The world we live in today is not the world we lived in pre-pandemic. Brands are now challenged to meet an entirely new set of customer needs and expectations. A digital-first generation – consumers expect and prefer frictionless, impactful interactions with brand content online.
For brands with e-commerce websites and apps, it is extremely important their web content, social content, ad content, and ad campaigns deliver a consistently seamless experience across all platforms.
This could mean a number of things – a slick welcome from an AI-powered text reader or an Augmented Reality filter that delivers the awe of innovation with clean design and clever participation touch points. Designed to be indicative of their purchase intent, these highly personalized customer experiences, when offered to millions of individual customers, are difficult for competitors to imitate. A crucial aspect of innovation strategy.
Aimed at achieving future organizational growth, innovation strategy involves determining how innovation will create new value for potential customers, how the brand will capture said value, and which types of innovation should be used to build a competitive advantage. Choosing what kind of value your innovation will create and then sticking to your choice is critical, as the capabilities required for each type of innovation are different and can take time to accumulate.
“As an outcomes-oriented Strategist, we work with performance-focused marketers to drive business outcomes largely through innovation strategy.”
A key step in the development of a robust innovation strategy is aligning any aspect of innovation to the overall business strategy. There are four main types of innovation, none more important than the other: Incremental, Disruptive, Radical, and Architectural. We encourage you to research, rank, and prioritize for implementation the type(s) that align(s) best with your business achievement.
A great example of radical innovation is Augmented Reality. To quote my article Augmented Reality, The Only ‘AR’ America Truly Needs, ‘For brands seeking an innovative way for consumers to interact with their products across platforms and devices, AR should be top of mind. Used to augment a person’s real-world environment with sound, visual elements, or other sensory stimuli by using the camera on a smartphone, augmented reality, or ‘AR’, serves as an exciting and practical component of a future-focused interactive content strategy.’ Radical innovation in action.
Here’s the problem: Brands have a tendency to procrastinate pivoting their business strategy towards innovation as ‘innovation’ is often presumed to require a vast amount of resources related to time and cost. Innovation is practical and therefore doesn’t require huge investments before seeing a significant return. Please read that sentence again.
When choosing a team to design, implement and execute your innovation strategy choose a firm where decisions around innovation strategy are collaborative, carefully planned, and driven to improve business outcomes. How? We start all projects with data. Why? Data is how you connect and scale. Simple. To help our clients leverage all aspects of data, we dynamically redesign processes related to customer acquisition. Progressive and future-focused, we are genuinely excited to make new things better.
Big, new ideas don’t just happen overnight though. In fact, all too often, innovation is broached as a reaction to underperformance (decrease in sales, revenue, CLV, and customer engagement). Brands that are proactive in their approach to innovation should survive. Proactively innovating for consumer purchase behavior, preferences and intent are far more sustainable and advantageous. The brands focused on dynamically innovating to improve outcomes with e-commerce optimization and the implementation of data-rich platform integrations are more than future-proofing their customer acquisition strategy, they’re ascending from ‘future-focused’ to ‘future-ready’ – setting trends which lead, not some of the time, but most, if not ALL of the time.
“If your organization falls in the reactionary category of innovation, get your ish together. In a time when it seems like a dozen brands die a day, be not only intentional about innovation but radical in your approach.”
Being intentionally radical about innovation means choosing a team unapologetic about the disruption it takes to drive meaningful impact. As we approach 2022’s high-stakes holiday retail season, it isn’t too late to future-proof your client or brand’s digital innovation strategy this year.
Here to help. In a world full of digital disruption and rapidly evolving processes for customer acquisition, we offer boost capacity on a project basis allowing for faster innovation, ad campaign solvency, and brand survivability. Schedule a virtual coffee and strategy call with me today.
I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the lands on which I work and extend my deep respects.
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Askia Underwood is the first-ever U.S. Business Director of the award-winning, global digital product development studio Miroma Project Factory (MPF). Askia brings more than 16 years of experience in strategic omnichannel campaign planning, development, and execution to MPF. Her expertise in digital strategy and content monetization lends to campaigns designed to motivate consumers to take action online.
A Certified Metaverse Expert and cultural illuminator, Askia’s focus includes innovating at the intersection of where shoppers connect, consider, and purchase online, and the development of advanced format immersive, experiential, and impactful digital content, products, and brand experiences.
Her past work includes migrating more than twenty-five million dollars from traditional advertising mediums to higher-performing digital, social, and search platforms working with clients in the consumer, automotive, retail, sports, pet product, beauty, and non-profit categories. Priding herself on actively driving consumer behavior, Askia is often tapped to curate experiential brand moments that motivate consumers to act (watch, share, buy or donate) online.
