Innovation is a word used quite often among loyalty marketers to spark customer engagement and drive brand loyalty.
During his session, “Business Excellence: Accelerating Customer Experience Strategy Adoption through Innovation, Leadership Development, and Value Creation,” at the 6th annual Engagement & Experience Expo presented by Loyalty360, Jose Pires, global business excellence leader, Black & Veatch, talked about the concept of innovation, dispelling the notion that every innovation has to be a breakthrough.
“Innovation is personal,” Pires said. “You need to adapt to your culture.”
He cited passion, discipline, and resilience as the three keys to sustaining an innovative company mindset.
“How do you predict the future? You have to create the future,” Pires said. “What does it take to be sustainably great? Discipline, innovation, leadership development, and value creation. Combined, they’re necessary and exceptional. I need to capture their imagination and I have to be relevant. Don’ ignore your core. All you need is a different perspective.”
Nike is a perfect example of a global company that places innovation at its forefront.
During the company’s recent second-quarter earnings call, CEO Mark Parker talked about this theme.
“In the fast-moving world of sports and youth culture, results like these come from our obsession with the consumer of knowing what they need and what inspires them,” he said. “That’s what drives innovation at NIKE and innovation is what drives growth. Our approach has fueled 28 conservative quarters of growth at a scale that is unrivaled in our industry. We have a strong track record and more importantly we have an even better runway ahead.”
As in sports, competition is a positive thing, Parker noted, because “it sharpens our focus. Starting with the consumer who is not asking for more products, but looking for more choice of the products they love. We are responding by giving the consumer more distinctive options with fewer products, what we call edit to amplify. Reducing styles and highlighting key items in concepts has the huge impact across our entire value chain. And this is especially important in North America and our key geographies as we better manage supplying demand to drive productivity and profitable top line growth, while highlighting and scaling our most compelling product stories.”
Parker pointed to Nike’s success in China where “we amplify what’s working and edited out what’s not to accelerate growth. Beyond product, e-commerce is one example as we double down on the power of digital in this mobile-first market. We also know from our consumers the speed matters. That insight is driving several speed and agility initiatives throughout our company. For example, we're scaling a process we called the express lane, which allows us to go from creation to market in weeks instead of months.”
Editing to amplify and driving speed and agility are keys to winning now, Parker stressed.
“They also help set the foundation for growth in the future,” he added. “The other focus for us, of course, is innovation, my top priority for the company. Innovation is what offers differentiation for consumers and takes them somewhere new. It’s how we lead the market. To be clear, without innovation, there is no such thing as sustained growth.”