Apple just introduced its new, foldable iPhone Duo. Whether you think this is fabulous or a future flop, Apple has reignited focus on the intertwined roles of innovation and marketing.
The New York Times story on the new iPhone Duo focuses on whether or not people will buy a mobile phone with a suggested retail price of $1,999. The NYT story did not examine Apple’s ability to innovate and market that innovation successfully.
In today’s world, it is no longer possible to separate brand strategy from imagination and innovation. Apple has always led in both. When the first iPhone hit the market, the innovation was not just the physical phone. We were mesmerized by the exquisitely designed white box packaging. Opening the box signaled that something new and desirable lay inside. Amazing marketing.
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Increasing top-line revenue growth through innovation is essential to brand success. Brand success demands innovation. And innovation success demands marketing. Innovation without marketing, my friends, is a secret.
The intersection of innovation and marketing is the secret ingredient to enduring success. Apple knows how to deliver innovation and marketing.
What is brand management’s role in innovation and marketing?
Brand management is about designing and delivering brand experiences. Again, this is what Apple does so well.
Apple understands that consumers do not differentiate strategy from execution. To the consumer, the execution is the strategy. So creativity must actively participate in the strategic development and design of the promised brand experience. Yes, strategic design.
Brand design is the creative fusion of brand strategy and executional creativity for designing innovative, relevant, and differentiated brand experiences that satisfy the needs of consumers.
Creativity is not an output; it is an input. AI does not apply here because true, original creativity is (currently) a human gift.
Here are seven New Rules for generating organic growth through innovative, brand-designed experiences.
New Rule #1: Stop trying to create a creative process. There is no such thing as a creative process.
Organizations are, well, organized. Businesses look for a process for everything. There is a manufacturing process, a product process, a financial planning process, a personnel process, a site location process, and so on and so on. According to process mindsets, with the right creative process, great creative ideas will come out the other end.
It is Biblical: the processes beget steps, steps beget tools, tools beget templates.
Process management of creativity does not encourage creativity. Process management stifles creativity. Process prevents creativity by constriction; confined courses of action choke creativity to death.
The process management of creativity is an organizational muffler. A brilliant idea enters one end but exits the other end as a dull, muted, unrecognizable, uncreative, unimaginative idea that bears little, if any, resemblance to the original idea.
There is no such thing as a creative process. People are creative; processes are not.
New Rule #2: Abandon the off-base belief that everyone can be creative.
Companies believe they can create creative employees. Brands hire creative trainers to run creative training seminars that promise to make uncreative people creative. Creative trainers promise to release the creative soul from anyone who walks through the door.
Managers buy into the belief that through the magic of a fun-filled, offsite meeting with games, flip charts, pantomimes, and rainbows of Post-it Notes, creativity will be unleashed in every employee.
Please do not fall into this expensive, time-consuming trap.
Mozart once remarked to a student, “I can teach you to play the piano, but I cannot teach you to write a great symphony.”
If you want different outcomes, you need to hire and retain people who think differently and have a different mindset. The iconic 1997 Apple tagline was Think Different. This applies internally and externally.
An organization cannot jump-start the innovation process by training the typical business executive to be creative. Creativity requires creative people. These creative people are already in your organization, and they are not named Claude or Rufus.
Jeff Tweedy of the rock band Wilco said in an interview with WFUV, “I like to think that when I go to bed at night, I have contributed something that I didn’t know about when I woke up in the morning.”
Which brings us to New Rule #3.
New Rule #3: Great ideas do not care where they come from.
No location has the exclusive license to creative ideas.
While we were embedded in McDonald’s for the now-classic turnaround beginning in 2003, we solicited ideas from anywhere.
By opening up the creative opportunity to locations outside of the city of Chicago, McDonald’s broke through the clutter of consumer communications with groundbreaking outdoor advertising from Brazil, truly wonderful packaging from England, fabulous retail concepts from France, innovative approaches to the menu from Australia, and the creative idea underlying “I’m lovin’ it” campaign conceptualized in Germany.
Democratize the source of creative ideas. Great ideas do not care where they come from.
New Rule #4: Synthesis triumphs over analysis.
Business schools teach, and companies follow, the subtle allure of superior analytics. Business schools believe that superior analysis will reveal a great creative insight, leading to a great innovation.
Analysis generates an understanding of what has happened and why. Analysis is backward-looking. When you ask AI a question, the answer is based on what has happened and what is happening now. When you open Amazon, the first page shows products you might like based on your previous searches and purchases.
Dissection, inspection, retrospection: analytics cannot help set your direction for the future. Creative breakthroughs are not born out of analysis. Analysis is about taking things apart. Synthesis integrates, rearranges, and reorders familiar elements in unfamiliar, creative ways.
