The Importance of Combining Innovation and Marketing

In the business world, you’ll hear a lot about innovation and marketing, but not necessarily together. But why? These are two fundamental elements to business success, so we need to start considering the importance of combining innovation and marketing.

Innovation means creating new value and satisfaction for your audience. When it comes to business, innovation should be market-focused; filling the gap where unfulfilled consumer needs are turned around with new products or services that your audience wants, needs, values and even expects your brand to deliver. However, just because you’ve delivered a product or service they’ve been missing, they have to be willing to pay for it – so it’s important to consider the whole consumer journey. This is where the relationship between marketing and innovation is paramount to business success.

What’s the difference between marketing and innovation?

Innovation, in short, is the process of taking an inventive idea and turning it into a product or service which creates value which customers will pay for. Marketing on the other hand is the process where a team communicates the features and benefits of their products or services to the consumer to persuade them to purchase. But, there’s much more to discover about how these two elements work together and what more they have to offer.

Why is market-focused innovation key for your business?

Creating a new product or service is one key element to business success. Offering something new means your customers aren’t faced with the same offering and avoids them becoming complacent with your brand. However, creating a product there’s no demand for is wasteful on resources and budget. Therefore, market-focused innovation is key; creating a new product offering your target audience want, need and value is what creates success within your business. 

Marketing isn’t just about selling the product to the end consumer. Marketing is also about pricing, developing strategies to remain competitive or even top of the market, advertising, marketing communications, innovation, and much more. Marketing is much more than delivering a message to your consumers, selling a product your business offers, or advertising to build brand and product awareness – it’s also all about finding out what it is your customers need to help drive the innovation side of your business. 

As for the innovation element of your business, it’s important that it’s customer driven. For ultimate business success, innovation should be driven by marketing’s effort of finding out your customers’ needs and wants, then putting that data into developing a product offering they will then buy. Therefore, it’s not possible to separate these two fundamental elements of your business if success is what you want to achieve.