The Innovation Backlash?
An opinion piece in AdAge seems kind of all over the place, but might spark a wave of anti-innovation writing. The article is pretty straightforward: innovation is one tactic, not a strategy; it’s not even a core tactic, just one.
There’s also the famous Peter Drucker quote, “The business enterprise has two — and only these two — basic functions: marketing and innovation.”
I would simplify that quote: “A business enterprise has only one basic function: build a brand that can dominate a category.” Early on, innovation can help a company build that kind of brand. Consider: instant photography and Polaroid; the plain-paper copier and Xerox; the microprocessor and Intel; wireless e-mail and BlackBerry; the athletic shoe and Nike.
But when a category matures, the situation changes. Take the automotive industry. The significant innovations in the auto industry — the V-8 engine, automatic transmission, power steering, air conditioning, seat belts, air bags, etc. — took place decades ago.
What makes a powerful automobile brand today is not innovation, but a narrow focus on an attribute or a segment of the market. Reliability and Toyota. Driving and BMW. Youth and Scion.
Seems questionable, but at least aguable. But then the argument drifts:
Most brands don’t need innovations; they need focus. They need to figure out what they stand for (or what they could stand for) and then what they need to sacrifice to get there…. It’s sacrifice — not innovation — that builds brands.
Don’t innovate, go after segments, build and dominate a brand attribute, get focused, and make sacrifices, quite a lot of chasing in an article that starts with Peter Drucker, but the conclusion wraps it up:
As the Sharper Image story illustrates, innovation is not a strategy. It’s a tactic that needs to be used in support of a company’s branding strategy.
Feels like a hammer flailing about for nails — anything to say brand work is all that matters.
The upside of the article is that it might spark a bigger backlash. Backlashes are interesting double-edged phenonomena. On the one hand, they force the backlashees to put sharper points on their thinking, shore up weaker parts of the argument, and in general go deeper and justify claims. On the other hand, backlashes tend to turn the object of attack into trends that are passe. For some, the innovation conversation will be over, cuz the debate is turning on itself.