What’s New, What Sticks —Sherburne

In the book, they use an example from Ford for its popular F-150 truck. While this, again, is B-to-C, you can get an idea from the example of how you might implement such a process in your own company. The 70 percent was devoted to tried-and-true television and magazine advertising. The 20 percent sustaining innovation was invested in lifestyle magazines in the sporting arena because it is a truck, and even Town & Country, because the F-150 is considered a luxury truck. They note, “Who knows if Town & Country will work? But what if it does? If Ford didn’t explore advertising in this magazine, it would be a loss of opportunity, if the magazine did work better than the alternatives.”

The company still spends 70 percent of its budget on tried-and-true methods, but the 20 percent is spread out over several experimental venues and is measured closely to determine results.

That final 10 percent is something with which you can really have fun. In Ford’s case, they used the 10 percent of their F-150 advertising budget to experiment with online advertising in different venues—not just Kelly Blue Book or cars.com, but reaching out to other online venues to determine whether they would generate awareness and interest in the product.

A couple examples in the printing industry of disruptive innovation that I have recently come across include:

Disruptive Innovation

One vice president of marketing for a printing firm subscribes to an online print bid site, not to respond to the bids, but to see who is out there buying print online, what they are buying and how much. When he sees a company doing a fair amount of buying over the Internet, he researches them, including checking them out in Dunn & Bradstreet. He uses this process to deliver qualified leads to his sales force, at the rate of some 10 to 15 companies per week that he probably would not have known anything about otherwise.