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Participants:
Brian Regan; Host
Liz Miller; VP, Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Introduction:
Welcome to Innovation Matters, the podcast about technology innovation, why it matters, where it’s happening and how it’s changing our world. Each week we talk with industry leaders and experts about topics ranging from corporate innovation to digital transformation to artificial intelligence and beyond. Join us for a provocative conversation about the future of business technology and society.
Brian Regan:
Why does innovation matter? There are a limitless number of answers to that question with enlightening and fascinating stories behind each one. Welcome to Innovation Matters. I’m your host, Brian Regan and in this podcast, I sit down with innovation catalysts from all areas of business, technology and academia to get their perspectives and insights and guidance and occasionally cautionary tales. Late last year, I got a ping on LinkedIn that Liz Miller had left her longtime role running the CMO Council to become a VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, the respected Silicon Valley research and advisory firm founded by Ray Wang. I had worked with Liz for a couple of years when she and I both ran strategy and programs for the CMO Council and Constellation is most assuredly the beneficiary of one of the sharpest and sharp witted marketing minds I know. At Constellation, Liz focuses on the business demands facing today’s chief marketing officer and the evolution of customer engagement and the emerging needs in the enterprise for a new security posture that is reflective of the increasing threats that brands face to brand trust today. It’s an expansive portfolio but even that doesn’t fully describe Liz’s expertise and the value she brings to companies. Over the years, she’s worked with several hundred brands, helping them decipher the challenges inherent in effectively transforming business models to stay competitive in a rapidly changing digital landscape.
And as we enter the second half of the year that between a global pandemic and a full-stop economic shutdown and a long overdue examination of race and diversity in our culture and our work environments, I have no doubt that Liz’s thinking and contributions will be even more valuable to brands looking to navigate these existential headwinds. In our very animated conversation which I confess upfront was rather one-sided given Liz’s boundless enthusiasm for the topic, we went deep on her thoughts around the increasing and necessary primacy of the customer when innovating, the innovation mantra ‘Think Big, Fail Fast, Fail Forward’ and the fallacy of innovation as the destination. I also asked Liz for her thoughts on the role and relative merits of the chief innovation officer—more to follow—and finally, we talked about her latest blog post for Constellation, a literally laugh out loud funny piece about the shift to virtual events, a trend brought on by current events that is driving the need to innovate around how brands engage with customers and prospects and partners in this new low-touch economy. And so, with that, let’s get to it. And Liz Miller, thank you so much for joining me on Innovation Matters.
Liz Miller:
Thrilled to be here. Thanks, Brian.
Brian Regan:
Well, and it’s so good to talk to you and because I enjoy you so much, I’m going to give you a softball question to start which is why does innovation matter?
Liz Miller:
I love it. And you know what? I think that’s really mean. I actually don’t think that’s a softball question. It’s only because we’ve known each other so long that you did that. I know, I know. So, I think that the best way to start that is that innovation matters because it matters to our customers and I think that for any organization that doesn’t believe that our customers regardless of where you are on the spectrum—Are you B2B? Are you B2C? Are you a hybrid? Have you decided to call it something new?—wherever you are today, our customers are constantly looking and expecting that we are staying ahead of the curve and while they may never call that innovation, it is. Right? And I think that they are looking for innovation in really small ways like did you create a frictionless way for me to pay you and give you money or did you come out with something that was so brand new and a product that was so mind-blowing that I have to have it right now? Innovation comes in lots of different ways and our customers may not know what to label it. They just know how it feels and they know they like it.
Brian Regan:
So true and it’s interesting that you started out with the customer because I think for so long particularly in technology, innovation was germinated and kind of birthed not thinking first about the customer but just thinking about innovation in and of itself. And you’ve got such a long history of kind of customer driven work that it’s not a surprise that you started by talking about the customer perspective.
