We’ve Always Done It This Way

Innovation is disruptive, creating new categories that move things forward.

However, new categories can often feel risky to the market. While it’s great to hear, “I’ve never seen anything like this before”, it can be a difficult road for your sales and marketing teams. That’s because even if the results of established offerings aren’t as good as yours, you’re forcing someone to leave the comfort of the “status quo”.

When companies challenge existing paradigms, it psychologically breaks familiarity that buyers have, creating a perception of risk.

So, how can you overcome the apprehension your buyers are feeling when considering your new product or service?

People like new and improved, show them how you’ll deliver better outcomes.

It’s difficult for your buyer to understand why you created your new product or service unless you show them. When companies launch successful new categories, they often directly compare their advancement against existing offerings.

When Apple launched the iPhone on January 9th, 2007 at MacWorld in San Francisco. During the keynote, Steve Jobs famously said "Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone". He compared the iPhone with the Moto Q, Blackberry, Palm Treo and Nokia E62. Apple was the first device to abandon the use of a stylus, and physical keyboard, and popularized the use of a touchscreen.¹

Once this new touchscreen category was launched, inevitably others came to build on this, pushing innovation further, which is good for buyers.

When marketing a new product or service, some of the most famous inventors over the past century, Henry Ford, Alexander Graham Bell, and Thomas Edison, not only had the ability to recognize a need and create something better, they loudly demonstrated the advantages of their new invention with public exhibitions creating excitement around the new category.

Your mission is to get to a place of strength and establish your category.

A challenge for innovators is falling into the trap of leveraging the same go-to-market strategies as the companies established within the same space. Since you’re disrupting existing systems, you’re at a disadvantage, you need a different approach.

Your competitors mission will be to diminish your advancements, saying they’re irrelevant, unhelpful, or your company is risky doing business with, spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD). This is often done subtly by competitors, as not to appear to be purposefully disparaging.

This is why a different go-to-market strategy is required.

You must visually demonstrate how your product or service is an improvement over your competitors. Many companies struggle with public comparisons because they don’t want to appear to slam competitors. However, when threatened with a loss in revenue, you’re competitors will downplay your advancements before emulating them.

Sometimes it’s possible to avoid a direct brand comparison, and simply compare to “others”, but this depends on your industry, product type and how much of an improvement you’ve made.

Henry Ford didn’t invent the automobile, he made them affordable with the development of the Ford assembly line. He advanced them with a steering wheel on the left, made them simple to drive, and inexpensive to repair. It was mass produced for middle class buyers and by 1918 half of all cars in the United States were Model Ts². Ford also patented the transmission, and Ford Motor Company, would go on to become one of three major car brands that dominated in the United States for decades.³

Alexander Graham Bell didn’t invent communication over long distance, the telegraph did, he advanced it with the telephone. The story goes that Bell and his partners offered to sell the patent to Western Union for $100,000, a large sum in those days, which the president of Western Union balked and said, “the telephone was nothing but a toy”. He later told colleagues that, “If he could get the patent for $25 million, he would consider it a bargain”. ⁴

Many of these advancements aren’t immediately obvious, but once successful they often result in patent challenges, and legal battles.

Thomas Edison a self educated man was a prolific inventor and entrepreneur. Many of his inventions were improvements on existing systems like the quadruplex telegraph, which provided him with the seed money to build Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory. There he invented the phonograph, carbon telephone transmitter, the incandescent light bulb, along with the development of another 1,093 patents⁵.

While the road of an innovator isn’t a bed of roses, it can shape our world in profound ways. We now have a five day, forty-hour work week thanks to Henry Ford, telephony thanks to Alexander Graham Bell, and electric power distribution, motion pictures and sound recording thanks to Thomas Edison. Many of the worlds most enduring brands and their technologies have resulted from these icons over the last century.

Promotion and Success

The paradox of a connected world is, it can be more difficult to gain attention.

Whatever you’re bringing to the market, you’ll need to generate demand to be successful. Therefore, emulating your competitors sales and marketing playbook isn’t a strategy for success.

After launching a new category, and providing a side by side comparison to other systems, you’ll need to get your story in front of as many people as possible. That means understanding your market better than your competitors, why your new product or service is important to them and promoting it everywhere they are.

If these historical figures are a pattern for success, they all partnered with fellow entrepreneurs, who also saw new ways doing things, and were able to keep innovation moving forward.

Thanks for reading one of these

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(1st_generation)

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry_in_the_United_States

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison