Innovation takes centre stage in the minds of many marketers, but too few are making the jump from talking about it to doing it. Suzy Bashford investigates what is holding marketers back
We’ve all heard the marketing battle cry ‘innovate or die’ and witnessed the casualties of this war meet their demise, from Kodak to Blockbuster, because they failed to heed the advice. But does this mantra make you brim with optimism, or does it strike fear into your heart?
If you fall into the latter camp, you are not alone. Research conducted by B2B communications agency Man Bites Dog at the end of 2014 showed that, of 200 CMOs interviewed, 82 per cent agree that B2B marketing is experiencing a crisis of creativity and 92 per cent agree that B2B brands require a radical new way of working in order to be creative. CMOs report feeling ‘starved of inspiration’, with very little time for ‘abstract thought’, and many say their organisations are fearful of innovation and change, yet 97 per cent concur that ‘innovation is critical to the future success’ of their business.
Man Bites Dog managing director Claire Mason says: “B2B is a very challenging market, where many of us are selling very high value products and services in an increasingly commoditised space and we’re struggling to stand out and retain those premiums. We know the power of ideas; we’re in an ideas economy. We know the brands that can best articulate their thinking will win. But, in practice, generating ideas can be very difficult, especially in conservative organisations.”
So concerned was Mason by the findings that she hosted a debate to get to the crux of the issue and come up with some solutions. This debate revealed a key barrier to innovation in the B2B market is actually one of perception. Marketers admitted to finding the words ‘innovation’ and ‘creativity’ intimidating and conceded that they associate them much more with the B2C sector, particularly the FMCG market.
From idea to execution
At the same time, the organisations present also revealed the problem is not actually a lack of ideas – they have plenty of these – the problem is around how to manage the idea flow and transform the good ones into meaningful business actions. Therefore, it would seem that if there is any ‘crisis’ going on, it is more to do with confidence than creativity.
Matthew Cushen, director of innovation consultancy What If confirms this hunch: “In line with other businesses, but even more apparent in B2B, is a lack of individual and team confidence in their ability to create new ideas. Unfortunately our education system and the way we continue to be rewarded during our careers for the ‘one right answer’ dramatically reduces the creative, exploratory, experimental, limitless possibilities behaviours we all had as children. But, with some training, it is possible to unlock the talent we all have.”
BT’s global brand and marketing director Suzi Williams agrees. She is responsible for B2B and B2C innovation, spearheading the recent launch of ‘National Inventors Day’ aimed at highlighting the importance of new ideas, not only to her BT colleagues, but to the British economy in general:
“There’s this perception in the market that B2C is faster moving, sexier and more inventive than B2B and that B2B is somewhat slower moving, more corporate and less entrepreneurial. That’s a really out dated view. I don’t believe there’s any difference between the two. It all comes down to culture and the question: how do you build a culture where invention and risk are accepted and where there’s enough empowerment and trust to allow people to innovate, so they can come up with original ideas and campaigns?”
This is a question Dr Nick Udall, CEO of the Nowhere Group, hears constantly from the firms that hire him to help them break free from conventional thinking, so they can embrace and create new ideas. He describes what he does as building ‘internal confidence and courage’ and teaching brands to: “Learn to dance between the known and unknown; to ride the creative rollercoaster.”
According to him, the companies thriving in this new paradigm are those that: “Are clear about who they are and their core identity and have the courage to invent ‘next’ practice and not just follow ‘best ‘practice.”
Of all the B2B brands he works with, he says Alibaba exemplifies this. Why? “Because it is prepared to challenge the dogma, ask the big questions, learn fast and fail fast. It has moved from being silo-driven to being an ecosystem where there is a very different way of working. It is not about working harder or longer or having more meetings. It’s about working with creative insights and collective intelligence in a flow state”.
Udall, who relishes ‘riding the creative rollercoaster’ and works with brands at the cutting edge of this new paradigm, makes it sound easy. But, while his words make perfect sense in theory, in reality cultivating this kind of corporate confidence is hugely difficult. And make no mistake – particularly if you’re one of those many B2B marketers who feels starved of inspiration and fearful of innovation – Alibaba is most certainly the exception rather than the rule.
Fostering the right culture
The vast majority of large organisations are struggling with the challenge that creating a culture of creativity presents; it’s the nature of the corporate beast that the processes and mechanisms that must be put in place to function efficiently work against the flow of innovation. Businesses, particularly publicly listed ones, are founded on short-term, definite measures whereas innovation requires a wider, more long-term, outlook that allows for a certain amount of uncertainty.
Taking all this into account, in practical terms, how can a marketer start to address these challenges? The most useful first step is to realise that this culture cannot be single-handedly driven from the marketing department.
When it comes to innovation, no marketer is an island entire of itself. Without the buy-in and proactive support of the senior management, any efforts to foster creativity across the business will fail.
Google is the company most often lauded for managing to create a buzzing, entrepreneurial atmosphere, despite being a large company. David Keene, head of marketing, Google for Work, Northern, Eastern and Central Europe, says: “Taking risks is all about whether you have the support of the leadership team. We encourage everyone to take ownership of projects; to be leaders in their own right, so they feel confident enough to come up with ideas.”
