Innovation Marketing: An Introduction

Innovation marketing has become a sector of marketing science in its own right. The reasons for the high acceptance of knowledge and methods of innovation marketing are twofold: enormous investments in new products and numerous failures. The crucial question is: what determines the success of an innovation? Why does one innovation succeed on the market, while others fail miserably? Success factors research, founded in the 1960s and expanded ever since, has unanimously identified the competitive innovation advantage – or CIA – as the most important factor for success (Trommsdorff and Steinhoff (2007). Innovationsmarketing. München: Verlag Vahlen). The CIA represents a competition-beating performance that delivers benefit to the customer, is perceived by the customer as such, that the competition cannot catch up to easily, and that can hardly be invalidated in its environment. Innovations with a CIA are more successful than imitations and marginal innovations, because they are comparatively beneficial and, in particular, address a basic conscious or subconscious need of the target customers. Moreover, major components of the CIA can be subsumed under the key word “customer focus.” Although customer focus has become the dominant management credo in recent past, its implementation in the innovation process remains difficult. One reason for this is that traditional market research methods come up against their limits when it comes to innovations. Nonetheless, intelligent methods of innovation marketing are available to overcome this bottleneck factor. As such, the CIA really represents a meta-success factor; it is more the result of professional innovation marketing than its cause.