Why is innovation so hard to sell?

Gil: That's the title of a recent posting at Dave Pollard's always intriguing Save the World blog.

It's a critically important question since "selling innovation" -- or nurturing, accelerating, extending innovation -- is one of the core tasks of sustainability advocates. (Not the only one, of course. Innovations not only need to be created, they need to be embraced and embedded in day-to-day practice, which can be even more challenging.)

Dave offers four reasons:
  1. People don't like to change.
  2. Everyone thinks they can do it themselves.
  3. It's a "dragon" issue, so it involves a lot of trust.
  4. It requires understanding of how and why the market has moved on without you.
Darn these fickle and irrational customers!

What's happened here? We've defined the [customer] demographic and affinity segments in terms of what we have to sell, rather than how these affinity groups define themselves. And we've defined their needs in terms of the features and attributes we can offer, instead of much more broadly in the emotional terms that the customers define and recognize their needs themselves.... Once we get fixed in our mind what our demographic targets are and what needs we're filling, we start to define our customer in the context of what we can sell to them, and we can't shake that mindset. Meanwhile, the customers are defining themselves in completely new ways constantly -- as the culture changes, as they get older, as their needs and wants evolve. While we were focused on them, the customers have left us behind.
It's a variant on the age-old admonition to sell benefits, not features -- an obvious truth, one that everybody knows, and one that's more honored in the breach.

Sharon Drew Morgen takes the issue a step further, arguing that the challenge isn't learning how to sell, but learning how your customer buys. I'd say that perspective applies to these internal marketing challenges as well.

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Gil Friend, systems ecologist and business strategist, is president and CEO of Natural Logic, Inc. -- offering advisory services and tools that help companies and communities prosper by embedding the laws of nature at the heart of enterprise. Sign up online to receive his monthly column via email. Read Gil's blog here.