Innovation and R&D
Intellectual Property and Innovation
You could be missing out on a hidden opportunity to use R&D and Innovation to grow sustainable revenue and points of difference vs your competitors. The opportunity is hidden within in your Marketing budgets.
These budgets can be massive. Businesses spend hundreds of billions of dollars globally on Digital Marketing. Most competing businesses are spending similarly and using similar strategies and tactics, which is great for the digital advertising industry.
Brands like Google, Facebook, and TikTok want to keep users on their channels and clicking on revenue-generating paid ads rather than surfacing new brands organically. That means big brands with bigger budgets are the ones succeeding in converting customers.
This also introduces the downside to excessive focus on acquisition as the costs are going up. The research sample below done through 2019 shows cost per acquisition (CAC) rising up to a rate of 60% over five years!
During the recent pandemic, when online demand for goods first surged, ecommerce giants like Amazon and supermarkets ramped up their tactics, investing massively in paid search and delivery fulfillment. With Amazon getting 70% of initial product searches, this makes the game designed for the big spenders.
If your business follows this acquisition-centric path, and does not have the biggest of budgets to play this game, it is a recipe for disaster.
THE OPPORTUNITY – RETENTION TACTICS AND INNOVATION
With industry bodies clamping down on 3rd party data (Google, Facebook and Apple) , 1st party data is an opportunity going forward that serves as a backbone for retention and personalisation programs.
1st party data is THE opportunity because the business owns it, not Google or Facebook. This is an opportunity to something slightly unique and marginally better than our competitor.
With a fixed investment and commitment to data, people and processes, a business can use innovation to create marketing programs that pay back repeatedly into the future. This is something you cannot get with acquisition only.
Our Innovation and R&D process to unlock the opportunity
MyCMO provides a blend of strategy and marketing program audits to unlock Innovationa nd R&D opportunity for your business. We do this by developing a baseline and context for innovations that directly impact marketing effectiveness.
A benchmark for Innovation can be defined as new or different ways of delivering value to a customer that bring efficiency, engagement or commercially impactful points of difference vs. what a competitor is doing.
There are four opportunity areas for marketing or business innovation we focus on that include:
- Product Innovation (Performance, service, customisation, localised, design and usability)
- Resource Innovation (R&D, data analysis, business processes, partnerships)
- Customer Innovation (New markets, new channels, customer service, Loyalty Programs)
- Revenue Innovation (One off vs. pay per use, bundle vs unbundle, freemium, advertising, subscriptions, multi-sided platforms)
These opportunity areas align directly with a business model (see above) and can have benchmarks applied to them with simple questions.
Any new innovation project should be able to answer these questions positively:
- Is it FEASIBLE?
- Is it ATTRACTIVE to the customer?
- Is it COMMERCIALLY VIABLE for the business?
Innovation is exciting and can be financially rewarding but there are no free lunches in a hyper competitive environment. Businesses must take risks in order to discover new capabilities that make a commercial difference.
MyCMO mitigates risk and maximises success in R&D projects by using the techniques described above. This assures a proper strategy is in place that validates the concept and value of a project to both the business and consumer before the work is started.
Financial assistance Innovation and R&D
Your business could be leaving thousands of dollars or more on the table by not taking advantage of the many government programs offered in Australia to support R&D and innovation.
This is extremely helpful for the sustainability of business investment into innovation projects that may not be afforded otherwise.
Government support includes grants, tax rebates and other subsidies based on the type of project or industry sector your business is in. Some of these are quite generous.
Some of the more useful programs include:
- R&D Tax Rebate incentive
- Export Grants
- Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Grants
Invest for Success
MyCMO works with your business to use innovation and R&D as building block for success by balancing cost, spend and reward with the right strategy for supercharging your marketing and innovation investments.