Marketing Innovation: Feel the burn!
Entrepreneurs must not only be able to invent the next new thing, they must be able to communicate about their innovation to the world. Otherwise, as marketing guru Robert Middleton says, no-one will even know you exist.
Many people underestimate the difficulty of communicating about a new idea or product. In an age of instant gratification and shortened attention spans, we measure our successes and failures on ever-shorter time scales. In large corporations the life-span of a Chief Marketing Office averages less than two years. The temptation is to market nanotechnology in nanotime.
This was not always the case.
Consider the case of Robert Chesebrough. Who? Read what Luke Johnson’s excellent Entrepreneur column in today’s Financial Times has to say:
Take the case of Robert Chesebrough. He was a British-born chemist who patented petroleum jelly, which he discovered in 1859 at the age of 22 in Titusville, Pennsylvania. It took him 10 more years to perfect the compound, and even then no one wanted to buy it. So he became a travelling salesman, giving away free samples of his product, which he named Vaseline. He even used to inflict burns on himself to demonstrate the soothing powers of his miracle gel. Eventually the public took to his invention, and he became a wealthy industrialist, with operations in dozens of countries. His persistence, self-belief and positive thinking paid off.
Do you have what it takes to market your product? Are you ready to feel the burn?
1 Comment so far
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Ian, I really like both your content and writing style. Your stuff is always pertinent and cogent.
Best, Scott
By scott hammond on 11.22.07 9:57 pm
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