Innovation really changes our lives. The teacher thinks that innovations helps firms develop
further being competitive and things like that.
Peter Drucker (1909-2005)
‘’Any business enterprise has two, and only these two, basic
functions: marketing and innovation’’
Market orientation – Innovation
‘’Innovations facilitate the conversion of market-oriented business philosophy into superior
corporate performance’’.
In other words Innovation is one way of implementing market orientation
The question is: how does Market orientation translate in to actual performance? And
performance could be, you know: Sales or profit and so on. There need to be something in
between this very abstract notion of a Market orientation – how does that translate in the
end to performance?
One of the things that helping us to make that transformation is activities like: Innovation.
So, innovations can help companies to translate market orientation in to profit, sales and so
on.
You can show, by doing innovation what market orientation actually means, that you are
indeed market oriented. You can make money by doing these activities, like innovation in a
market oriented way.
Innovation turns out to be one of the most important activities in that respect. So, it is not
the only one (there are also other activities that you can employ), but innovation turns out
to be one of the important once. That is why we here focusing on innovation. But you also
see that it is driven by Market Orientation. So, that suggest that marketing has a big role to
play there.
, Competing on….
Differentiation
o On the product itself
o On additional services
o On brand/image
Price
Which strategy do you prefer?
You want to stand out, compared to your competitors. There are different ways in doing that
(see above). Any preferences here?
Product itself – most companies try to compete on innovation, on the product itself. If
this becomes difficult they add branding/image. And if that is not helping anymore then
price becomes important. Prices is the least interesting way of competing. Because, it’s
like everyone is loosing. Firms try to stay away from this situation.
Are A-brands in trouble?
‘’They should innovate more. There are too many me-too products’’.
In a lot of industries, products are becoming more and more similar and then they try to
compete on branding. In the long-term this is very difficult, because consumers are not stupid
and if the product is really basically the same it is very difficult to differentiate. Therefore,
you need to innovate to keep up the competitive edge that you would like to have over your
competitors.
So, that is a reason to focus on innovation.
Innovation for survival
Products introduces in the last 5 years
generate
Another one. If you look at: where is the
money coming from, in terms of product and
services. When they where developed and
introduced.
Then you see that a large part of the money in terms of Sales and profits is coming from
relatively recent products. So, that means that you will need to be consistently involved in
product development/ in innovation. If you don’t do that – you will loose a lot of money. A lot