1.5 Learn from Successful Companies
While looking at what has worked in the past, we also need to keep a keen eye out for innovations in marketing. What’s Google up to? What’s Apple doing next, and are their opportunities coming from the M1 chip?
Make learning a daily task. Read, watch the news, or go experience a new product in a store. Ask your friends if they’ve tried anything new they could recommend. We must always keep an eye out for innovations that will change everything (the internet, streaming, smartphones, etc.). A lot of marketing success comes from just paying attention and assimilating knowledge that may become useful somewhere down the road.
What is Elon Musk working on? How is Tesla a top car brand yet they spend zero dollars advertising? What's new at Disney? At General Mills? At Coke? How will artificial intelligence (AI) be harnessed? We need to keep an eye on the innovators to see what possibilities are opening up to leverage as marketers.
Image 1 by The Royal Society, July 13, 2018, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons; image 2 by Austin Community College, August 25, 2017, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Only one thing is assured: everything changes. The world is not static. Stand still, and you’ll get run over. We have to keep moving, maintaining a healthy dissatisfaction with the status quo. We must always seek better avenues and methods for effectively improving our products and services. We need to keep an eye on how we position them in the marketplace to maximize sales.
In this book, I’ll share ideas on how to effectively combine the innovations of the digital revolution with the fundamental branding and marketing truths of the world’s best consumer product companies to build your product marketing/brand management acumen and effectiveness.