Can innovation prevent a looming recession?
Was having a conversation at the Ho household about the forecasts of a looming recession in the US. This NYT story was the most recent report on the declining economic situation that I’ve read lately.
My wife made the observation that it feels like a time of low innovation. Everywhere you look, it seems that the trend is to capitalize upon established innovations rather than creating new ones. Flat TV’s were a dramatic innovation, but today we’re not shopping for new kinds of televisions just bigger, sharper versions of the ones that have been out for years already. Hybrids changed the auto industry, but we’re now just being offered different flavours and varieties of the same innovation.
This is particularly true in our field – marketing. Every day there’s a new story about brand x moving more and more of their marketing dollars online – however, there’s very little noise about actually doing anything new there. My guess is that the bulk of this money will end up on search engines and portals or perhaps on Facebook trying to convince people to become friends with their brands.
There’s very little discussion about actually trying something new/different, and I have to believe this is related to the economic situation we find ourselves in today. Exciting new innovations inspire the imagination and money tends to follow. Could it be that we’re not spending because there doesn’t appear to be anything worth spending upon?
I remember having this same feeling towards the start of the last recession at the end of the boom in 2001. At the time I lived in the Bay Area and one of my favourite places to visit was Fry’s Electronics. If you haven’t been, these are essentially geek paradises. Themed electronics stores which stock every gadget known to man, along with the parts to build your own.
Usually I lusted after more things than I could afford but that day I walked around a store for about an hour one day and realised I didn’t want anything there. It was a depressing experience but it did highlight for me the lack of innovation in consumer electronics at that time. For a consumer electronics company, the solution was obvious – deliver an innovative new product (iPod anyone) that made people excited about buying again.
As providers of marketing solutions, we also have an ability to alter the future that appears to be barreling towards us. Inevitably, the shift of marketing dollars away from traditional media seems to me to be a staging point for tightening and shrinking budgets overall. Those in charge of marketing budgets will quickly tire of “online” as they’re now tiring of broadcast and print. To me the solution to this is creating innovative new ways, new places, new models for them to spend. Create excitement around the marketplace of marketing channels by innovating.