Using Innovation to Create Demand
What’s capturing the attention of your ideal buyer? Hint: It isn’t your advertising.
Advertising is becoming increasingly less effective. Deep down, we know it’s true. But what do we do to create demand for our products and customers?
It’s simple. Find innovative ways to build relationships with them. Share tips, ideas, stories, tools, and insights. Think outside the box. What do your customers need before they buy from you? Once you can answer that, you’ll be on the way to building relationships that create demand.
It might sound overwhelming, but it just takes an innovative mindset.
What Innovation Looks Like
While many brands cling to outdated advertising models, a few are leading the way toward authentic promotion and innovation. Take the wine brand 19 Crimes, for instance. The company understood and capitalized on something wine drinkers everywhere have always understood: Wine isn’t a product. It’s an experience, and that’s exactly what 19 Crimes offers its customers.
Each bottle of 19 Crimes wine has an interactive label that consumers can explore using the company’s phone app. By aiming their phone’s camera at the label, customers gain access to a fascinating story that features the very bottle they hold in their hands. That’s innovation at work, and it’s a strategy that has skyrocketed the brand to being one of the highest grossing wine labels in the world, all through word-of-mouth advertising.
Listening to the market and understanding what it wants is the key to innovation that drives demand. Domino’s online ordering platform, revamped stores, and brilliantly executed “Paving for Pizza” initiative are prime examples of how companies can put that knowledge to work. Domino’s spent time listening to customer service calls, looking at feedback on social media, and engaging with customers via their app and online. What the company realized through their efforts was that their pizza was only part of what they were selling.
Just like 19 Crimes, Domino’s is selling an experience. Their customers want a convenient, inexpensive, and tasty meal but not simply because they are hungry. Customers buy pizza from Domino’s because they’re busy, stressed, and looking for something to make their day easier. Domino’s has worked to deliver that experience by remodeling their stores to offer an airy, eat-in environment; offering a real-time delivery app; and fixing potholes in certain cities so take-out customers can drive home stress-free — without worrying that their pizza will fall to the floor on the way home.
How to Generate Authentic Demand
Understanding what your market wants from your product is no longer enough. You have to understand what they want out of their relationship with your brand. That’s what Domino’s and 19 Crimes have in common, and that is what’s driving the demand for their products.
Generating authentic demand isn’t about marketing or advertising. It isn’t about selling. Generating authentic demand is about serving the target market in innovative ways that build strong relationships. To do this effectively, executives must understand the buyer in a meaningful way that requires extensive engagement and dedication on the part of the C-suite.
Executives who listen to customers and potential customers can easily find ways to innovate authentically – which will create demand. Not sure how?
- Spend time in customer service.
- Get on social media and engage with people.
- Ask your customers what experience they are seeking and figure out a way to deliver that in an authentic and innovative way.
- You’ll know you’re successful when your target market enjoys the experience of working with you so much that they do your marketing for you. That’s innovation at work.
Our vision with Promote On Purpose is bold. We revolutionize the way brands grow. And we’re so good at Authentic Demand Generation™ that we guarantee a revenue-based ROI.
