Brand Innovation

Not that long ago, it would have seemed strange for companies to send their employees into consumers’ homes to observe how they used products and tackled challenges.  Now, corporate anthropologists and ethnographers – researchers trained to observe people and cultures – are fairly common, especially among consumer goods companies. The same companies that once led the way in popularizing ethnographic research – customer-centric leaders such as P&G, Intel, Ford, and General Motors – are now bringing corporate futurists into the mainstream. Futurists are individuals whose job is to observe and predict. They research trends, talk to people with different backgrounds and study how things are changing. They look well beyond their own industries to understand how economic, social and technological forces will shape consumer demand and impact their businesses.

All companies and entrepreneurs aspire to be innovative and responsive to customer needs. But how do you balance the seemingly endless customer wish list with the very real effects that those “extras” have on your bottom line?

In 1997, Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen published his first seminal work, The Innovator’s Dilemma, which laid out a concept he termed “Disruptive Innovation.” It took a few years for the book to catch on, but eventually its tightly-reasoned, well-evidenced and counter-intuitive approach found deep resonance with innovators worldwide.

We are all innovators now.

Covid-19 demanded new behaviors if companies were to survive. Speed, ongoing adaptation, and multi-dimensional innovation became necessities overnight. And it worked! Amid all its hardships, 2020 witnessed perhaps the fastest pace of innovation the world has ever seen – from new business models to new forms of customer interaction, and a great deal more.

What’s changed? Here are five key principles from the pandemic that you can embrace to sustain and keep building up your innovation strengths:

All over the world, people go about their days getting things done. Much of what they do is aimed at satisfying a collection of short and long-term objectives that they see as being related to their well-being. The many decisions that they make throughout the day—which toothpaste to use, whether to drink coffee or tea, what product to buy for their company—are all part of satisfying these objectives, as each person defines them.