Liz Miller:
It’s funny because I think innovation has really been a lot of times, it just turns into corporate navel-gazing if we’re just being really honest about it. I think that people mistake conversations around how can we make it go faster like how do we make the Zoom louder that they get caught in the cycle of saying that innovation is taking a big idea and automating it and that’s not really what innovation means to our bottom lines. And I think that when we start to think about innovation in terms of the customer, we inherently start to think about innovation as a driver to and a byproduct of our growth strategies. How are we actually growing, entering new markets, expanding our markets, coming up with new ways to engage and connect? But when we think of innovation as I would say not only just a byproduct of business but when we start to think of innovation solely in the terms of shifts and changes to our product, we are only ever going to think of innovation as a way to improve speeds and feeds. Right? Like I’m going to innovate by making the margin smaller and making my product faster so that I can say we have the bestest product in the world. That’s not really innovation. Right? It’s a change. It’s an update. It’s great. But I think innovation inherently has to be something, some act and it can be a small act or it can be a massive act that changes the perspective of the customer so that they know they have to shift from the status quo. Right? Did you give them something that empowered them to also then take your innovation and turn it into theirs? And it’s that handoff and it’s that kind of bi-directional nature of innovation that I think a lot of people a) mistake for being easy and b) discount it altogether.
Brian Regan:
Very true. And so, let’s talk about the process for a minute. And when we chatted last week, you said something that I really reacted very strongly to and loved which is you talked about maybe you’re thinking of the process as Think Big, Fail Fast—sorry, Fall Fast, Fall Forward and it sounds cautionary but it also sounds very reasonable and realistic. So, tell me a little bit about what you mean by that.
Liz Miller:
Yeah. I think that it’s funny when I talk to executives and they are kind of explaining what their innovation or the other words that I love that have somehow become synonymous for innovation is transformation. Right? There’s usually like a puff of sparkles that come after it. Like it’s my innovation strategy and then out come the sparkles. They talk about in these kind of really big almost impossible to move and never going to scale terms and the problem with that is if we then ask the organization to adopt that mindset or strategy for innovation, it’s very hard to actually go realize because then it becomes a project. There are KPIs, we have to succeed, we have to move forward and they become all of these mindset blocks around what we have to do rather than just making innovation turn into a business positive and a positive business impact. So, I think that the reality becomes thinking big doesn’t necessarily mean boil the ocean, right? Think big about what needs to change. What is that point of friction that either is a negative for your customer or interestingly enough, has proven to be a positive, right? Friction isn’t always negative. What is that point? How can we actually make that a benefit for our organization or a benefit for our customers? Do we have to get rid of it? Do we have to amplify it? Do we have to put more things around it? And then go and try something, right? Like go and actually do something about it and if it fails, don’t stop moving forward because I think there is this mindset of if I try something and it doesn’t work, I put it into the heap of dreams of the past and I walk away from it rather than saying okay, what didn’t work? Because I learned what didn’t work, I can actually take the next step and try something new the next time.
And it’s those little bites of innovation, those little steps forward on an iterative process that doesn’t position failure as a setback but it actually positions failure as hey, a) you did something, tried something, learned something; now apply it into the next step. It’s always about maintaining and keeping that forward momentum because if you don’t, if you don’t actually go try something, if you don’t actually go iterate and move forward and yeah, fail but fail forward, you’re actually just standing in the same place. And it’s kind of interesting when you talk to people who have been charged with innovation programs when they’re like yeah, we tried all these things but it didn’t really happen. They kind of get into that cyclical dialogue of we tried it and failed so we gave up and we just did another thing. Like they just walk away from it when in reality there are very few big innovations that you can think of that didn’t involve at least one failure, right? And that failure has usually translated into a) that failure, yes, failed but you’ll learn something and you move forward. Like the Wright brothers didn’t just make one plane and voila, it flew. Like they had use lots of different iterations to get to a flyable plane. So, I think if we start to think of innovation as not a static single step but a iteration of a multitude of little failures that let us keep moving forward, we’ll stop being afraid of the word failure and we’ll actually move forward.
Brian Regan:
That’s a wonderful perspective and you’ve had the benefit through your tenure with the CMO Council, The Chief Marketing Officer Council and at Constellation with observing a multitude of companies across so many different disciplines both core in the technology space as well as kind of technology adjacent. Where do you think innovation can go wrong and is it possible that the first misstep might be when a company actually decides they’re going to name a chief innovation officer?
