Structuring Marketing teams for innovation
Innovation is the lifeblood of long-term success. Innovation is about disrupting the way things are done today to make them better for tomorrow. If you don’t disrupt yourself, someone else will, and that’s almost always less pleasant.
More than a few times when I worked in a marketing agency I heard feedback from clients that they wanted work to be ‘more innovative’ or ‘more creative’. But that it had to work within the brand guidelines. And be done within a budget that provided just enough to deliver something functional. And had to meet the guidelines of a specific brief. This type of request is fundamentally pointless. What it generally amounted to was that the marketer didn’t like their own brand guidelines. They wanted the agency to push the boundaries of what could be done so that they could see something different and potentially prove to their boss that they can ‘innovate’. Some agencies love this – they get to be creative rather than production engines. Unfortunately, this type of request is anathema to many objectives of a scale marketing organisation. Brand guidelines exist for a purpose: to drive consistency and reduce cost in campaign development. Innovation and testing need proper investment to evaluate them effectively and, more importantly than anything else, they need a business framework for rolling the learning from the innovation back into the knowledge base of the rest of the marketing function. ‘Innovation’ that has no mechanism to drive functional change is best described as ‘inefficiency’. Innovation costs money and introduces risk; why wouldn’t you want to be really sure that you get business value from it if successful before you do it?
Innovation is as much cultural as it is organisational. A culture of transformative innovation and entrepreneurial spirit will create great ideas. An organisation of iterative transformation that activates effectively will deliver profitable customer value. Together, in harmony, these two secure the organisation’s present and its future, and if they cannot operate in harmony it can spell significant trouble. Take these steps when planning how you will establish your innovation culture.
Define your operating model for innovation. How will you iterate what you have today? How will you transform for tomorrow? Define separate teams with clear focuses. Functional, shared services teams should have plans for how they will build and measure improved performance. Marketing Innovation centres of excellence should incubate new operating models and technologies and then scale them to the prime time.
Set different goals and KPIs teams. Innovation should not be measured with the same KPIs as you run the breadth of your team with. Innovation should evaluate the number of tests that are completed. The outputs of those tests, if positive, inform whether the tests should be rolled out. Requiring successful test KPIs be met will only stifle true innovation.
Learn by doing. Most innovation can be tested without significant business risk or decision making. Build a culture of testing and basing decisions upon data. Go fast and connect the dots to get to value faster.
Be clear when teams should focus on execution. Efficient execution is the bread and butter of your team’s success. Minimise distractions and govern work to maximise outputs. But listen, learn and take inputs to inform actual, structured innovation and testing.
Enable your teams to understand how the organisation is structured to innovate. Tell them the story of the Wright Brothers. Help them understand the pitfalls of unstructured innovation and the risks of not innovating. Be clear on their role within this process. Inform them on the importance of seamless execution and reassure them that not everything has to be transformative innovation.