Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Building Breakthroughs

Chapter 11

Brand

How You Represent Your Offerings and Business

Brand innovations help to ensure that customers and users recognize, remember, and prefer your offerings to those of competitors or substitutes. Great ones distill a “promise” that attracts buyers and conveys a distinct identity. They are typically the result of carefully crafted strategies that are implemented across many touchpoints between your company and your customers, including communications, advertising, service interactions, channel environments, and employee and business partner conduct. Brand innovations can transform commodities into prized products, and confer meaning, intent, and value to your offerings and your enterprise.

Brand innovations include extensions that offer a new product or service under the umbrella of an existing brand. Alternatively, they might make a company stand for a big idea or a set of values, expressing those beliefs transparently and consistently. In business-to-business contexts, Brand innovations aren’t limited to the final manufacturer or the consumer-facing producer of a product; branding your components and making customers aware of their value can build both preference and bargaining power.

Brand innovation is not simply a successful campaign or marketing strategy, and it’s more complex than simply creating a new brand. It requires designing and expressing brand in ways that are both distinct from the competition and relevant to customers.

How to spot potential Brand innovations: ...