We have looked at innovation a number of times, but in the cover story of this issue John Kearon takes a heretical approach – arguing that marketing science itself and the centralisation of marketing expertise in large organisations may be at the root of the lack of genuine new category innovation. The theme of the ponderous, risk-averse corporation which is excellent at nurturing what it has (and, indeed, is the reason it got big) but not so hot at creating genuinely new category brands is familiar territory. But Kearon's evidence is compelling. And challenging.
However, another light at the end of this particular tunnel may lie with the work being done with online communities and other forms of cocreation. Done bravely and imaginatively, this dispenses with the cliché of consumers not knowing what they want by going straight to the more creative thinker-users (often fanatics who, theoretically, could be just as inventive as any company research and development department or engineer).
This approach is radical in itself and has the potential to encourage large companies to behave like the more adventurous startups. But, as has been examined in several articles in previous issues of Market Leader, the problem never lies in having the idea – that's the easy bit.
Getting it through mazes and silos of the organisational hierarchy is the difficult bit. But the search for barriers to innovative thinking goes much wider than merely the size and structure of the organisation. Academic anthropology has in the past been the preserve of masochistic travellers in primitive cultures (accounts of these intrepid creatures living with natives make for fascinating, if hair-raising, reading). But modern anthropologists in search of meaning use the same techniques and the findings are the very stuff of branding.
Commonplace nowadays are ethnography – observing people in their natural habitat – and semiotic analysis which decodes visual communications. But for the real deal, the Canadian anthropologist Grant McCracken is the expert. He makes a case for a new type of Csuite executive – the Chief Culture Officer – and in his article, ‘The enemy within: Philistines in the contemporary corporation', nails business schools, economists, code crackers and the corporation itself as the key barriers to cultural learning being central to brand marketing.
The observant among you will note, and I hope approve of, our new design. The brief was for a Botox tweak rather than the full facelift. We're delighted: it feels fresher and crisper and altogether more stylish. See what you think.