Always in Beta

“Do and learn,” advises Marc Pritchard, global marketing and brand building officer of Procter & Gamble, in a recent speech. “We have to try new things, be accepting that some things won’t work and learn why.”
 

This is far from the risk-averse P&G that I knew. They used to talk endlessly, and only reluctantly made decisions to act. Pritchard recognised this in his address: “We are trying to make this shift ourselves at P&G,” he said, “and it’s not always easy.”

But the validity and power of this approach is amply confirmed by the experience of many of the most successful businesses in Silicon Valley – Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Disney and others.

In an article in the current issue of Market Leader magazine, Marc Nohr reports that it’s a constant refrain in their corridors – “test, test, test”, “launch and learn”, “always in beta”.

Market research is nearly always a poor substitute for real life experience – especially in the case of breakthrough innovation.

It’s something that those big old corporations need to learn. And soon if they are to survive.

Desires we never knew we had

A funny thing happened to Dr Geoffrey Miller. He’s a leading American evolutionary psychologist.

At a conference that brought together economists and psychologists in London in 1999, he noticed for the first time a group of people who looked different from all the academics there.

They were marketers. And they were interested in psychology because they wanted to know more about people’s preferences and how these worked.

Talking with marketers, Dr Miller noticed: “A new world opened up.” He recorded the experience in his book Spent: Sex, Evolution and the Secrets of Consumerism, where he observed that marketers and marketing-oriented companies “help us discover desires we never knew we had, and ways of fulfilling them we never imagined.”

I don’t believe that traditional market research, nearly all borrowed from psychology, did any such thing. In my experience, that sort of enquiry, both qualitative and quantitative, was conducted in the present, holding firmly on to a rear view mirror. And this kind of research still holds sway in many of the more conservative organisations.

But over the past fifteen years or so, a sea-change has occurred whereby newly-developed “insight” processes (based on face-to-face interaction and walking together imaginatively into the future) have gradually replaced that rear-view mirror.

Of course, this work leads marketers to new and more interesting places – but it’s hard to replicate. So it can leave risk-averse managements very fearful of failure.

Trying things out is at the very heart of Darwinian evolution! The point for us is to manage the risks involved.

The future is a foreign country

The re-positioning of many traditional market research departments as “insight” providers has made a lesser contribution to successful innovation than might have been expected.

There are a number of reasons for this, perhaps the main one being that supposed “insights” often result from looking into what is in effect a rear-view-mirror.

What is needed, of course, is a way of walking into the future (together with customers, consumers, suppliers, experts etc) and gaining insights from that perspective. I think this is better described as “foresight”. And it’s not a good fit with people who have a strongly rational and logical cast of mind.

After all, nobody knows exactly what the future will hold. What we do know is that it will be different from the past. So walking into it is fundamentally an imaginative exercise – a new perspective from which fresh innovations can be created. And to do it well, it needs radically different methods.

To adapt LP Hartley’s famous opening sentence in his novel, The Go-Between: “The future is a foreign country: they will do things differently there.”

Why are senior managers the enemies of innovation?

Many years ago the founder of Synectics in Europe, Vincent Nolan, wrote an article entitled “Why is marketing the enemy of innovation?” It’s an apparently paradoxical but still very relevant question.

Building on Arun Prabhu’s comment on the “If at first the idea is not absurd…” post (October 28), I’d like to widen it to senior managers more generally. As Arun says, “In my experience, senior leaders who shout loudest about the need for breakthrough innovation are often the biggest barriers.”

There is the centre of the paradox. On the one hand, senior managers push hard for significant innovations, at the same time frequently putting the boot in when interesting, sometimes shocking, possibly breakthrough ideas are floated.

What’s more, the more a breakthrough the new concept seems, the less likely conventional market research is going to give a good reading on its performance in the marketplace.

Of course, there’s no evidence that seniority goes with judgement when it comes to new ideas – especially ones that break the mould in some way or other. In fact, there may well be an inverse correlation. They are exactly the folks who know lots about what has not worked in the past.

What’s needed? Often it’s for senior managers to invest in personally developing new skills in open-mindedness. Some chance?

So if that’s not going to happen, innovators need to develop new processes for getting senior managers into the boat.

What is your experience of all this?