All of us walk through the world with our own mental filters... our filters determine what we pay attention to and what we block out... when I walk down the streets of New York with a certain friend of mine from college, I notice all the dogs that trot past us... he notices the different architectural styles that imbue the many buildings ... for him the dogs are invisible... for me, the buildings.
However, there exists a quiet world which we both share. One all of us have in common, yet often pay little attention to... our inner voices. Those little whispers. So faint that they often go undetected. So what does this have to do with innovation? Everything.
Marketers must learn to hear their own whispers
For consumer-based marketers especially, it's essential to develop a refined ear. One that can tune into our own little day-to-day whispers -- particularly those whispers that relate to the products, services and consumer needs that underpin our businesses. It's through listening to these whispers that deep insights & innovation come bubbling up to the surface.
We all know that consumers do a notoriously poor job of communicating their unmet needs. Much of this is because most people have not developed the capabilities for tapping into their inner voices. And despite the many tools & sophisticated approaches, marketing research continues to have difficulty drawing out those unmet needs. This is why the onus falls on marketers to cultivate their own consumer inner voices.
Whether you're maniacally thumbing through a magazine in an unsuccessful search for the front-page article, or trying to figure out how to place an order at the funky new sandwich shop on your block, learning to "listen" to your day-to-day thoughts & feelings can provide tremendous opportunities for innovation. As I mentioned above, this is particularly relevant & powerful if you are also a consumer of the very products or services that your company sells.
Innovating around your inner consumer voice in the shower
Let's take a brief example of innovating around one's inner voice... there I am a few weeks ago taking my nightly shower before I go to bed. As I look down at the soap dish I notice that the soap is completely worn out - a thin slab of what was once a thick, meaty bar of glycerin. This situation is one that I have probably experienced hundreds of times in my life and yet not until a few weeks ago did I come to register the discomfort it creates. The soap was too small to be effective for washing yet it still has some useful life left. What I typically do is grab a new bar of soap and leave the old bar to slowly decompose in the soap dish, creating a soupy, soapy water concoction in the dish. For whatever reason, I cannot bring myself to simply throw away these tiny bars of just-about-unusable soaps.
It was only then, when I had acknowledged my discomfort, that I was able to think up ways to innovate around this discomfort which had remained dormant to myself for so long. Standing there in the shower I came up with a few decent concepts. One such concept was a contraption for tossing unusuable soaps into, which after getting filled-up with soaps, would act like a molding vice, mushing the soaps together, and producing a brand new bar of soap. Viola! While perhaps not a patent-worthy concept, that is besides the point.
The opportunity for innovation in the above example stemmed directly from becoming mindful of a mundane, everyday experience that generated displeasure for me, albeit not one of the 'life or death' variety. However, in today's modern world, with most of our basic needs already met, much of the opportunities for innovation lie within this 'valley of the subtle'; hence the need for marketers to refine their inner consumer voices. It is one of the key capabilities for marketers to develop in order to better identify opportunity areas for effective innovation.
Some of my favorite books on innovation
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