What do Allianz Group, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL), Axe, GE Healthcare (NYSE: GE), BMW, Proctor & Gamble (NYSE: PG), Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX), and Netflix have in common? These innovators consistently and successfully bring to market winning innovations, achieve profitable new growth, and reinvent their business for the future.
Erich Joachimsthaler, founder and CEO of Vivaldi Partners, a strategy, innovation and marketing consulting company, in his newly published book - Hidden In Plain Sight : How to find and execute your company's next big growth strategy - provides us insightful answers to real questions facing businesses today: on creating successful innovations and driving profitable growth - by introducing a new methodology “demand-first innovation and growth” (DIG). Joachimsthaler purports a poignant view of the misplaced state of innovation in the broader market.
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Question #10:
What drives Apple's innovation and growth? Is Apple better at connecting with and engaging consumers?Erich Joachimsthaler: Apple’s innovation and growth is first and foremost driven by inner conviction about the outer world – a conviction that is manifested by Steve Jobs and largely led by him and people around him.
This conviction is about changing how consumers live around music or entertainment. It is not merely a product focus, although it might appear this way. Apple has created the transformational change that I talk about in the book, it has created the customer advantage as I define it. It has changed the way we find out about music, the way we select music, buy music, listen to music, store music and discard music – in short, it has changed how we manage music in our lives (something that is fairly important to all of us), it also has changed how we manage video, etc.
It is not merely a better experience from competitor X, but it is a transformation of our lives, a part of our lives and Apple moves on doing the same with our entire digital lives, watch the launches of iTV and iPhone.
If Apple merely would define a set of needs and wants and then seek to fulfill it, they would ask consumers what they like or dislike about the Walkman and then create a better Walkman. I think that model of need-fulfillment paradigm is NOT at the core of the Apple process. Instead, Apple develops a notion of the changing consumer landscape. Think about around 2000 or 2001, there were already some consumers who downloaded songs from Napster and Kazaa. They see how the demand landscape is changing and they develop their own thinking, what I call structured thinking, around how to create a transformative experience for consumers. They don’t rely solely on consumer input and focus groups. In the process, Steve Jobs reframes the entire opportunity space for Apple – from a computer company, to a music company (Apple happens to be now one of the largest music retailers), to be an entertainment company. You ask about connecting with consumers? What would Madison Avenue recommend you? They would say: you need to find an emotional message that creates a connection with the consumers – touting functional and emotional benefits and achieve a clear positioning relative to competitors. How would that look like? Most likely a message, communicated over TV that clearly explains the principal benefits and the reasons to believe this benefits to targeted consumers. What would a marketer recommend? He or she would recommend that Apple segments the market into those who like more noisy music versus the sophisticated music lover who perhaps listen to classic music. And if you look at what Apple did, it seems they have followed little of the standard advice from marketers or advertising professionals. Connection and engagement does not happen on the small screen, the TV set or the large screen, but it happens in the 1,440 minutes where consumers live and work and play. Engagement and connection for Apple has nothing to do with emotionalizing the difference of iPod over the Walkman or touting superior product attributes. Look at their advertisements. Their marketing program or advertising program cannot be printed on paper or shown in little films called TV or cinema spots. Their program of connecting with consumers is about the 2,000 accessories that they have licensed to Bose and other companies so that we can absorb and assimilate the iPod into our 1,400 minutes we all live every day.
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Creativity And Innovation Driving Business
