Marketing Innovation

This could be a completely old cartoon that I just happened to discover yesterday, but I wanted to share it.  It’s from a strip called Brand Camp by Tom Fishburne:

When I first saw it, I thought about it’s message in context to wikis in the enterprise, and my team’s own experience in standing up a wiki inside our corporate firewall.   More specifically, I thought about it in context of the  Wikicities post from last week.  My version of the script is a bit different, however.  I think the most striking difference is that the last two frames are actually flipped.  In my case, we actually do a have a new product/service to offer–a dynamic knowledge creation and storage environment–but we end up marketing it down to a web-hosting solution in order to draw in more users, especially those who are more risk adverse (rightly or wrongly).  I think is just as important to consider has the above version of the comic: how do you manage the marketing of an idea so that we don’t limit our self to marketing apple sauce when we really have a shiny new apple? What’s the correct balance when marketing a wiki or blog?

It is of course easier to market new concepts in the terms of old and more familiar technologies.  A blog isn’t all that different from a one to many email, except that it publishes to the web instead of landing in an inbox.  A wiki is at it’s core a web-publishing technology that makes it incredibly easy to set up a website.  But they are of course more powerful than the technologies that they displace, when used correctly.

In the name of keeping this short (I know I tend to get wordy), I’ll sum it up with this: sometimes it is those who advocate new ideas who end up marketing new cars as faster horses.