When it comes to innovation, focus is way more important than creativity.

Today’s post is by Alex Goryachev, author of FEARLESS INNOVATION: Going Beyond The Buzzword To Continuously Drive Growth, Improve The Bottom Line, And Enact Change (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

I often hear that innovation is primarily about ideas and creativity. With over 20 years of speaking with top innovators around the globe, I am biased to disagree.

I believe that when it comes down to it, innovation is about leadership, communication and execution. Without strong, informed leadership, there is no strategy, and without strategy, there is no innovation. And communication and execution is what separates ideas from results.

To be truly innovative, it’s not enough to proclaim weak platitudes like “Be creative,” “Spark your imagination,” or “Think Bold”—let’s not confuse corporate propaganda with actual strategy.

To keep their organization innovative, leaders across levels and functions must hold themselves responsible for clearly defined pathways, actions, and measurable outcomes. Remember, innovation doesn’t happen naturally—so an environment for innovation must be incentivized and supported.

As I write in Fearless Innovation, when helping others shape their innovation strategy, I often think about the work of Abraham Maslow. If you’re not familiar with Maslow, he was a  brilliant twentieth-century American psychologist, best known for developing the concept of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, typically depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels that address our material and immaterial human needs.

At the bottom level, we have our most basic physiological needs, such as food, shelter, and clothing. The next level up is safety, covering aspects like personal safety and financial security. Level three is that of friendship, family, and a sense of connection, known as the love and belonging level. The fourth level is esteem, including self-esteem, status, and the feeling of accomplishment. And the top level is self-actualization, basically a level that’s all about being the best people we can be, focused on a sense of morality, personal development, and creativity.

I believe that when it comes to innovation, any goal can fall under one of four main categories:

Aspirational Innovation. Human aspirations are a key driving factor, and pretty much every innovation throughout history originally resulted from an individual or a group of individuals pursuing their ambitions. When it comes to the business environment, ambition, curiosity, and legacy play a major role in many leaders’ plans, decisions, and strategy.

Innovation for Survival. Survival is the market position you need to retain to remain in business. If your competitors are on top of innovation and you aren’t, it’s likely that you’ll see a negative change in your market share, or your entire market might just go away. As a goal, “just surviving” may not sound all that exciting, but if you remember Maslow’s pyramid, basic survival is essential to prosperity and growth.

Innovation for efficiency. Operational efficiency relies on optimizing the processes and costs in an effort to increase the speed of production or time to market. This goal, and any of its related strategies, has been popularized through lean methods, some to great fanfare.

Innovation for growth. Growth requires the greatest attention to the future. Here, your company shapes or creates new markets and increases its footprint and revenues. Ideally, innovation will ideally always lead to growth over time.

These innovation goals do not always come in a particular order and will vary based on current market conditions, as well as maturity of your organization. If you’re a sole proprietor launching a new project, you may have different goals than a well-established corporation whose business model is quickly becoming obsolete. Then again, there are times when even their goals will overlap.  Just like in the pyramid, as one set of needs are met, others arise, and they always will. Whether you’re focusing on one or all four, these goals will develop into an actionable innovation strategy.

Many might disagree, and my experience shows that a constant state of creativity does not move a company forward and could be counter-productive to getting results. To survive and grow, organizations need to develop actionable goals and strategy, mapped out in practical terms, that align horizontally and vertically, while identifying where innovation is necessary and efforts should be invested.

Remember, developing a clear innovation strategy is just the first step—you still have to execute on it, and you will surely pivot with time. Taking accountability and communicating to spread clear and measurable goals is where it all begins.

Alex Goryachev, author of FEARLESS INNOVATION: Going Beyond The Buzzword To Continuously Drive Growth, Improve The Bottom Line, And Enact Change, is the former managing director of Cisco’s global Co-Innovation Center, where he spearheaded programs and initiatives to accelerate innovation. Goryachev is a Silicon Valley veteran who is a sought-after speaker on innovation and is often referred to as the ‘innovation therapist’.

For more information please visit www.alexgoryachev.com

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Jim Everhart explains why every marketing program needs strategic messaging.

Today’s post is by Jim Everhart, author of BRAND VISION: The Clear Line Of Sight Aligning Business Strategy and Marketing Tactics (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

If you and your company are involved at all in marketing (and who isn’t?), you’re constantly being bombarded by sales reps, each claiming their marketing tactics or services are the silver bullets that will put you over the edge, into viral heaven.

Everything from search ads to email to analytics programs to social media influencers are being promoted as the next big thing.

