First Step Marketing

Innovation has become so commonplace that scarcely any product survives long enough to age. New ideas and items are born obsolete. The cycle never stops. Accordingly, customers and suppliers alike grow dizzy in their futile pursuit of the next best thing.

Last year, consumers in the United States were inundated by roughly twenty-three thousand new packaged goods—about 450 per week. Revlon, Inc., alone introduced four hundred new items. Combine that with the thousands of other new consumer products that appeared, from computer advances to car models, and you get a sense of the plethora of choices, a flood that would have daunted Noah.

If all this makes your head spin, maybe you should consult a consultant. But there is an overload of consultants, too. “The latest estimates suggest that more than 10,000 firms claim to provide some form of Internet consulting or Web design services,” reports The Industry Standard. If you wait to buy a computer with a hard drive that can hold 10 gigabytes, the 40-gigabyte model will come out six weeks later. In many cases, product proliferation and line extensions begin almost immediately after a basic design is developed. It seems as though some products have come and gone so quickly that their sales brochures were the only thing that ever reached the market.

And this process, too, feeds on itself: The shortened life cycle spurs even faster innovation. If you look more and more like your competitors and your products become less and less distinct, conventional wisdom seeks the answer in new thinking and invention. While all the gurus exhort you to innovate, revolutionize, get out of the box, the quest for something new and different often interferes with more practical measures, such as controlling costs and speeding up deliveries.

We have not overdosed on innovation yet, but perhaps we need to think about what we are doing. In the fantasy of today’s high- tech Zeitgeist, every garage tinker is tomorrow’s Bill Gates. In the business schools, apprentice MBAs express disdain for investment banking or consulting; 30 to 40 percent of them are aiming for their own dot-corns. At the height of the bull market, many venture capitalists threw caution to the wind and snatched at nearly any business plan ending in “.com.” If some were badly burned and no longer play the dot-com game, hundreds of other digital dreamers are still hunting the money to fuel talent and launch more innovations. At least some of them will surely find it.

As the new goods and services congest the markets, the pool of potential buyers will not keep pace. In other words, the inflation of innovation causes a deflation of customers.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
Innovation is Universal

This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 11:09 pm and is filed under Banking, Business Plans, Business Schools, Sales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.