14 Surprising Secrets to Being Innovative in Marketing

A culture of marketing innovation in a business is an environment where traditions can be challenged. Your success in building a culture of being innovative in your business depends on making them happen. No business attribute is more important today as that of innovative, as many, many businesses are on the brink of irrelevance. Here we will explore being innovative in marketing.

Check out our thoughts on building innovation.

You need to have the ability to challenge business traditions as often as possible. It’s also important to recognize that culture comes from the people—it is the people. Think about the individuals within your organization—what are their personalities like? Who are they outside of work? What tickles their fancy? All of these things lend to the culture of your organization, and ultimately your products and services.

Click here for an excellent short video on innovative marketing ideas.

Unfortunately, most companies fail to unleash their most valuable resources: human innovation, imagination, and original thinking. They lack a systematic approach to building a culture of innovation and then wonder why they keep getting beaten to the punch.

Make the secrets of building an innovative culture the main strengths of your company and the pillars of its long-term growth and success.

Here are some useful ways how to help move toward an innovative culture in your business:

Marketing innovation … have big goals

Make the goals big and avoid business as usual incremental approaches. Make the performance you seek to depend on focused attention and persistence.

Start small

Start small with just one part of the organization. Here is an example. ITW is a diversified manufacturing company that produces a wide array of products from industrial packaging to power systems and electronics to food equipment to construction products. It is a highly profitable company nearly 100 years old.

Yet this big, old company, which is nestled in a traditional industry, thinks small. The leaders at ITW believe that being nimble, hungry, and entrepreneurial are the ingredients for business success. As a result, any time a business unit reaches $200 million in revenue, the division “mutates” into two $100 million units. Like an amoeba, the unit subdivides so it stays hungry and nimble.

The company would rather have 10 independently run an innovative $100 million units than a single, bureaucratic, and clunky $1 billion unit. Guess what? It’s a great environment of change and adaptation.

Companies that can stay more curious and nimble, have a better ability to change and adapt more easily. They have a stronger sense of urgency and are not afraid to embrace change.  They put their curiosity, imagination, and creativity to work

Marketing innovation strategy … avoid isolation

Separate the part of the organization you are starting with. Wall it off from the rest of the corporate bureaucracy. In addition, don’t forget to leave the standard bureaucracy behind. Eliminating the bureaucracy helps to stimulate risk-taking and acts as a counter to old organization inertia.

Encourage curious, imaginative minds

Become big believers in change and adaptation. Such believers contribute heavily to creative minds. We’re first curious about something, and it’s that curiosity that drives us to create new ideas.

Try to think of inventors who created something without first being curious or imaginative. Difficult isn’t it?

Rapid iteration and feedback

Put a strategy in place to handle failures and learn from them. Use an experimental approach to fail early, often, to increase the learning and move forward more rapidly.

Marketing innovation examples … build intrinsic rewards

The best intrinsic rewards are built on if-then external motivators. You want to incentivize the behavior you want more of and eliminate behaviors you dislike. The basic needs are essential. Here are the ones I recommend:

Autonomy – the desire to steer your own ship

Mastery – the desire to excel at what you are doing

Purpose – the need for the journey to mean something

Create a spirit of collaboration

Your employees should feel like members of one big family. They are the biggest assets of your business.

Innovation rarely happens in a vacuum. As the author Steve Johnson says, chance favors the connected minds. When people are together, talking, laughing, thinking, exploring — they’re going to throw out ideas. These ideas trigger something in someone else’s mind, and it snowballs. Before long, this group of folks has developed a creative change that wouldn’t have been possible without the collective collaboration.

See our article on employee engagement as a backbone of customer culture.

Don’t fall prey to the myth that only some people are adaptable and you’re not one of the chosen few. We are all adaptable; it’s just a matter of figuring out in what way.

So find things you’re curious about and that are interesting to you, use your imagination a little, stay motivated and work at it, and surround yourself with others who are doing the same.

Foster adaptability

Change and adaptability have a great ability to drive innovative thinking. Innovative thinking is best when built around a process and can be taught. There are many courses that teach people different innovative techniques.

Give your employees the opportunity to acquire skills that will help them become more productive and proficient in what they are doing.

