Innovation & Marketing

“Product Launch is a process, with a life-cycle & aims to build sales momentum” – Innovation & Marketing, every management professional must have heard this quote many times throughout his studies.

Marketing as expected, requires to take decisions in all the areas including advertising, promotion and distribution, through research, investment and finance. Though times may have changes but traditional marketing approach still remains at the core of any product launch. Having said so, the recent developments, innovation that marketing strategy had witnessed, brings several new dimensions to read and dwell upon.

Social Product Marketing, recent term used by marketing gurus caught my attention. Basically its an amalgamation of traditional marketing with social media – creating a marketing strategy that leverages platform offered by social media as well. These days any product launched is accompanied by a community hub that provides blogs, a wiki and a forum where product designers post additional product suggestions, where consumers could publish questions and answers, or could provide tips and tricks. A social media page, i.e. a facebook group is created to drive people back to the hub, which would contents such as informative videos,and advertisements.

Many management schools and universities practice a ‘360 degree marketing simulation’ – in the sense that students get a chance to ‘live through all the phases of the process – as if in real’. And much of the effort is invested in updating and upgrading this programme to remain effective. Some B-Schools maintain a separate cell that keeps researching and innovating their marketing simulation framework from time to time.

WWF, a marketing wrestling program, designed and innovated by IPER has great potential to create quality marketing professionals for the industry. The result in the form of recognition, WWF got from the professional community shows that it has set itself as an icon for marketing prowess. The participants are allowed the freedom to innovate and this is an optimal opportunity to add new dimensions to the marketing skills acquired with formal management studies.

Another outcome of such simulation is learning the most important art of working as a team, in different roles. Team behavior plays a very vital role and we see that in most cases (if not all) , the team that wins is the team that is more marketable.

Idea of innovative marketing with the traditional, and ways to implement this mantra is what the teams develop. Their success depends on getting their concepts brought by the industry experts. Team needs to define , detail the marketing plan and lay out the target markets and various promotions to use in order to outsmart the assumed competitors.

Not just this, increasing awareness of events, creating followers/fans for their product, making it enticing to attend, and creating a great atmosphere once event begins are all essential components.

WWF held on 08-Dec-2013 at IPER , as seen by the media:

For detailed pictures of the event , click and visit our official Facebook page here