How to market innovation

Claes Loberg, creative director at Cocojambo explains to market a new product or service you need to understand the buyer's motivation

INNOVATION can be either inventing something new or bettering something that presently exists, but the one thing that is consistent in both scenarios is the approach needed when marketing it. You have to communicate the points that are motivationally relevant to the target audience - not just the points relevant to the innovator.

When marketing innovation, we usually don't have the luxury of comparison, so it's not about presenting why we're better than the competing products, it's about explaining something brand new - and often this means innovators and inventors get lost in the detail of the features.

Imagine, for example, developing a new process at the office that allows you to get the job done 50 per cent faster. To pitch this to the boss in order to get your process implemented, you have to appeal to your bosses' motivations rather than your own. Your time and process may not be of relevance to the boss, but the money your process will earn or save may be.

The same is true when marketing any new invention or innovation. Forget the features or aspects that you think are cool, and find the true motivations for a person to need it or want it.

Take an innovative investment fund: to market it you need to consider that a person's motivation may not be 'how do I get an investment underway'; their true motivation may more likely be 'I've got $100,000 more money this year, how do I move it so I'm not losing it all to taxes".

Inventors and innovators can easily slip into the trap of having very long marketing messages which over-explain the brilliance of their idea or product. The person buying the product or service usually has no interest in the actual thing, but more in what it will do for them.

Therefore we need to find the reason someone will use the innovation, understand how they will use it, and then we also need to understand the person's own language subsets, interests and comprehension levels so that we can create a message in the context of an answer that they get and want - not an explanation about all of its features or benefits in terminology that works for the innovator.

This is easily achieved with the creation of a detailed customer profile - to ensure that every time you think about selling the product you look not at the product for inspiration - but at the customer.