International marketing: \\\'Innovention\\\' rules the game

According to a recent US survey on senior executives, marketing will be the most important area of expertise for business leaders of the next generation. The study commissioned by the Institute of International Research sought to identify key areas for leaders. Marketing was the clear choice, with 31 per cent of votes, followed by 20 per cent for operations and 16 per cent for financial expertise. Sales and engineering were deemed least critical to leadership with eleven and six per cent respectively.
While marketing departments are often struggling to effectively measure effectiveness and the related battle for internal credibility, recent studies provide evidence that marketing in the global sense has been making significant headway in proving its value within organisations.
There is no one-size-fits-all formula of international marketing. There is no definitive answers to questions like whether India has to change the grapes marketing policy (India produces grapes twice in a year) or Bangladesh can maintain the tempo of exporting low-cost readymade garments or Bhutan will go on heavily depending on the sale of hydro-power. But we do have the time to plan in such a manner that we do not lose sight of 'innovention' [innovation + plus invention] aspects. Simply tinkering around the existing practices has severe limitations.
Then how to go ahead? When once a company enters into the tunnel it is obvious that it has to come out of the tunnel. Intense competition is both a problem and an opportunity. Most executives understand what is at stake and what matters, even if their companies do not always seem to get it right.  The ongoing global situation has been calling for 'superior product performance' and 'superior product quality' as their top strategic goals. And the two most important cultural attributes have been 'strong identification with the consumer/customer experience' coupled with a 'passion/pride in products.'
The key finding of Global Innovation 1000 study of the world's biggest spenders on research and development (R&D) reaffirmed in each of the past seven years: 'there is no statistically significant relationship between financial performance and innovation spending, in terms of either total R&D dollars or R&D as a percentage of revenues. Many companies, notably Apple, consistently underspend their peers on R&D investments while outperforming them on a broad range of measures of corporate success such as revenue growth, profit growth, margins, and total shareholder return.
Actually, the ways R&D managers and corporate decision makers think about their new products and services and how they feel about intangibles such as risk, creativity, openness, and collaboration are surely critical for success.
A successful leader knows where a company's industry is going and how to respond. Fostering teamwork at all levels, this executive can align individuals behind a single vision and strategy-and turn the ship when it is time for a new direction. So, the outcome depends, among others, on ability to overcome organisational challenges, build the right team, embrace change, and drive company performance.
The success of an organisation is determined by one thing: whether or not people choose to buy what you have got to sell. The goal is to include the voice of the customer at the basic research level and throughout the product development cycle, to enable company's technical people to actually see how their technologies work in various market conditions. If more companies could gain traction in closing both the strategic alignment and culture gaps to better realise these goals and attributes, not only would their financial performance improve, but the potential gains might be large enough to improve the overall growth rate of the global economy.
A company may become dissatisfied with the pace of growth in one of its largest geographic markets. The questions that surface on this score would hover around: was the company targeting the wrong customers, using the wrong materials, supporting a brand with an undifferentiated value proposition or advertising ineffectively?  If the company could get answer to these questions, it would gain some of the insights needed to transform its organic growth strategy.
Finally, variable conjoint analysis for companies in industries as varied as luxury goods and retail banking, is emerging as a strategic tool.  Actually, the methodology needed to use conjoint analysis in this new way is very similar to the methodology that traditional practitioners of this type of analysis have used, but has a key variation. The marketing team uses the results to organise customer groups with similar preferences, providing a more detailed view of the categories they fall into, the needs they have, and the likelihood that they might become bigger (or smaller) sources of revenue. Conjoint analysis has become a new source of insight into customer segments. Companies usually have a sense of who their real and prospective customers are, and have an idea of what each segment considers important. But by segmenting customers with the help of conjoint analysis, companies can develop a more layered form of intelligence, with implications for which segments to prioritise, which value propositions to offer them, and how to market to them.
Scholars have rightly noted that conjoint analysis, a technique that has been widely used in market research for three decades, can be used to support organic growth.
In fact, the elements that make up a truly innovative company are many: a focused innovation strategy, a winning overall business strategy, deep customer insight, great talent, etc. According to the results of this year's Global Innovation 1000 study, only about half of all companies say their corporate culture robustly supports their innovation strategy and that innovation strategy is inadequately aligned with their overall corporate strategy.
Small or big innovention is the key! Marketing makes people want what you have.  It makes the product or services desirable.  In fact, marketing should make the product or services so desirable that the prospects are ready to buy it. International marketing is simply marketing to people or companies outside of one's own domestic market.
Dr B K Mukhopadhyay, a Management Economist, is Principal, International Institute of Management                  Sciences, Kolkata, India. [email protected]