Marketing innovation masterclass is an annual GDM platform where the company connects with stakeholders in the marketing and innovation industry for knowledge sharing purpose.
Innovate or die’ is a phrase often used to describe the approach brands must take to stay ahead in an ultra-competitive market characterized by rapidly changing consumer demand.
Antonio Lucio, the former Global Chief Marketing Officer of HP but now with Facebook in similar capacity captures the importance of innovation in marketing when he said that innovation is not one more thing that marketing professionals need to do, but the way they need to think and behave. This relates to what the famous Peter Drucker said: “because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two – and only two – basic functions; marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. This is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”
This is enough reason to take a deeper look at the purpose and role of marketing from an innovation perspective. Marketing includes tasks to increase sales. The focus is on customer and market orientation; all products, services and processes are to be aligned with the needs of customers and users. Basically, its influence is key to ensuring new offerings fit with a strategy determined by customers’ needs, so companies are not stuck trying to sell something for which there is no demand. But brands have to balance being insight-driven with being able to launch products that no one would ever think to suggest.
Here is where innovation plays a pivotal role. Innovation is about establishing desirability, feasibility and viability. Do customers want it? Can we make it? Can we make money from it? Innovation is as much about insights as ideas. The insights come from knowledge of consumers, users and customers, and provide opportunities to meet recognized needs, as well as to identify potentially unrealized ones.
To help brands and organizations in the highly competitive Nigerian market effectively proffer answers to the posed vital marketing questions and to help its many clients solve marketing problems from an innovation angle, Generating Demand Management (GDM) Group, one of Nigeria’s foremost 360 marketing consulting firms has evolved into Nigeria’s premier marketing innovation outfit.
Having provided marketing solution services for over 150 brands in the 40 of the biggest companies in Nigeria, including multinationals across FMCG, Financial Services, Telecoms, Technology, etc, GDM Group is embarking on a journey to help brands under its portfolio evolve with the dynamics of today’s marketplace – innovation.
Three products were unveiled at the firm’s Client Appreciation Dinner event which held at the prestigious Radisson Blu Hotel in Ikeja, Lagos, recently. The event had in attendance some clients from the over 40 multinational companies and 182 brands the innovation marketing Group has worked for including Nestle, Unilever, Nigerian Breweries, Suntory, Lafarge, Friesland WAMPCO Campina, Diageo, the Lagos State Government, BOI, Mouka among others.
Daniel Obi, BusinessDay.