True innovation and strategic value come from synthesizers who can draw together information from multiple fields. Synthesis takes craftspeople, artists, engineers, scientists, connoisseurs who derive pattern, form, and foresight from fragments of seemingly unconnected information and observation
Think about this: synthesizers like ambiguity, analogy, paradox. Synthesizers are curious. Synthesizers make the strange familiar and the familiar strange.
Synthesis will triumph over analysis. Synthesis is essential for planning the brand’s future.
New Rule #5: Move from asking, “What can we forecast?” to asking “What are the future possibilities?”
We base forecasts on hindsight, extrapolating trends into the future. Innovation requires foresight, not mere forecasts. Hindsight is understanding what happened after it happened. Foresight is the ability to predict what will happen or be needed in the future.
Yes, foresight is risky because it cannot be tested; foresight cannot be evaluated. Foresight means there can be no exact proof that this is the right direction. But foresight is not guesswork. It is insightful, informed judgments about the future.
Ford gave up on the minivan because it did not fit neatly into existing views of product segmentation. Chrysler made the minivan an iconic brand symbol. Electrolux had the idea of a bagless vacuum cleaner before Dyson. Electrolux engineers said “No.” Dyson envisioned the future possibilities of bagless, changing the marketplace.
Apple’s Steve Jobs was a passionate advocate that consumer-friendly, brand-designed, innovative products can not only revitalize a brand but change an entire industry. He showed foresight by creating the iPod and iTunes. This includes the iPod, iMac, iPhone, and Apple retail stores.
Akio Morita of Sony also had foresight: the foresight in 1979 to see that people wanted music they could hold in their hand, rather than being in a room with a stereo system or lugging a boom box: the Sony Walkman.
Move from forecasts to foresight. Foresight means seeing the future in a way that others fail to see.
Brand should strengthen competitive position, pricing power, and enterprise value. The Blake Project helps make that happen.
New Rule #6: Harmony is the enemy of creativity.
Consensus encourages everyone a chance to turn creativity into conformity. Everyone can put in their 2 cents and, often, the contribution isn’t even worth two cents.
A creative culture does not mean creating a culture of creative harmony. The opposite is true. The creative process lives off what Jerry Hirschberg, the founding director of Nissan Design International, called “creative abrasion.” Creativity is divergent thinkers arguing and agreeing all at the same time. Creativity is dissenting viewpoints discussed, harnessing that friction.
Create an environment conducive to creative friction. To generate innovative ideas, brands must allow for dissent and debate.
Brands need unconventional, off-the-wall people who are the source of fresh thinking and innovation. In the words of the 60s Yippie iconoclast Abbie Hoffman, “There are organizers and outlaws.” Learn to embrace the outlaws within our midst.
Organizations breed organizers. Serendipitous creativity by outlaws is outlawed. Be receptive and accepting of unfamiliar, imaginative ideas created by outlaws. Outlaws challenge the status quo; outlaws create friction.
Brands hate friction and conflict. Brand organizations want operations to work smoothly. With creativity, smooth is out; friction is in. Creative friction is the energy source of creativity. As Jerry Hirschberg liked to say, “Without friction there can be no spark.”
Passionate individuals passionately imagine possibilities. Choose commitment over compromise.
New Rule #7: Cultural change requires cultural leadership.
Leaders who create an environment conducive to innovation are key to success. Have senior executives and a Board who are truly passionate about innovation and producing it with quality. Without support and cover from the top, innovation efforts become lost in the shuffle of short-term demands.
Apple has always had a culture conducive to creativity, both top-down and bottom-up. W.L. Gore is another example of a brand where openness to ideas matters.
Leadership has a responsibility to create a culture that can recognize opportunities to reinvent the future, not just manage it. Profitable, enduring growth demands innovative brand-designed experiences.
But, there are two creativity killers to be avoided at all costs. Those who fear innovation use these killer questions to avoid responsibility.
- Who has done this before? As an innovation, it has not been created before. Brands that focus on this creativity killer are terrified of failure. Apple failed with Lisa in 1983 but had a huge success with iMac. Do not fear failure. Learn from failure.
- How do we know our innovation is ready? Are we ready? True, there is no perfect idea. But lengthy development times are a killer. Contemplation is for monks. Decisions based on informed judgment are for leaders. Exercise judgment. Leaders weigh informed action against inaction and take the leap of faith.
Innovation takes courage, commitment, conviction. Have the courage to be a brand that does not strangle great ideas. Support great innovations with great marketing.
The revered marketing guru, Peter Drucker, said, “Marketing and innovation create results; all the rest are costs.” Apple has proven that innovation and marketing lead to enduring profitable growth.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Joan Kiddon, Partner, The Blake Project, Author of The Paradox Planet: Creating Brand Experiences For The Age Of I
At The Blake Project, we help leaders turn brand into a disciplined driver of financial performance — strengthening pricing power, competitive position, and enterprise value. Email us to start a conversation about enduring profitable growth. For The EBITDA.
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