Liz Miller:
Oh, I love title bingo. Yeah. Gosh, the title, the title conversation. It’s funny. I think that naming a chief innovation officer actually isn’t the problem. I think the problem is when the board assumes that by naming a chief innovation officer, it means that innovation will be profitable and therefore, if it is not immediately profitable, you should fire the chief innovation officer. Right? It’s that we’ve got a weird linear mindset that says if I stick a C on the function, that function will immediately start being flawless and drive business and my stock prices will go up and all these amazing things are going to happen because I took a function and slapped a C in front of it. And I think that that tends to be a really dangerous idea because innovation is as much a process of operations as it is a culture that has to be embraced across the entire C-suite, right? If you have a CEO and a CFO and a COO who are kind of straight from central casting, executives resistant to change, I dare any chief innovation officer could make it work, right? Like if you are in a culture that is like nope, nope, we have done this for 300 years. That’s the way we’re going to do it. Like nope, we’re never getting a website, only catalogs. You’ve got a problem, right? And no matter what your title is, if you don’t have an organization that is willing to think big and fail fast and fail forward and to see that as opportunity where it may take more than a quarter, two quarters, a year, two years to realize where the benefit comes from that, that’s going to be your bigger problem, not did you hire the right chief innovation officer.
I also think that innovation—so, my colleague at Constellation who covers customer experience is a woman by the name of Nicole France and she often refers to customer experience as being the ultimate team sport, right? And I think a lot of people will think of customer experience as being a marketing centric or a marketing only aspiration. But it is truly a team sport, right? The reality is is innovation is also a team sport, right? If you set your sights on innovation, it can’t just be executed in a silo. It has to include and embrace all the parts of the organization that are then going to have to actualize and realize that innovation, right? And so, if you keep it in a silo and call it the innovation team and department, you are just adding to a culture of corporate don’t touch my button and you know that game. Like Brian, how many times have you seen it? Where you go into an organization and they’re like hey, we’re going to think big, we’re going to try this new campaign, it’s going to be great, we’re going to bring sales and service and hey, finance, HR, we’re all going to get involved in this. And all of a sudden, all the executives start to like wrap their arm around their button that has their function on it and they’re like no, I’m the people officer so I deal with people and you just said the word people so that’s my button. Don’t’ touch my button. Right? And so, that’s what the strategy sessions around whatever the innovation is going to be actually turn into. It’s this like weird corporate game of don’t touch my button.
So, I think that innovation is something really hard to harness. I mean I think that it can happen in the most unlikely places. I think some of the most amazing stories of innovation that I have seen let’s say over the past 10 years have been those moments where an idea popped up from the front row folks in customer service, right? Of like hey, gosh, a lot of customers have been complaining about this or a lot of customers have been saying they’ve been using our product in this crazy way. Gosh, maybe we should look at that. And those opportunities to bubble up innovation especially from those teams that are at the front line of engaging with our customers, I think those are also those awesome moments where it bubbles up. It becomes part of the fabric of the organization and that’s what makes it so powerful.
Brian Regan:
Yeah. And what you were just describing is very much the reason why we’ve seen a rise in organizations that offer corporate innovation solutions to big enterprises, right? They’ve seen an opportunity with larger companies who are trying to and they profess to want to innovate but they’re challenged by all of the problems and issues that you’ve just outlined. Do you come up against those companies when you’re talking to Constellation customers/clients and is there any challenge in what you’re talking to a brand about versus what a corporate innovation consultancy may be talking to a brand about?
Liz Miller:
No. That’s an interesting question. I haven’t seen it mainly because I think a lot of what we at Constellation are talking—so, whether we are talking to the vendors so we may actually be working with one of the innovation vendors, right? We might actually assessing the skills across and assessing the actual category of vendors that are providing those levels of services. And then, of course, our end customers across our Constellation executive network, I think the buy-side clients, the question that we kind of keep hearing that my colleagues and I when we’re in the watercooler and we’re just batting around ideas, I think when it comes to innovation, oftentimes it’s not the big ideas that people are necessarily grappling with. Sometimes it’s how do I innovate in the little things, right? How do I innovate so that my people have access to the data that they need that they can see data differently? Recently, I had a CMO ask me how can I actually make my teams want to work with data better, right? And so, that’s not a how do I automate it, how do I make it faster, how do I bring in more? It’s not kind of the sausage-making around data or analytics. The questions are more around how do I get my team to have fun again when it comes to things like data? How do I look beyond something as simple as say visualization to actually innovate new ways I can be leveraging this for better relationships with my customer? So, I think we’re asking different questions.
