That is a pretty tough statement from Peter Drucker, isn’t it? Jeff Bezos would certainly agree though … look at Amazon over the past decade-plus. He has established Amazon as an innovation opportunities leader. And Amazon knows much about innovative growth opportunities.
No question. But most businesses would have a hard time agreeing, in our opinion.
Within five years, if you’re in the same business you are in now, you’re going to be out of business.
Peter Drucker
In the past few decades, most innovations focused primarily on efficiency in response to mass market opportunities.
While ongoing innovations in technology and operating strategies will continue to improve efficiency, future innovations will be more customer-facing and more focused on significant growth opportunities. Again, look at the growth of e-commerce businesses like Amazon.
Both online and brick and mortar businesses will address the unique needs and desires of individual consumers to provide a more rewarding and memorable shopping experience.
They will innovate around new formats and distribution models, product and service offerings, marketing and customer communications, social commerce, and other components of the business model.
Let’s examine ten categories of innovation ideas from Jeff Bezos and his team and other innovative businesses. We’re sure they will help all of us get our thinking caps on.
Help customers with choice decisions
More products, brands, retailers, and shopping formats are introduced to consumers every year. At the same time, technology has resulted in an explosion of information.
Faced with too many choices and information overload as well as more complex products and a lack of knowledgeable sales assistance, many consumers are struggling to make smart choices and are looking to businesses for help.
The ability to try it before you buy it helps consumers choose the products that are right for them and helps innovative marketers close sales. Supermarkets were among the first retailers to realize that once you taste it, you’re more likely to buy it. Sporting goods superstores have jumped on the bandwagon with a variety of
facilities for outdoor enthusiasts to test the equipment and have fun in the process. In-store listening posts and online music samplers let shoppers hear song samples from CDs to aid in the purchase decision.
Amazon’s “Search Inside the Book” feature is one of its most popular innovations. Launched as a significant extension of its groundbreaking “Look Inside the Book,” it helps shoppers find exactly the book they want to buy.
Now, instead of just displaying books whose title, author or publisher-provided keywords match the search terms, search results will surface titles based on every word inside the book and render actual pages of the books for the shopper’s review.
Time and convenience
In the old days, consumers made the pilgrimage downtown from miles around to shop. Then malls were created, and shoppers flocked to these huge centers. More recently, many retailers have been moving into neighborhoods to be closer to where their customers live.
What’s next? In my home, in my car, at my workplace. New distribution models are springing up as businesses take the show on the road and reach out to consumers wherever they are.
From mobile pet grooming, car maintenance and optical labs to traveling carpet and home décor stores, mobile initiatives are gaining in popularity as time-pressed consumers to seek ever-greater convenience to save their time.
Help with solving my problems
Problem-solvers understand what the consumer is trying to accomplish by looking downstream at his or her ultimate goal. For example, innovative home improvement businesses such as Lowes or Home Depot understand that the consumer doesn’t want to buy a drill.
The consumer wants to make a hole to build a deck. Looking even further downstream, s/he wants to build a deck to entertain family and friends. Easy to build, flexible designs are the key.
Innovative companies are networking with companies in other business sectors to offer new products or services outside their core businesses. No one company will have the skills, technologies, channels, products or services that are needed to do this independently.
Be memorable
As busy consumers turn to the Internet to satisfy more of their shopping needs, store retailers will focus more intently on providing experiences that can be gained only by being there. Individual businesses may not be able to own a product or service category, but they can own a buying experience.
The decision to create a customer experience shifts the focus from what moves product to what moves people. Experiences are more than entertainment, education or interaction; they engage customers in a memorable and meaningful way.
Sporting goods retailers REI, Cabela’s and Bass Pro Shops have led the way in making their retail space an experience. Their stores have emerged as major tourist attractions by offering climbing walls, mountain bike tracks, fishing ponds, archery ranges, putting greens and a host of other opportunities to test one’s skills and try out products. The stores effectively bring the great outdoors indoors.
