Each year, how many new smartphone models are launched? How many apps are introduced or updated? Each month, how many new must-watch shows and must-hear tunes stream toward your devices? How many times a week, day, hour does “breaking news” interrupt your newsfeed? Geekier readers may feel like firing up a spreadsheet and running some numbers to answer these questions, but for most of us the answer is simple: too many, too much of everything to keep track of.
Now, thinking of those same categories, how many of these new offerings are genuinely innovative and memorably different? Several? A few? One or two? Most are just repackaged ideas that may catch people’s attention fleetingly before everybody moves on to the next slightly modified update of a familiar formula. It speaks volumes that streaming services such as Netflix and WarnerMedia are in bidding wars for the rights to run decades-old stalwarts such as Friends and Seinfeld.
We all have the impression that change is unrelenting, that there’s something new coming out all the time. We have come to expect—even crave—the constant buzz of new this and improved that. When something new(ish) does come along, we may feel a buzz for a while, but only until the next new thing appears. And even if the next new thing really does change everything, that change quickly becomes the new normal. And so it is that change and expectations of change are perpetually accelerating.
In such an environment, can brands and brand marketers innovate fast enough and deeply enough to command attention? It’s possible, but it takes hard work—and guts.
The temptation is to take what worked before and adjust it just enough to make it seem a little fresher. That can seem safer than raising the bar too high—and risking the expectation that you’ll be able to do it again…and again. In truth, yielding to this temptation to endlessly tweak is the low road to mediocrity. Rehashing old campaigns, sticking to “safe,” well-trodden territory and steering clear of the unknown may make life easier in the short run, but it’s a recipe for getting ignored in the marketplace.
Now, as ever, success in marketing is about standing out from the crowd, making a mark and connecting memorably. What’s different now is that the crowd is much bigger and far noisier. So, marketers have to choose between two types of risk/reward strategies. One is the low-risk/low-reward approach: play it safe, make incremental changes and aim for growth in line with the rest of the market. The other is the high-risk/high-reward strategy: dive deep into market insights, applying intuition to spot trends and imagination to disrupt the business-as-usual norms.
If you feel inclined to go for the low-risk/low-reward strategy, bear in mind that there’s a hidden risk of irrelevance for you as a marketer. Implementing this sort of strategy will increasingly be the work of machines running self-learning algorithms. And who needs human marketers if machines can make incremental improvements 24/7? Until machines develop the capacity to come up with high-risk/high-reward marketing ideas, this apparently riskier approach is likely to be the safest way for marketers to stay relevant and avoid being replaced by a bot.
