Book Excerpt: Now is the time to rethink innovation, and bake marketing directly into products themselves.

“In the blink of an eye, brands can go from being winners to losers,” write Alex Bogusky and John Winsor in Baked In: Creating Products and Businesses That Market Themselves. “They face new pressures exerted by digital technologies, globalization, cultural diversity, economic recalibration, and the sheer volume and variety of products and brands. These pressures are forcing companies to rethink everything from advertising to product design and, if they’re smart enough, even the basic structure of their businesses.”

In this excerpt from Baked In, Bogusky and Winsor explain why executives must rethink innovation and bake marketing directly into products themselves:

We all have lots of preconceived notions about the world of product and marketing. So let’s begin by preheating your mind before we get to the baking.

You walk into a room filled with machines. Against one wall is a machine that looks like a big microwave oven. As you peer into the window, you’re a bit disappointed to see a pair of sunglasses that appear to have been cut in half horizontally. The color, though, is just what you had hoped for. The machine is hard at work so you decide to go get a cup of coffee. When you come back the glasses are fully formed. You try them on to check the prescription. Perfect. And the coolest part is you’re not on the starship Enterprise. You’re at Kinko’s.

Consider the “3D printer.” When the term was first used in print, it was hard to imagine such a thing could exist. To be able to “print out” an object in three dimensions has been the stuff of science fiction for a long time. But today they exist. Many of us have still never seen one, but we can say with full confidence that they exist because we actually own one at Crispin, Porter, Bogusky. It probably wouldn’t surprise you to learn that to own this modern marvel required an investment in excess of a million dollars. But what might surprise you is that is, in fact, a lie: It cost a little under twenty thousand dollars.

Consider the power in that. To create prototype products in the past has been a very time consuming and laborious process that has been fundamentally boiled down to pressing the print button. This is just one aspect of the technology and processes that are compressing the production time frame of products from years to months. And in some cases even weeks. We’re not talking about cutting edge technology here either. The software we use to design and 3D model the products that then get sent to this magical printer is the very same software that is being taught to the Jr. High students that go to school down the street. It’s a new world. The new shop class doesn’t teach you how to repair a car. It teaches you the tools that allow you to design and manufacture your own line of vehicles.

The democratization of the printed word until recently was referred to as the desktop publishing revolution. Today we can hardly remember a time when any individual couldn’t create and print out whatever was on their minds. And the revolution went way beyond where even the revolutionaries expected it to go. Because who needs paper. Blogging made the idea of publishing on paper arcane.

Well what the computer did in two dimensions it’s now doing in three and the democratization of product design has begun. The 3D printer will continue to improve. Today most 3D printers create plastic prototypes but that is already changing newer models having the capability to print in multiple materials. Circuit boards are already created in a process that is fundamentally printing. And these circuit boards make up the inner workings of most consumer electronics. How long will it be before fully working prototypes can be printed? Probably not very long. And once we’re capable of printing fully working products why even bother to manufacture in traditional terms? Why not just print more? Or why not just sell the idea and the plans for a product instead of the product itself. The customer can make their changes and print it out themselves.

Marketing people like to say that product is more than a physical object. As in a cup of coffee is more than a cup of coffee. A pair of sunglasses is more than a pair of sunglasses. A car is more than a car. There’s a story that the car represents. A promise. And that’s what we’re really selling. That’s what the brand is made of.

Sometimes this story is true and sometimes, unfortunately, it’s not. Sometimes a car really is just a car. So the process of marketing is to uncover, coax out, and tell a story that is buried inside the product. Most of the time a story can be found, but too often the story is only tenuously connected to the product, and in some cases the story is just wishful thinking on the part of all the marketers around the table. The product was created without a clear narrative and audience in mind or is perhaps just another me-too product with nothing new to offer. What happens next is too often the sad state of affairs that passes for marketing. A battery of focus groups, ethnographies, brain scans, and more are arranged to go forth and uncover what the consumer wishes the product really was. Then the marketing budget is spent telling lies about the product.

This book is about flipping that process.

In today’s world—in the same amount of time that it takes to create an advertising campaign—it’s now possible to take all that consumer insight and actually bake it right into a new product.

A product designed with a mission. A product with a story to tell. A product with the ability to sell itself.

Can your organization create a product like this?

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About the Authors: Alex Bogusky is a cochairman of Crispin Porter + Bogusky. John Winsor is CEO of Victors & Spoils, and author of Spark and Flipped.

Reprinted with permission from Baked In: Creating Products and Businesses That Market Themselves, Agate B2, 2009

Source: 1to1media