Blog: When innovation is nothing of the sort

By Alistair Houghton on Dec 8, 09 06:25 PM

Regular blogger Dougal Paver on the need for innovation

INNOVATION is one of the mainstays of marketing. Blokes in red-rimmed glasses team up with geeks in bottle-end specs to analyse product lifecycles, before consulting with the men in white coats to dream up something new and wizzy to extend its shelf-life.

So, where once it was the introduction of air conditioning and central locking, now it's bi-xenon headlights and ipod ports.
And, as best illustrated by the automotive industry, today's innovation rapidly gets copied and becomes tomorrow's core specification.
In the fiercely competitive capitalist system, therefore, innovation buys you precious little competitive advantage.

When you trumpet an innovation, of course, you take a huge risk because you flag it up to your competitors who can quickly put their men in white coats on to it to find a way of improving on whatever it is you've dreamt up. Still, there's not much point in innovating then not telling your customers.
Thing is, you'd better be darned sure that your innovation is just that. Don't, whatever you do, fall in to the trap of re-presenting something old and standard as new and whiz-bang. You'd look darned foolish if you did that, wouldn't you? After all, you'd be rumbled in double quick time.
Once you'd been caught at it you wouldn't then persist in peddling this innovation as just that, spending tens of millions of pounds of shareholders' funds in the process, would you? You'd be sacked, surely?
And so it is that I continue to marvel at how NatWest Bank spent, over a period of about four years until recently, tens of millions of pounds on TV advertising to tell me that I could ring my bank branch and ask them to serve me. Somehow, to them, that counted as innovation.
You know: use a 100 year old technology to speak with one of your service providers. Wow.
But then I remembered: these are the same people whose upper echelons so badly managed their business that it required you and I to bail it out to the tune of almost £70bn of our hard-earned money. So I suppose using the telephone probably did constitute a service innovation.
With marketing geniuses like that is it any wonder they were careering toward bankruptcy? Such a shame that we've had to pick up the tab.

Dougal Paver is managing director of Paver Smith in Liverpool