic beating heart of the organisation although from time to time we also suffered several financially induced cardiac arrests!
Without belittling the role of the creatives in commerce, new products and services spawned from lighting sparks and light bulb moments provide the raw energy needed to continue to enhance, upgrade and improve our lives as well as society as a whole. Although certain caveats relating to weapons of mass destruction need no mention!
Often though, the idea alone is not sufficient to take a product to market, again going back to research days, I had the honour of working in the EMI research labs in Hayes, Middlesex, where the CT body scanner was developed by Nobel prize winner Sir Godfrey Hounsfield. Whilst this wasn’t my area of expertise, I’m sure no one would disagree that this is one of the most important and significant medical diagnostic tools available today; yet the product reached the market place through GE in the States and not EMI in Hayes where the prototype was patented and developed.
In the 80’s this serendipitous discovery was gathering momentum and raising finance proved complex. This was largely because there was a lack of a coherent plan and processes to get this product to market. This led to opportunistic bystanders (GE) who saw the potential to conceive and mobilise a game plan, test the patent laws and steal a march on developing the product commercially with enormous success.
We now need to take a quick pit stop and move onto the second half of this blog which relates to structure and maintenance. Apologies once more for the ongoing sports confusion!
For marketers, the mere creation of a product gets you to the stadium in your sports kit ready to start the game. It doesn’t guarantee that you will succeed on the field. This is where a plan, goals, targets, insights on your competition, and the market place are necessary to create the tactical framework for success.
In basic marketing, I call this maintenance by which I mean all the underlying factors that need to be in place to achieve success. At a top line level these can be as complex as a business vision, a strategy, a plan, a series of tasks that help prepare you to achieve your goals and ambitions. As you get more embroiled in the detail more important factors emerge, such as processes to ensure lists are accurately maintained, how you are going to deal with platinum clients and how to maximise and gain traction from lead generation activities. These are but to name a few… and for every business these hygiene factors must be identified, documented, and trained and shared with every team member involved in the marketing maelstrom.
To move things onto a higher plane, it is also worth challenging the team to develop better procedures and processes. I have even come across companies who award a team member a quarterly “maintenance spanner” for individuals who created a new process from a routine task, wrestling back some kudos from the creatives.
So, the message is clear if you want your marketing to evolve in line with your business vision ensure you encourage a good balance between your creative and maintenance tasks and in short… “try to make slick verse from a plough’s gear!“…. or something like that!