Of course Google accepts that businesses must have traditional mechanisms in place to function smoothly – such as annual pay reviews and short-term targets – but it also recognises the need to introduce new incentives and metrics that boost innovation, rather than stifle it. For instance, there’s a formal arrangement that engineers are on ’20 per cent contracts’, which means one day each week is spent working on a project that the employee is personally interested in, which can have nothing to do with the day job. As it happens, many of these projects have actually led to Google innovations – from Gmail to Google Glass – but the point of them is not to create new products; the point of them is to allow their employees to explore a passion with curiosity, follow their imaginations into the unknown and to see where this leads.
Another tactic Google uses to foster a spirit of innovation internally is empowering every colleague to be able to reward another for their contribution to a project. As Keene explains: “We focus on positive coaching to give our colleagues confidence. Anyone can give a colleague a cash bonus inside Google. For instance, if I worked with someone on a project that is nothing to do with our day jobs, but I thought that person really went the extra mile, then I can award them a cash bonus. We think it’s very important to change the incentives we put in place so they support innovation. After all, if you just pay people for sitting at their desks and sending emails all day and not achieving anything, then people will do that, just sitting waiting for the next pay rise or review.”
Feedback is also another critical element of building confidence across Google. The HR department manages a full feedback process across the whole organisation, which looks at a host of different measures from happiness levels and engagement to positivity and creative input. “Doing this creates a culture where people are accountable for their behaviours because it’s all very open and transparent,” says Keene. “And our HR teams don’t just look at whether you’ve hit your target. They ask questions like ‘did you hit your target in a way that was creative and pushed the boundaries or challenged convention?’ We’re online all the time now. We don’t need to sit at a desk 24/7. We shouldn’t. We should be asking ourselves: ‘what am I going to try and achieve today? How do I maximise my impact?’”
Inspiring innovation
Once you’ve got buy-in from senior management, then your role as the marketer becomes key: you are tasked with ‘representing’ and inspiring innovation across your organisation. This can be particularly challenging in B2B because often organisations don’t see themselves as creative. The most effective way to approach in these cases, says Paul English, global head of marketing and communications at Grant Thornton International, is to embrace your role as ‘the antagonist’.
English did this by starting the conversation with his colleagues about why innovation is so important. As he puts it: “In a very conservative business like ours it can be a battle. You need some antagonists internally. I was our antagonist. I was willing to knock on doors and say ‘we need to be acting and responding’. I’m the one pointing to the research that says that if you don’t innovate, you’re stuck and you’ll start to lose your competitive position. I’m the one saying ‘let’s not just roll over and create another five-year strategy, this is the moment to look at this problem differently and turn the organisation upside down’”.
One way Grant Thornton has built excitement around idea generation and empowered colleagues is by running a company-wide competition. For this, English asked every single employee – that’s 40,000 in 130 countries – for their ideas on where the firm’s future strategy should go. Approximately 40 per cent of the workforce contributed their ideas over a three-day social media event.
“We ended up with about 200 very well-formed ideas that came from PAs to payroll about improvements we need to make,” says English. “The global leadership was shocked and stunned [by the quality of ideas]. It was a radical approach, but it’s a different way of delivering new ideas.”
Having a clear objective for why you are generating ideas and a framework to gather and distil them is paramount says Richard Carpenter, head of marketing, commercial banking and asset finance, Lloyds Banking Group: “The approach to innovation, especially in B2B, needs to be very disciplined. First you have to define the problem, then you can set a target for innovation. It’s amazing how many businesses don’t go through those two steps which ensure the idea generation is focused.”
While Carpenter concedes that it’s currently very trendy to talk about embracing failure and ‘failing fast’, he believes the stakes are often much higher when it comes to B2B, so marketers must limit their exposure to failure as much as they can, while still experimenting.
“You have to be very, very careful about whether failure impacts your clients in any way, shape or form. You might test something internally and it may fail – that’s fine, so be it – that’s an investment in innovation. But you can’t risk something that has public impact and might fail.”
Consequently, brands like Lloyds often grapple with a ‘conflict of innovation’. On one hand, brands need to create a culture of free-flowing ideation and-risk taking, but on the other these ideas have to be rigorously tested and assessed so a marketer like Carpenter can: “Be confident that the innovation is without question”.
As he admits, it’s a delicate line to tread to ensure the brand is: “Innovating at pace while staying on the right side of objectives we want to deliver.” Agencies can help brands negotiate this tricky balance. The Marketing Practice (TMP), for example, views its role as an ‘innovation engine’ for its clients, which include Microsoft and O2. It set up a dedicated innovation and planning team around a year ago which uncovers insights and proposes innovations, crediting this arrangement as the reason for success behind some of its award winning B2B campaigns.
Robert Ainger, marketing director at TMP, reiterates the importance of having a clear framework and says that some of the most dramatic results the agency has seen, with clients like Atos, are because the brand has made some significant changes in how it approaches marketing. For instance, with TMP, Atos has set up a centralised ‘lead generation factory’ and now works much more collaboratively with other functions in its organisation, like sales.
While Ainger is a great believer in the adage that companies must innovate or die, he also implores marketers not to drown in the hype around innovation either. His parting word of warning is this: “Don’t mistake valuable innovation with pointlessly jumping on the latest bandwagon. While a degree of experimentation will normally be valuable, any agency worth its salt will be able to advise when and where not to experiment, rather than just constantly throwing new toys over the fence at its clients.”