Encourage Autonomy

We all prefer control over our environments.  According to a 2008 study by Harvard University, there is a direct correlation between people who have the ability to call their own shots and the value of their change and adaptability. An employee who has to run every tiny detail by her boss for approval will quickly become numb to the environment of change.

Granting autonomy involves extending trust. By definition, your team may make decisions you would have made differently.  The key is to provide a clear message of what results you are looking for or what problem you want the team to solve.  From there, you need to extend trust and let them do their best work.

Passion starts with leaders

Believe in what you preach. Give yourself 100% to the cause. Be honest if you want to be accepted. Lead by providing the example. Do not just lead – inspire!

With a team full of passion, you can accomplish just about anything. Without it, your employees become mere clock-punching automatons.

Celebrate even small successes

Social norms in any culture are established by what is celebrated and what is punished. Consider more narrowly how they function within an institution. Nearly every business’s mission statement includes words about “innovation,” yet risk-taking and change are often punished instead of rewarded.  Rewards come in many forms, and often the monetary ones are the least important.

Celebrating change and adaptation is not only about handing out bonus checks for great ideas—although that is a good start.  It should also be celebrated with praise (both public and private), career opportunities, and perks.  In short, if you want your team to be creative, you need to establish an environment that celebrating their successes.

Foster risk-taking

Zappos as a company is known as much for its culture as for its innovative business model. The company has built a business that is growing rapidly by allowing individuals the freedom to take creative risks without that overwhelming sense of fear or judgment.

They tell their employees to say what you think, even if it is controversial. Make tough decisions without agonizing excessively. Take smart risks.  Question actions inconsistent with business values.

Here is another interesting example: A software company in Boston gives each team member two “corporate get-out-of-jail-free” cards each year. The cards allow the holder to take risks and suffer no repercussions for mistakes associated with them.

At annual reviews, leaders question their team members if the cards are not used. It is a great way to encourage risk-taking and experimentation.  Think this company comes up with amazing ideas? Absolutely.

Create a changing climate

Always look for alternatives, improvements, and non-standard ways of solving problems. Many of the ideas that your team will come up with will be unfit, some of them will be excellent and a few will be brilliant. Sometimes one brilliant idea is all it takes to make a huge business success.

Readily accept mistakes and failure

There is no success without failure. Ask any successful person and they will confirm that they have failed in life but that their failures made them stronger and even more determined to go on. It is perfectly OK to fail as long as we learn from our own mistakes. Your employees should not fear failure because it will kill their desire to create new and unusual ideas.

In many companies, people are so afraid of making mistakes that they don’t pursue their dreams. The simply follow the rules and keep their heads down, which drives nothing but mediocrity.

James Dyson, the inventor of the Dyson Vacuum cleaner, “failed” at more than 5,100 prototypes before getting it just right. In fact, nearly every breakthrough innovation in history came after countless setbacks, mistakes, and “failures.”

The best innovators and achievers weren’t necessarily smarter or inherently more talented. They simply released their fear of failure and kept trying. They didn’t let setbacks or misfires extinguish their curiosity, imagination, and ability to change.

Failing means taking risks and increasing the rate of experimentation… and exploring. Some bets will pay off; some will fail. The key is to fail quickly. The speed of business has increased dramatically and every minute counts. The best businesses try lots of ideas and let the losers go quickly and with no remorse.

The bottom line

As you can see, some of these ideas do not take much time and money to implement. Start from small and transform your company step by step. Creating an innovative culture is a process that takes time, but as the first creative ideas become reality, and the first results show up, both you and your employees will appreciate the positive effects.

Things change. New technologies come along. Leaders fail to adapt, as Clayton Christensen pointed out years ago in “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” But doing nothing only accelerates the results.

Need some help in improving the innovation process for you and your staff? Innovative ideas to help the differentiation with your toughest competitors? Or maybe ways to innovate new products and services?

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new innovative ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. 

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Do you have a lesson about making your innovation learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find him on Twitter, and LinkedIn.  

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change.  We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.

More reading on creativity and innovation from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:

Learn How to Think What No One Else Thinks

Generating Ideas by Convergent Thinking

Amazon and Managing Innovation … the Jeff Bezos Vision