The Constant Observer

Yesterday we dealt with the idea of a Value Proposition and went deeper into the idea of ‘generic benefits’ that consumers experience (something that was floated in Part 1).

Today I am going to try and give you a closer look at Innovation and whether it should be branded. I will possibly try and outline where innovations tend to be over branded and how branding a technological innovation may ultimately lead to leadership.

I noticed something peculiar with Google Gears – it is probably one of the few Google Brands that does not have a completely generic brand name. You have GMail, GTalk, Google Reader, etc. True there are benefits of generic names and Google is probably not that great an example because its core brand has immense equity. But I think Gears is an attempt by Google to brand innovation.

Consider the iPod, iTunes, The Kindle by Amazon. All of them were technological innovations in their own right. Consider how they would have sounded if they were called Apple MP3 Player, Apple Music Software, and Amazon Electric Book Reader. Branding an innovation is central to the longevity of an innovation.

I also think that Branding an innovation is part of the ‘Generic Benefit’ that can be offered to the consumer in terms of the way he or she ‘feels’ and the way others look at and perceive him or her.

There are however, dangers of over branding – putting brands on innovations that do not warrant them in the 1^st place. What ultimately happens then is that the brands are created but later not supported.

Branding too can thus create a Shakespearean dilemma and make Brand Managers and CEO’s modern day Hamlets.

Branding an innovation or rather over branding an innovation can happen when there is a marketing or technical person who has brought up his or her baby through all kinds of meetings, budget reviews and then ultimately wants the innovation to have a name so that customers can identify with the innovation the way he or she does. So more often than not, brands are provided to innovations and the result if a large variety of brands, with a lot of underfunding, confusion, and lack of prioritization.

So ultimately the goal of branding an innovation should not be an excuse to slap a name on anything and everything.

I should probably provide an example from Foxy here. We have Foxy - The Services Brand, BeFoxy, BeFoxy TV, and A Network. Now BeFoxy is going to be our latest brand and it deserves to be branded solely because it is a property that is not easily available at other similar websites.

To have different brands there has to be differentiation in terms of processes, mind power, possibly even the work space.

While there may be a tendency to over brand innovations, there are also dangers in not branding and not identifying innovations, working on a family of brands and working on their tactical and strategic roles.

While branding an innovation, the 3 key questions that need to be asked are:

1) Is it a significant advance?

2) Do customers care?

3) Will it merit investment over time by bringing in sales and profit, market leadership, and other me too products?

Next post:

I will try and dwell deeper into these 3 questions that Brand managers and marketers need to ask.

If you have any similar examples of branded innovations that did work or branded innovations that were not branded, please do share them – I’d love to have the opportunity to learn and fine-tune my thoughts!

1) The Amazon Kindle: 200 Books, the size of a paperback.

The Good:

Small Size

A Model that looks to earn revenues from the service rather than the product.

Battery Life.

Does not tire the eyes while reading.

The Bad:

Design

Does not read PDF’s

The ‘service’ can be cracked, giving users free alternatives.

2) The RFID Revolution: By tagging items and containers with tiny chips that can be interrogated wirelessly from a few metres away, companies will be able to streamline their distribution and delivery systems. RFID tags can act as wireless bar-codes on everything from cereal boxes to medicine bottles to expensive military hardware, enabling suppliers, retailers and government agencies to track inventory more efficiently and cut costs.

RFID is not new – the technology has been around for a while, 2007 was the year it’s potential use was put into use at certain places.

In the Future, RFID can possibly put into human beings, their emotions and impulses monitored and contextual marketing can be taken to the next level.

The Drawback of course is Privacy. Also, for a large scale RFID detection mechanism, large scale wireless networks need to be deployed. In India at least, we are far from that.

3) Biometrics: It’s all about uniquely recognizing humans based upon one or more intrinsic physical or behavioral traits.

Why it’s good:

Enhanced Security

How can it be taken to the next level:

If biometrics can identify human emotions along with identifying traits, we can expect the same level of contextual marketing that is possible with embedding RFID’s into human beings.

4) The Nintendo Wii: I spoke at length about ‘generic benefits’ that products seek to identify in my series on technological innovation – the Wii identifies that gaming is not all about graphics and appealing to the hardcore gamers.

The Good:

Cheaper

Easy interface

More multiplayer options

Takes gaming back to the basics without really doing so (only people who have used the Wii will understand this!)

