Challenging Marketing Summaries; Gamification, Collaboration And Innovation

The recent Challenge Series of White Papers I contributed to focused on three topics that are set to test marketers in 2013. The rise of Gamification, the need for Collaboration – and the demands for Innovation. You can download the full white papers from the Benchstone website–  but here are some of the top facts, statistics, comments and quotes from the three papers in the series.

Ten Key Facts From The Challenge Series

1 – Computer games  is now the single biggest sector of the entire entertainment industry. With annual sales of £1.9 Billion it is nearly double the size of the once mighty UK music industry. (Source: Entertainment Retailers Association, 2012)

2 – By 2015 over 50% of global top-2000 organisations are expected to be using gamification techniques within their innovation programmes – and over 70% will be using games mechanics within their retention efforts. (Source: Gartner Enterprise Summit 2011)

3  – Only 16% of CEO’s surveyed by Capgemini say they have the right culture to drive collaboration and innovation. (Source; Capgemini  Report, 2012)

4 – General Electric’s Global Innovation Barometer reported that whilst 86% of top marketers they interviewed worldwide agreed that external partnerships were critical to innovation – only 21% are able to actively build them. (Source: GE Innovation Barometer 2012)

5 – There are 463 million search result pages for the term innovation management and 35,000 books on innovation available from Amazon. (Source: Google & Amazon Search, October 2012)

6 – Capgemini’s Global Innovation Survey reports that 76% of senior executives viewed innovation as a key strategic priority and 46% agreed their businesses needed to focus on new product development. (Source: Capgemini)

7 – 46% of CEO’s said the biggest weakness of marketing department is their lack of understanding of data – and only 25% of marketers are properly reporting on campaign effectiveness (Source: Forrester ‘Marketing Metrics That Matter 2011’)

8 – 56% of marketers cannot measure results from their social media campaigns (Source: Altimeter: ‘Social ROI Cookbook, 2012’)

9 – Over the past five years the need for innovation projects to show a profit has grown from 39% to 50% (Source: McKinsey ‘Making Innovation Structures Work Survey 2012’)

10 – To innovate, organisations are increasingly sharing information across their business; sharing strategic priorities (76%) , knowledge (77%) and research (69%)

Top Quotes And Comments From The Challenge Series

“With the ever more acute targeting of audience segments, gamification already contains detailed profiling insight to ensure the efficacy. The use of profiles during the planning provides clear direction for crucial areas such as gender, demographic and cultural variances” – Duncan Thomas, Pomegranate Group.

” Beth Comstock, CMO of General Electric summarises it beautifully when she says – ‘we used to think we could do it all ourselves but that’s not how the world works any more” – Andrew Armour, Benchstone Limited.

“You have to come back to what the business wants from collaboration.  Most key relationships fail because of a lack of those key soft skills – which are hard to measure around” – Stephen Hemmings

” To innovate people have to realise it’s not all up to them to have that one blinding moment of genius. As the science author, Stephen Johnson says ‘chance favours the connected mind’ “ – Andrew Armour, Benchstone Limited.

“The use of data sounds clinical – but this stuff creates pictures, patterns landscapes which we can view. When you introduce analysis points – that relate to bottom line and brand impacts we have found people are more receptive to bigger strategic thinking” – Duncan Thomas, Pomegranate Group.

“There is a lot of evidence that the most effective creative environment is a small and well focused team. Interestingly though, one with  a little bit of tension within it tends to perform the best.” – Paul Sloane, Destination-Innovation

“Lateral thinking looks at approaching a problem from a different way. As Edward de Bono says, ‘you cannot go in a new direction if you are continually looking at the sane old one’. So, no amount of incremental changes to aeroplane design would ever get you to the creation of a helicopter.” – Paul Sloane, Destination-Innovation

“More than ever, marketing leaders need to prove their department is still the home of creative pioneers – managing new thinking, brand innovation, product development and cultural change” –  Andrew Armour, Benchstone Limited.

If you have a top marketing topic that you have investigated and would like to contribute to the next edition of The Challenge Series please contact Andrew Armour. Thanks to the 2012 Challenge Series contributors and partners; Duncan Thomas, Stephen Hemmings and Paul Sloane and the team from Pomegranate Group.

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