POINT OF VIEW: Where Have All the Innovators Gone?

By Rod Ford, President and CEO

The recent passing of Steve Jobs prompted me to reflect on innovation. I think of Steve Jobs as the Thomas Edison of our time. The light bulb changed the way we live and so did the innovations that Apple produced. Specifically, I began to reflect on new ideas and innovations that have benefited our specialty catalog market. I was able to identify a few innovations that have provided measurable benefit in our industry, such as:

• Co-op Databases
• Add-a-Name & Drop-a-Name
• Co-mailing
• Variable Print

The more I thought about it, the more depressed I became that I couldn’t think of more innovations or I couldn’t think of any recent innovations that have truly made a dent in our market space.

• What was the last truly innovative idea brought forth and adopted by our community?
• Why do we still primarily utilize RFM + P + C for scoring?
• Why are the large majority of customer marketing databases not truly integrated with web analytics or truly integrated with email deployment? Why aren’t we truly triggering emails based upon real-time customer behaviors?
• Why haven’t we adopted contact stream optimization as a defacto standard?
• Why do we have to pass files back and forth across disparate systems just to execute a multichannel marketing program?
• Why does our industry primarily rely upon counts presented through spreadsheets for customer insights?

On a long flight recently, I read Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come from: The Natural History of Innovation. There were several years of good times for merchant mailers, up until the cost of promotions began to escalate. In the book the author elaborates that “It's not that good times are bad for innovation, necessarily”. “Easy money just tends to generate more followers than leaders”, says Johnson. He uses a metaphor from biology: nature has evolved several tiny critters that reproduce asexually when food is plentiful. "Just make a copy of ourselves, because this is working," Johnson said. “When resources are scarce, though, suddenly there are males that mate with females to produce a more diverse next generation.”

Something like that happens in business when resources become scarce. Instead of companies trying to simply duplicate existing success, they're more willing to mix up the old formulas. "There is more of a drive for experimentation in the lean times and more of a copycat model in the fast times," Johnson says.

If this is true, I am wondering where are all the innovators in our industry? Whether good times or bad, my observation is that our industry has just made a copy of itself. It is time for innovators in the service community to step up and deliver true innovation that pushes us to the next level of marketing effectiveness. Never before has there been a better time for the vendor community to push through its short term thinking and deliver upon the Howard Shultz mantra, “expect more than others think possible”.

It’s an exciting time to be an innovator and a dangerous time to be a copycat.

Be on the lookout for some really breakthrough ideation being piloted in our labs as I type.