Marketing Skills: Innovation and Creativity

Course Overview

This course is designed to show how, by studying markets and buyers, organisations can innovate and create improved offerings that will generate, amongst other things, improved profits, greater market share and future success. It is not a new product development course, but will aim to show how new competitive ideas can be generated by looking at customers, buyers, competitors, and other market factors. These innovations can be based on any part of the business offering (pricing, channel usage, service issues, marketing communications etc).

Audience

Anyone in an organisation who controls or contributes towards business development. As such there are no specific knowledge pre-requisites but a thorough understanding of your own organisation would be useful.

Skills Gained

Your organisation will benefit by having staff that are better trained to look outwards from the business, sieving the market for new ways forward. Such an approach can only lead to increased business with enhanced customer recruitment and retention. This market-led innovation approach can prove very cost effective, and whilst not necessarily replacing classic NPD solutions, innovation has surely formed the basis for the success of businesses such as Tesco, Virgin Airways and Accenture.

You will benefit by embracing a new approach to innovation that will enable you to support business development on a broad front. Not only is this a satisfying result in itself, but market-led innovation is challenging and fun! The processes involved could change your work philosophy in a positive way.

Course Outline

• Develop a market centred approach to everyday working practice
• Analyse market forces and trends to determine where the market is going
• Build processes that encourage the identification of new market sectors
• Identify the buyer's route to buying selection and what can influence this
• Use some of the key tools of innovation including the Japanese
• Degrees of Freedom' approach, identification of market Key Success Factors and others
• Prepare a simple plan path for the process from issue analysis to actual rollout
• Identify the key influences that can affect success or failure both internally and externally

Marketing Skills: Innovation and Creativity / 0027