As a pioneer in spotting opportunity and continuous innovation, innovation keynote speaker Jeremy Gutsche was recently featured on Direct Marketing in an interview about how to stay on top of the cutting edge in the realms of marketing and business.
One of the key factors that impedes innovation is complacency and being too afraid to go outside your past successes to uncover the next big breakthrough. In the interview, Gutsche shares several tips on how businesses can leverage his six patterns of opportunity to set themselves up to have a standout year for 2015. For example, innovating alongside a competitor by taking a pre-existing product and tweaking it is one way to use the pattern of divergence to uncover new opportunity.
Visit Jeremy's innovation keynote video page to see clips of his new Better and Faster presentation.
6 Keys to Innovation and Opportunity
Direct Marketing News
Low barriers to entry have flooded many markets with me-too brands, products, promotions, and messaging. This makes it exceptionally difficult for marketers to stand out from a sea of competitive sameness, as well as to reach their inundated customers. However, today's relative ease of access to technology works in marketers' favor.
Here, Jeremy Gutsche, founder and CEO of Trendhunter.com, and author of Better and Faster: The Proven Path to Unstoppable Ideas, details the six patterns of opportunity in today's business world, and why marketers must approach business differently in 2015.
Why do you think marketing, and business in general, is so different these days?
We're experiencing history's highest rate of change, but we aren't really wired for it. People and corporations are wired to repeat and optimize and farm whatever contributed to last year's harvest. Because of this, you consistently see examples of bright people and businesses missing out on ideas that were so close to their grasp. We saw this with Kodak and the digital camera. We saw this with Blockbuster, which pioneered a lot of online video, and had three opportunities to buy Netflix for $50 million, but didn't. Smith Corona invented grammar and spell checkers, and the laptop word processor. They got into computing, and retreated out. All of these brands didn't just miss spotting a trend, they invented entire markets, but then they retreated back to what they were already doing. They went back to farming their existing market.
Read the full interview on DMNews.com HERE.
Direct Marketing News: Jeremy Gutsche Shares His Six Patterns of Opportunity For Success
Direct Marketing News
Trend Themes
1. Low Barriers to Entry - Opportunity to create me-too brands, products, promotions, and messaging because of the ease of entry in some markets.
2. Divergence Innovation - Opportunity to innovate alongside a competitor or take a pre-existing product and tweak it to uncover new opportunity.
3. Rate of Change - Opportunity to leverage speedy advancements to bring an idea to life or even inventing a new market.
Industry Implications
1. Marketing - Disruptive innovation opportunities include leveraging technology to differentiate marketing campaigns from competitors.
2. Business Consulting - Disruptive innovation opportunities in business consulting include helping companies approach change differently and identify new opportunities.
3. Technology - Disruptive innovation opportunities include creating new technologies to facilitate and take advantage of the highest rate of change in history.