Permit easy sharing
Consumers have a fundamental desire to connect with one another, and technology is facilitating the exchange of ideas, information, and opinions. New types of social networks foster community among consumers who share a common passion or interest.
Marketers can forge stronger relationships with these consumers and earn their patronage by helping them connect in ways that matter to them and by responding to their emotional as well as their physical needs.
Hallmark, in a deal with Enpocket, enables mobile subscribers to send greeting cards to friends and family on their mobile phones. Users click on a branded image and text, add a personalized message and send the composite to the recipient.
Pointing out trends
Successful marketers take advantage of opportunities created by demographic, societal, economic and technological trends. These “green space” opportunities represent emerging growth patterns in the market. New products, new services, new retail concepts, and new business models maximize these trends.
The needs of older people and ethnic consumers and the desire among a growing segment of the population to play a more active role in their health and well-being are among the trends providing fertile ground for innovative solutions.
The Home Depot, in an expanding alliance with AARP, is tapping into the growing base of older customers with innovative products and services to help seniors remain in their homes as they age.
Personalize shopping
Shopping is becoming increasingly individualistic. This is being driven by the growing diversity of the consumer marketplace, technology enablers and the consumer’s desire for greater influence, control and uniqueness. In this new environment, the power structure has permanently shifted from sellers to buyers.
Innovative businesses will look for ways to provide more unexpected gratification to shoppers and let them express themselves in unique ways.
But, can marketers seek out the desires of individual consumers and do only and exactly what each one needs or wants? For the most part, customizing each order to each demand point will remain outside the boundaries of economic feasibility. Instead, the goal will be better matching the market to the consumer.
The Internet enables this process by providing greater access to more information and more options, along with the ability to customize the shopping process to meet shoppers’ specific needs better.
The goal of Amazon’s personalization strategy is to build a store unique to every customer, filled with items selected just for them. As Jeff Bezos explains, “We not only help readers find books, we also help books find readers, with personalized recommendations based on the patterns we see.”
Don’t waste my time
Consumers value what is most scarce, and time is at the top of the list for many. They want it fast (speed up the shopping process). They want it now (immediate gratification). They want it first (latest and greatest).
The need for speed, particularly at the order-entry and checkout stages of the shopping process, will continue to drive changes in store concepts, design, location, merchandising, transaction processing and payment.
Having studied what items are highest on customers’ visits for quick trips, Food Lion’s new Bloom stores feature the Table Top Circle, an area in the front of the store stocking milk, eggs, bread, chilled beer and soda, meal solutions and other frequently purchased, high-traffic convenience offerings. In the parking lot, the first few rows are designated with 20-Minute Parking signs
Simplify everything
Ease-of-use is vital to the success of the shopping experience. Innovative process, service and design solutions that are simple, intuitive and in tune with shoppers’ needs—along with new technology tools— can save consumers time and effort. Easier and more rewarding customer experience will boost sales and enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.
With Staples Easy Rebates, they continue to deliver on its brand promise of making the purchase of office products easy for customers. Easy Rebates, a paperless online rebate process, was developed in response to customer feedback about the frustrations of the mail-in rebate process, which typically includes filling out forms, cutting out and mailing in UPCs from boxes and providing duplicate receipts.
Easy Rebates offers a “no hassles, no clipping, no mailing” guarantee that modernizes the traditional rebate process.
Do what I don’t need to do
Another way to solve my problem is to do it for me. Demographic shifts and lifestyle changes are steadily driving consumers into the do-it-for-me market for everything from home improvement and automobile maintenance to cooking and cleaning.
Businesses are responding to consumers’ increasing do-it-for-me demands with innovative new services and conveniences.
Best Buy offers in-home installation services for appliances and home electronics. Authorized technicians will integrate a single component into an existing system or wire an entire room.
Most Best Buy stores also are equipped with vehicle installation facilities and staffed with certified technicians to install a CD player, auto security system, or video system.
The bottom line
Imagine you could go back in time and give your 20-year-old self a bit of advice on investing in the creative process, coming up with new ideas, and producing good, fun work.
What would you say?