And so, I think what we hear most often and what we tend to see at Constellation is more how do I identify when I need to start looking at teams that can come in and work with us in order to make innovation operationalized or make innovation actually bubble up or when do I just need to maybe listen to other internal cues? I think that becomes the bigger question that we keep hearing and we keep advising clients on which is how do I know when it’s right? How do I know when I need to start? And then how do I know who is offering the services that are right for me and my type of organization, right? I think that there are a lot of innovation organizations out there whether it’s innovation enablement or empowerment, whatever we want to call it, I think there are a lot of organizations out there that are very, very good at helping organizations break down some of the unintentional and unseen walls that block the path not only to innovation but block the paths for innovation to take hold and become just part of the enterprise and part of the organization.
Brian Regan:
Right.
Liz Miller:
So, I think a lot of those organizations and I think that’s what we tend to see a lot of our clients try to figure out okay, when do I need to go talk to those people, right? When is the moment to hit go? Because I think a lot of organizations will say we aspire to be innovative or we aspire to realize what new opportunities there may be out there but then when they actually hit go, they really aren’t ready to make the commitment to it, right? They love hearing the presentation, right? They love hearing that. Here’s what you could be doing and look at all these new business segments you could be looking at. You could be a subscription company, Toilet Paper Manufacturer, right? I’m sure that when that conversation first happened, no one thought it was possible and then Amazon did it and now everyone’s like oh, damn, I’ve got to go do it. Right? So, I think what we tend to hear about and what we advise a lot of organizations about is kind of understanding the when you’re ready and understanding that you need it and then hopefully providing them with the guide rails that they need to be asking themselves, that they need to be looking for to identify which organization is right for them. Because the reality is there isn’t one organization that’s the perfect fit for every company, right? Especially when you’re talking about something like innovation and what you may need to look at is how do I look at layering approaches and layering voices and layering different types of capabilities so that this path to innovation and this culture of innovation becomes something that’s manageable for my organization, right? So, essentially, they’re the customer in that regard, right? So, how do we make it right for us? And it may take various steps. It may take iterations. But I think that’s what we find we’re advising more clients on these days.
Brian Regan:
That’s wonderful. I’m going to deviate from the meticulously prepared script I put together.
Liz Miller:
Love it.
Brian Regan:
Because yesterday I read the best post I read all month. Now yesterday was July 1st but this was posted on June 30th and the headline was “What I missed: Event Report from a Grounded Marketer” and the author is Liz Miller and I loved it because it is such an arch and wonderful take on the reality that we all face with every event, corporate tradeshow, customer extravaganza now transitioned to virtual environments.
Liz Miller:
Oh, it’s been painful.
Brian Regan:
But what I found so fascinating was by extension, where event planners, where brands, where everyone involved in the customer experience has to innovate in how they move from what everyone has become so comfortable with to the next iteration or generation of event. And so, I know you probably have some wonderful thoughts on that so I’d love to hear your deeper perspective.
Liz Miller:
It’s funny. When I when I wrote that post, it was really in reaction to this really funny tweet I ran across I want to say maybe like two or three weeks ago where it was a wife who posted about her husband and that he was going to be attending kind of the first virtual conference during all of the current lockdown, the pandemic lockdown that we’re currently engaged in. And so, she said, she made this really funny comment that in order to help him get through this, she was going to lay out some soggy fruit and a picked-over tray of muffins and just as he was about to get to it, she was going to whisk it away so he couldn’t have any of it. And I personally reacted to that because I was like oh, yeah, those muffins, right? Like we all remember the muffins, right?
Brian Regan:
Those muffins.