The Bad:

Graphics – well but the graphics are good enough

5) Cheap Laptops: Rajesh Jain and Ashok Jhunjunwala have teamed up to form Novatium, a provider that hopes to pioneer the concept of a Net PC floated by Oracle’s Larry Ellison.

 The PC as we know it is a self-reliant machine, heaving with processing power, laden with software and stuffed with data. But in the age of broadband, it is unnecessary to house so much computing power in a box on your desk. Better to store the bulk of it on a central server, to which users can connect via the Internet.

Novatium’s PC will probably cost Rs. 2, 800 with a Rs. 399 monthly subscription.

Expect PC and hopefully Internet penetration to take off across our country.

Nigeria has also pioneered the one laptop per child policy – where a laptop costs as little as Rs. 4, 000 or $100.

6) API’s & Widgets: Application Programming Interfaces and widgets were included in Facebook, Orkut also opened up its platform to API’s. Deep integration into the social network, mass distribution etc. can lead to new opportunities that have mutual benefits. They are here to stay.

7) Social Ads: This is something else Facebook started this year to try and be worth it’s while.  Contextual Social Advertising allows advertisers to choose the key words for which it seeks to generate clicks and simultaneously gives the advertiser an idea of how many people fit the description of being likely to click on that key word. (a handy research tool for marketers and an exciting tool for advertisers to view since they anyway get the option of targeting specific audiences and now they can also know what they are looking at in terms of sheer numbers). I do confess however that the numbers can be slightly overestimated since not everyone will probably click on the links. To counter that Facebook has used a Google style fee collection method of Cost per Click (CPC) and also Cost per Thousand or Mille (CPM). 

For more on ROI on the Internet Walk into the World of Web Metrics. 

The Good:

Contextual

Social

The Bad:

The Numbers

8) GPS Cameras: Flickr has launched a geotagging feature on it’s website – to cut the long story short, camera manufacturers are now embedding GPS into cameras so that 1 drunken party can be differentiated from the others.

The Good:

Handy feature that makes photography more interactive

The Bad:

What bad?

All iPhone lovers, sorry the iPhone does not really figure on WATBlog’s list. Primarily because of:

No video recording

No real ‘unique’ features

Bundled with operators – against the economic idea of freedom.

If you hate us but still love the iPhone, read all about it here.

Let’s first take a look at the approach taken by firms towards innovation.

Too many firms today believe that there is a trade off between the “engineering” approach to innovation or the market driving approach to innovation and the pure market driven approach to innovation.

The engineering or market driving approach basically assumes that consumers do not really know anything and as a result of that, engineers must go on “innovating” without really bothering to ask them anything.

The pure market driven approach to innovation looks at innovation from a level of customer feedback to new ideas – this often results in “me too” – not truly innovative products.

What ‘innovators’ and marketers fail to do often is identify generic benefits to consumers. By identifying generic benefits a firm virtually lets the consumer guide the product developer and marketer through the innovation process. For example – the generic benefit that consumers may look for with respect to social networking is that they can be an enhanced version of what they really are – a social network allows them to be cool and fun – and this will guide the innovator on a social network to have adequate applications that make the user seem more ‘cool and fun’. So you will have a ‘FunWall’ or an application that tells the user which celebrity he or she looks like (and inflates his/ her ego) – or you may even have a ‘if I was a drink I would be’ (and no matter what drink you are you are bound to sound cool!). I have picked up these examples from FaceBook and again I think this is where they have got it right – the correct innovations that identify generic benefits.

Btw: NEWSFEED – All Social Network Watchers – Facebook just overtook MySpace in terms of visitors to the site according to alexa.com

Innovation it must be considered is understood as something new or novel. While that may apply to technologies and the functionality of features – it does not really apply to the generic benefits – they virtually stay the same.

So this shows that customers may “know what they want” without really “knowing it” – great isn’t it!?

So when a customer is choosing a new technology, fundamentally he is buying a benefit.

Thus a technological strategy should begin with the fundamental need of customers and work with a problem solving approach, an approach that satisfies a need and improvises a benefit. Such an approach is balanced in a sense and it thus diminishes that perceived trade off between being market driven or engineering driven.

I hope to make this series an especially insightful, long and interactive one. Over the course of the series I will be outling certain generic benefits, certain things innovators need to keep in mind while designing new products, and also various feature trends that are the real winners because they combine generic benefits. I will also try and make the scope broader if I have the capacity.

It would be great if we can make this series conversation like – do keep asking me questions and challenge what I write so that the series can be more engaging and mutually beneficial.