In case you had any doubt that marketers are hungry for innovation, consider these three points. First, Unilever announced the launch today of its “Unilever Foundry” program - open to marketing start-ups working across areas including digital, content, social and mobile. Not run by central marketing, as its existing Go Global Incubator program is, the new program will give its own brands more opportunity in how and with which start-ups they work with.
Unilever is not alone – Nissan, PepsiCo, AT&T, Home Depot and other major brands are in the business of purchasing equity stakes in digital marketing startups. But startup investments – with the hope of future returns – are not the only reason marketers are investing. They often run marketing innovation labs to find new digital marketing and digital commerce technologies, tools and techniques. Recently Gartner has seen an increase in inquiries from clients looking for process maps to quickly evaluate and prioritize new marketing technologies. Companies are finding that their agencies’ knowledge of marketing technology may bring them up to competitive parity, but may not lead to breakthrough competitive differentiation.
Second, Gartner found in its 2014 marketing spending survey – available free at www.gartner.com/dmspend - that 83% of large and extra-large companies allocated a portion of their marketing budget to innovation, and the average amount is 9.4% of the marketing budget, or about 1% of company revenue. More and more marketing titles include innovation, and Chief Innovation Officers represent a mix of traditional CTOs as well as digital marketers. More companies (over 80%, Gartner found) have the equivalent of chief marketing technologists. One of their most often-cited roles is as a CTO to lead the evaluation and prioritization of new marketing technologies.
Third, all you have to do is look at the rise of marketing innovation-focused events, consultants and courses available. Marketing-focused conferences with the word Innovation in the title are both broad and industry-specific, for example “Digital Marketing Innovation Summit” and “Marketing Innovation Summit for B2B”. We see the shift in focus of established conferences such as South by Southwest (SXSW) in 2014 from tech innovation to marketing innovation. There are also dozens of consulting firms offering marketing innovation, both traditional and hands-on, for example Inventours and Phenomenon Major universities such as Stanford University, Harvard and MIT are beginning to teach courses on marketing innovation.
What Unilever’s move says about innovation to me is that centralized innovation management may be too slow, have too much governance, and will operate better at the edges where marketers are busy learning how to fail early and fail often. Marketers who operate at real-time speed have the expense budget authority to be innovative using a variety of sources – agencies, startups, crowdsourcing and, not least, customer communities. Instead of trying to modify legacy processes from internal IT, R&D or procurement which are restrictive and slow, marketing has the opportunity to do what they do best – be creative and develop a flexible, high-speed model for digital customer-focused marketing innovation.