Liz Miller:
Right? But I think the funniest part of the tweet were the comments because people weren’t like oh, I’ll leave him alone. People were actually giving her more ideas of what she could do to torture her husband and give him the real conference experience. Like one of my favorites was announce that there’s a conference Wi-Fi and then randomly turn the router on and off throughout the day. And I was like oh, that too! And as the tweets just coming. So, I retweeted her original tweet and I want to say that in a week, I ended up with a couple thousand notifications of people either liking it or retweeting it and well over a couple hundred comments back to me. I’m not even the author of the darn tweet but it came back to me saying oh, Liz, here’s another thing to add, here’s another thing to add. And it kept going and going and going. It was all these really funny moments and that’s when it kind of dawned on me that the reality of what we’re missing isn’t the event itself. It’s each other, right? It’s the fact that we all get to kind of give that wink and nudge to each other when the muffin tray was gets whisked away by the hotel, right? Like we all get to look at each other with that knowing nod when the water pitcher covered in condensation just spews water all over our laptop because we dared want to have a glass of water, right? So, we all remember those moments and when you start to think of okay, this is what we miss and it was hundreds and thousands of people responding to this tweet, sharing what they missed about the absurdity of a live event.
Then shift your gaze to I’ve got to sit in front of my computer all day and listen to canned messages, right? Like it was this kind of like weird pivot because I think what happened when people started to rethink how did we need to go from a live event to a virtual event, the leading assumption in that rethinking and evolution was people really dig hearing from us and they love coming to our events because we give them such great content and we give them such great experiences. So, how do we translate the swag bag? How do we translate the keynote? How do we translate on the breakout sessions? And what’s been missing in all of them is the reality that what we as attendees miss are the connections with each other, the being able to shout out to that person you haven’t seen in a year because the last time you saw them was at this conference, right? Those moments where something really authentic happens because the speaker got a question they didn’t like or told a funny joke or relayed a funny story about what happened to them. It was that element of humanity that seems to be missing because in the shift, we spent more time navel-gazing at our content than we did about what people were missing. So, it’s led to—and Brian, I don’t know if you’ve seen these. Have you been to the virtual event where like the CEO quote-unquote gets up i.e. wakes up in the morning and puts the button-down shirt on because they’re still in shorts? But like gets up and does the video and the video just straight up looks like a hostage video? Like they’re staring into the camera and they’re like I’m here to talk to you and you’re like oh, God, this is worse than being live. It’s that really uncomfortable moment but now in theory you’re supposed to sit through the whole thing but you really just [inaudible 00:27:58] with the video, right?
Brian Regan:
Yeah, the CEO and the CEO invariably introduces him or herself as, “Hello, I’m the President and CEO of” and, of course, you know that because that’s why you’re there.
Liz Miller:
Right, right! Or the ones that I really I can’t watch anymore and I know it’s horrible but like here’s the reality. Does anyone think that coronavirus or COVID isn’t happening? Like is there someone out there in the business world attending a conference that doesn’t know that the reason why we’re not all together is because we’re like trapped in our houses? No. There’s not one person out there that doesn’t know that already. So, why do you spend the first half hour of your two-hour video keynote telling me how great you are and how great your organization is because of how you’ve reacted to COVID. Like I get it. Hey, table stakes, high five. Yes, you should care about your people and you shouldn’t be making them work in the office right now. Please don’t wait for the applause, right? But that’s kind of what we transitioned into and I think that those organizations who actually pumped the brakes and rethought oh, wow, wait a minute, what do people really want are the ones who have really gotten it right. Like I think really early on in the pandemic, the data analytics company Domo put on an event and they had two weeks to reimagine their live event into a virtual event. They had an earthquake the morning of their live virtual feed. Like literally had an earthquake in Salt Lake City. That doesn’t happen, right? But there they are just about to go live, earthquake hits, they still went live, right? They leaned into the absurdity of it all. They had some really great taped interviews where their CEO who was kind of a personality in and of himself and Josh James was like jumping off mountains and skiing and he was going to all these like really cool places in Utah that even if we were alive, we still wouldn’t have gotten to see, right?
And I think that because they let that humanity and they let their people shine through that they let their co-hosts be like you guys will never believe this, I’m from England and I just experienced my first earthquake. Like the honesty of that moment is what people will remember because at the end of the day people buy from people. We don’t buy, we don’t think of ourselves as buying from a website, right? People buy from people and you want to see how people react. You want to see that people are bummed that we’re not together but you also want to see people that know that their dog’s going to run into the video any minute now, right? Like you want to see the earnest reaction to that and people want to be able to engage live. So, what’s fascinating and you will likely have seen this and so, you will likely have thoughts about this as well because I mean you’ve been in this engagement game for long enough but the companies that went all taped also went zero engagement out of fear for not being able to control what was being said. Right? That need for control of I don’t want people to be able to get onto a live feed chat and say something mean about us. That won’t help our sales and since this event is supposed to help our sales, I have to control everything that’s being said. And that completely flies in the face of today’s buying cycle, right? Where someone can say oh, God, I hate this feature. I wish they’d get rid of it. And you know what? The community then stands up and is like are you nuts? I love that feature. Are you kidding? This is how I got around it. You’re not using it right. Do this. Right? It’s that interaction and engagement that not only people wanted to be part of but other people wanted to see. They wanted to be voyeurs into it.
