What Role Does Marketing Play in Your Organization?

Is it

Reactive? Does it focus on promoting new initiatives or products developed elsewhere?

Passive? Does it respond to requests for marketplace information to strategy, sales or new product development teams?

Proactive? Does it actively develop marketplace intelligence as inputs to decision-making processes?

A driver? Is it actively engaged in creating new initiatives and developing the necessary insight required for innovative new factor, operational, organizational and marketplace strategies and plans?

Which role should it play?

Radical v incremental innovation

Innovation, writes Patrick Thibodeau, "is the most abused word in tech." A Google search yields 108 million entries and, without even trying, I found more than 20 articles published in the last 24 hours.

Part of the confusion is that few distinguish between radical and incremental innovation. Radical innovations, like the steam engine, the cotton gin, the telephone, the automobile, the computer (quick quiz: when was the first programmable computer invented? - see the end of the post), and penicillin change the structures of societies.

Landing that job

In light of Friday's anemic jobs report, it's clear that competition for open jobs is not going to get any easier.

So how do you get an edge?

Oh brave new world: Re-imagining EVERYTHING

"After 244 years, Encyclopedia Brittanica announced the end of print editions in 2012," notes Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker in what businessinsider.com terms an "incredibly insightful presentation."

While you may already know this, and that Kindle is replacing books, Pinterest is replacing scrapbooks, NetFlix and YouTube are replacing Blockbuster and, one of my personal favorites, Yelp is replacing the Yellow Pages, did you know about:

A quick way to destroy your brand: cut prices, buyback shares, don't innovate

The mattress business is clearly not very restful: Tempur-Pedic's share price has dropped from $87 in April to $22 on Friday, a 66% decline. A colleague suggested I take a look at buying the stock. So I did a bit of research:

Innovation hype

'Companies throw the term "innovation" around but that doesn't mean they are actually changing anything monumental,' writes Leslie Kwoh in "You Call that Innovation?"  Now that this has made the Wall Street Journal, "innovation" has probably reached peak of what the Gartner group calls the "hype cycle," and is likely headed for the "trough of disillusionment." But for those who follow trends, this should be no surprise.