In all fairness, many of these tactics play important roles in effective marketing campaigns. They wouldn’t exist if they didn’t.

The problem is with the tactics-first approach they seem to be advocating. Let me explain.

Too many companies begin marketing campaigns these days by diving right into tactical execution. Like choosing between Facebook and Twitter. Search marketing or email. They’re casting the TV spot, worried about the media buy. Arguing over product placement. Unleashing PR people, web developers, search marketing experts, email specialists and front-end designers on the world to do their own thing.

They churn out tons of material. Take up gigabits of storage space. Burn through a lot of cash.

But those tactics-first approaches almost always fail.

Oh sure, maybe they get some likes. Or some heart emojis. But sales and leads? Not so much.

So while Marshall McLuhan proclaimed decades ago that the medium is the message, I’m guessing he didn’t mean that the medium should create the message.

And maybe what he meant was that you should choose the medium based on the message you want to deliver.

Not the other way around. The way all too many marketers do – picking a medium and letting that choice dictate your message. Or worse yet, hoping your media choices ferret out the message lurking somewhere in all that stuff you’re generating.

I’m a writer. A content guy. Always have been, always will be. And I think that before you select a social media platform or hire a celebrity influencer to make your pitch, you need to know what you’re going to say.

I have a writer’s solution to the problems marketing faces today – the creation of strategic messaging. A single-source, definitive document that defines the messaging around your offer (whether it’s a product introduction, a market initiative or a brand awareness effort) and presents all the relevant information your creative teams need to understand, present and deliver that message.

Here are the elements of that document:

The strategic landscape – how this project came about and the technology issues, the competitive landscape and the market dynamics.

A list of goals, as specific as possible, laying out what you’d like to accomplish.

A clear definition of the product, initiative or offer and the customer value proposition that differentiates it from the competition.

An integration statement showing how the project fulfills or validates the corporate strategy.

A customer profile (or preferably, a full persona) identifying the prospect and their motivations or hot buttons.

The strategic vision for the campaign: the one-sentence summary that aligns the product with the corporate strategy, connects it to the audience hot buttons and differentiates it from the competition.

The reasons to believe the Strategic Vision and the proof points that support them.

A map of the marketing campaign listing the proposed tactics (like emails, ads, posts and web pages) and showing how they work together to advance the sale.

An accountability plan, not only making it easy to optimize the program, but also measuring your success in achieving the objectives.

That’s not your typical product manager’s brief. Or even a creative director’s instructions to the creative team. But rather a hard-as-nails, comprehensive account that gives the creative team their marching orders.

Above all, it elevates clarity. A clear statement of the product’s advantages, shorn of corporate vanity, marketing voodoo and campy creativity. And lays out the proposed path to success.

It connects corporate strategy to the marketing process by making the brand, service or product the incarnation of the corporate positioning and keeping it top-of-mind as marketing tactics are developed and implemented.

It connects to the audience by highlighting the prospect’s pain points and making them the focus of the key messaging elements, specifically requiring strategists to call them out when they’re defining messaging reasons-to-believe and proof points.

It makes campaign integration possible, issuing a single set of instructions to the array of PR, advertising, social media, email and web teams you have generating the content in different silos. By different people. Working in different buildings. Perhaps for different companies. Maybe on different continents. Soon, on different planets.

It makes the best use of your subject matter expert’s time. You’re capturing all the information at once and working with them to make sure it’s accurate. Before it’s given to the different content teams to disseminate. So they only have to give the final materials a cursory look-through as the campaign is finalized and the paid ads, Tweets, e-mails and videos roll out.

It facilitates accountability and ROI measurement, both of which are not possible without the discipline of campaigns. Sure, you can measure impressions, likes, emojis, clicks and click-through rates. But to what end? Want to show any of that data to your CEO? Not hardly.

By organizing marketing efforts around strategic messaging. we marry strategy and concepts, messaging and campaigns. And we set the stage for program measurement, optimization, accountability, ROI reporting and even predictive analytics.

That’s the goal of strategic messaging. Nothing short of rescuing marketing from the snake-oil salespeople and the tacticians. And giving today’s businesses the marketing they need and deserve.

Jim Everhart, author of BRAND VISION: The Clear Line Of Sight Aligning Business Strategy and Marketing Tactics is a freelance strategist and writer, working with corporations and agencies to develop marketing communications tactics and campaigns. He spent more than four decades in the marketing industry, most of it at Godfrey Advertising, one of the largest business-to-business marketing agencies in the United States.

For more information, please visit www.brandvisionbook.com

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