Brian Regan:
Yeah.
Liz Miller:
And so, organizations that kind of had that stranglehold on engagement and serendipity are learning the hard way that people are realizing wow, they don’t have a personality. I might not want to do business with them.
Brian Regan:
So true. It’s the courage to go out there without a net and present yourself as a brand in a very authentic way and if you don’t do that and increasingly, the customer, the prospect sees right through that.
Liz Miller:
Oh, for sure.
Brian Regan:
And it’s interesting that and you will chastise me because I know how particular and precise you are about marketing jargon. So, I will say it once. We are on this journey around the transition from live events to some new iteration but it kind of goes to what you’ve talked to me about before which is innovation is not a destination. Right? It’s, again to use that word once, it is a journey. But just tell me a little bit about your thinking that it’s a fallacy of innovation as a destination.
Liz Miller:
Yeah. I do think that people when they engage in innovation projects or programs, they really do think that okay, we’re going to engage in this and we’re going to innovate and we’re going to change and then we’re going to get there and we’re going to be able to look back and measure it and tada, we’re done. And that bobbles my mind because innovation is something that the need for innovation didn’t grow up out of like the ether. It grew up and it bubbled up because either the market is moving ahead and you are lagging or the customers are moving ahead and you are lagging. Right? The call for innovation usually comes from the realization that you’re lagging behind in something whether it’s product, whether it’s sales, whether it’s mindset, whether it’s messaging. Right? Whatever that call to action for innovation is, it’s usually because someone in the C-suite realized or someone in the team realized wow, we might get left behind and that can’t happen. Right? But behind and where that behind is and where people are moving is an always moving target, right? It is always continuing to move. It is shifting. We’re seeing adjacencies come and completely blow up markets. We’re seeing something as random as a virus that comes out of China completely upending global economies, right? We’re seeing race and equality and diversity conversations exploding in one of the most wonderful and dynamic ways we’ve seen at least I’ve seen in my lifetime, right? And those moments constantly shift the target of innovation and how innovation is going to be applied.
And so, when you think of it as a destination, when you think of it as like I’m here and now I can enjoy a soda, like no one comes and gives you a soda. Once you complete your innovation project, no one shows up with a medal. Like you didn’t win something. And so, I think we have to start looking at innovation as iterative rather than innovation as a linear path to a place. And if you can allow yourself that freedom of kind of an unending iterative long-standing, it’s-always-going-to-be-there process, it becomes less about how fast can we get there and how are we reconsidering, how are we going back? Like let’s take the active messaging, right? How many people have come to you, Brian, and said okay, we need any messaging, we need to come up with something new, we need to be able to say something differently about our brand and then they’re like okay, great, I’ve got my new messaging architecture, it’s on my one sheet, I’ve got my mission and value statement, we’re done? And you’re like no, no, because guess what? In three weeks, your competitors are saying something completely different now, your customers are looking in a new place, you’ve got to be able to say that new thing now. So, guess what? Restart that innovation engine, right? So, when people think like I’ve innovated, I’m going to go take a nap, like make it a short one.
Brian Regan:
Well, sadly for me, we have reached the destination for this particular podcast because Liz Miller, I could talk to you all day and not just about innovation because whatever topic it is, you are full of remarkable insights and perspectives and sharp acerbic perspective on the world we live in when we help brands engage with their audiences.
Liz Miller:
It’s been great catching up with you too.
Brian Regan:
And what a remarkable half-hour. I thank you so much and thanks to everyone and we will be back soon with another episode of Innovation Matters.
Conclusion:
Innovation Matters is a production of Actual Agency, helping businesses communicate in a changing world. More at www.Actual.Agency.
