Lecture notes
Innovation and Marketing Strategies ‘Cross the CHASM’
- Module
- Business And Management
- Institution
- The University Of Kent (UKC)
Detailed notes on Innovation and Marketing Strategies ‘Cross the CHASM’
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Week 5: Innovation and MarketingStrategies ‘Cross the CHASM’
SOSTAC Reference
Real Life Example of Innovation
Amazon.com started as an online bookstore and later diversified to sell DVDs, Blu-rays, CDs, video
downloads/streaming, MP3 downloads/streaming, audiobook downloads/streaming, software,
video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, toys, and jewellery.
The company also produces consumer electronics—notably, Kindle e-readers, Fire tablets, Fire TV,
and Echo—and is the world's largest provider of cloud infrastructure service.
In 2016, Amazon introduced the Amazon Go shopping technology (physical store people could go
into take what they like and leave without going through tills).
As of October 2017, the store has yet to open due to issues with the technology tracking over twenty
people at one time.
Consumers are also questioning whether this is a shopping mode that they really need.
Being Either is not Enough (why innovation is important)
Michael Porter (1985) proposed that for being competitive in the sector, a business should adopt
either cost leading (same quality but cheaper than competitors) or differentiation leading (different
compared to competitors) strategy [Porter's Generic Strategies].
, However, more and more market leaders found being either is not enough.
Innovation
Importance of Innovation
From a strategic perspective, innovation is based upon technological superiority, and posits /
suggests / theorizes that buyers will seek goods and services that provide the greatest interest along
with performance, features, quality, and value for money.
Innovation is an integral part of marketing strategy due to its ability to reduce costs AND
differentiate. The ‘and’ part of the sentence has provided one of the biggest challenges to Porter’s
cost-differentiation framework in that many markets, the ‘name of the game’ is both to reduce costs
AND to differentiate. Buyers have become increasingly demanding and no longer see a contradiction
between product innovation and development and falling price.
(Source: Douglas C. West, John Ford, Essam Ibrahim ‘Strategic Marketing: Creating Competitive
Advantage’)
What is Innovation?
• Something that is new-to-the-world / market.
• “A new idea, method, or device. The act of creating a new product or process, which
includes invention and the work required to bring an idea or concept to final form.” (Kahn,
2012)
o From a marketing perspective, ‘new’ is anything customers perceive as new and
different.
Types of Innovations
Innovations differ in their degree of newness, and this helps to determine how quickly the target
market will adopt them.
Marketers classify innovations into three categories based on their degree of novelty (i.e. newness /
freshness / originality): continuous innovations, dynamically continuous innovations and
discontinuous innovations. However, it is better to think of these types as ranges along a continuum
(i.e. scale / band) that goes from a very small change in an existing product to a totally new product.
You can then describe the three types of innovations in terms of the amount of disruption or change
they bring to people’s lives. For example, the first cars caused tremendous changes in the lives of
people who were used to getting to places under ‘horse power’. While a more recent innovation like
GPS systems that feed people driving directions by satellite are cool, in a relative sense people have
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