…Unless your definition of innovation is to pepper your marketing campaign with the word “innovation”, “innovative”, or “innovate” over and over again. The entire point of innovation is that your consumers should be able to witness it without you telling them. To create an emotional connection with your product, and subsequently your brand… to consume, evangelize, and consume again. I swear, every brochure or advert I look at these days touts the company as a master of “innovation”… whether or not the innovation truly benefits the consumer in a way that has never been done (better product, higher quality, etc?)
There’s a great post from Reena at BusinessWeek about this (link to full article):
“The term has been over-used and abused of much of its meaning, with every lame brand-tweak and extension being hailed as an ‘innovation,’” observes Kevin McCullagh, who recently wrote an essay, Beware the Backlash: A rising tide of disaffection towards design, as in innovative product design for the popular design Web site, Core77.
“Designers and ‘innovators’ have definitely been guilty of over-claiming,” says McCullagh, a director of London-based product strategy consultancy Plan who has worked with Ford, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Nokia (NOK), Samsung, and Unilever (UL). “[But] I don’t think there is much evidence of consumers getting tired of innovation. Look at the widespread hunger for a better cell-phone experience that the iPhone is tapping into.”
Consumers, businesses, and designers alike might bemoan the constant repetition of “innovation” in advertising, marketing plans, boardroom meetings, and brainstorming sessions. But the quest for products designed with improved usability or fueled by fresh new technologies, true innovations, won’t soon end. As experts are starting to prescribe, innovative products can continue to drive profits if pursued with ROI, rather than marketing, in mind.
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