Innovation marketing is a discipline that encompasses activities and novel processes to introduce and deliver entirely new products.

This includes research into the needs of customers, concept and prototype tests with customers, and developing plans on how to market these new products in a saturated market.

“Innovation marketing is playing a leading role in securing and increasing the success of products in markets that are becoming saturated.”

Many successful entrepreneurs have embraced the concept of integrating innovation in marketing. To remain competitive against newcomers who are typically more agile and creative, established companies should strive to include innovation marketing as a key market strategy, whether it be content, website development or graphics designing.

Here are some of the aspects of marketing that get integrated with innovation to produce results that are unbelievably efficient for new companies and companies that are interested in growing big organically.

● Market research comprises the identification of customer needs. Marketing research opens new doors for innovation because new information is constantly flowing in the form of insights that can be used to better serve customers.

● Marketing innovation also plays a very strategic role in the corporate world. There are many cases in which marketing plays a leading role in the development of not only market strategies, but also in R&D of new products. This is because marketing via customer research can identify crucial markets where those learned insights are applicable.

● Focus on the four levers of innovation marketing. For the purpose of constructing effective marketing strategies companies need to focus on: 1) product design, 2) pricing policies, 3) communication and messaging, 4) distribution and sales.

Defining Innovation Marketing

Innovation marketing covers all the activities that contribute to the success of selling new products and services. Innovation marketing includes a very wide variety of tasks and activities that are related to the customer and market orientation.

“Innovation marketing, in its entirety, contributes to the identification of future and new market opportunities by way of research into the needs of customers.”

What are companies supposed to look for, when it comes to customer needs research?

Research into the needs of customer needs to be in accordance with the specific market segment focus. Research is also conducted to gauge market potentials like the feasibility of a market, size of market, and the potential adoption of new products in such a market.

In the process of the development of a product, innovation marketing has the task of involving customers to gain insights and validation continuously. The aim is to collect feedback from customers that regularly engage within the focus market segment and gauge their reactions to current developments.

A major part of innovation marketing is the development of a strategy to roll out a new product. That is where the efficacy of innovation marketing is most apparent.

Innovation marketing is a continuous task that involves both external and internal marketing.

As a first step, for the purposes of initialization, the company’s own marketing staff will need to be aligned and excited about the new innovation that has been developed. You cannot assume to gain any market acceptance at large, without internal alignment.

This isn’t a step that requires coercion, or compliance internally. In other words, this isn’t a top-down effort. It’s about gaining honest and authentic alignment and excitement internally. This is done by developing products that serve the needs of the staff as the first set of customers.

The second step is to market the product externally. This involves the entire marketing plan from product positioning, pricing based on learned customer preferences, adequate and effective communication, and finally setting up efficient advertising and sales channels.

Innovation marketing includes all the tasks of getting a new product or service to the market, from the front-end development to the back end.

Innovation marketing is a about having across-divisional functions that play a very crucial role in the entirety of the process of introducing something new to the market.

It is this phenomenon that makes it clear how closely related and connected the tasks of marketing and innovation are in the process of creating a successful strategy of rolling out a product.

“Innovation marketing is about achieving total cross-functional and divisional alignment centered around introducing something new to the market.”

Innovation marketing is important because if there is a lack of information regarding preferences of the customer base, the needs of the base will be neglected. Hence, the marketing strategy would then become inadequate in the face of scarcity of alignment, causing a failure in sales.

Marketers are realizing more and more that traditional showcasing strategies are not successful any longer. The organizations that are encompassing trend setting innovation with the union of marketing and innovation are the clear winners in the market.

Innovation marketing works really well for technology companies, as an example, because of the obsession with customer data that can be translated into executable insights.

This combined with listening to customer feedback and industry trends allows companies to optimize products and services that gain adoption faster.

Inventive systems in marketing permit companies to modify methodologies to more readily meet customer requirements and increase sales as a result.