Which comes first, marketing or innovation?

Let’s talk about….. innovation and marketing

We’ve lost count of the number of founders we’ve met who are absolutely convinced their innovation is needed. And the vast majority of them are right.

They’ve experienced the problem first-hand. They’ve spotted an inefficiency, identified an unmet need or found a better way of doing something. They’ve invested huge amounts of time, energy and intellectual effort developing a solution that genuinely has the potential to create value.

But there is often the assumption that because the problem is real and the solution is good, customers will be queuing up. They won’t just buy, they’ll make the business case internally, navigate procurement, overcome organisational barriers and drive adoption themselves. Success is therefore perceived as largely a question of visibility.

In short, when our customers know about it, they will buy it.

And if people aren’t buying, we turn on the marketing, correction, the comms tap. More promotion, more digital activity, more social media or more outbound.

The challenge for many start-ups is that they underestimate the role marketing plays in helping innovation succeed.

The founders I speak to aren’t dismissive of marketing, quite the opposite. But somewhere along the way, marketing became the thing that happens after the product has been built and at worse when they can afford it, rather than the discipline that helps shape what gets built in the first place.

Building Confidence in the Innovation

Which feels more tangible: a product or service you can see, touch, use and experience, or an understanding of how customers are likely to behave under a particular set of circumstances?

The former demonstrates progress in every action. Marketing, on the other hand, can feel far less tangible, particularly in the early stages when datasets are limited and customer research focuses primarily on validating the solution rather than understanding the behaviours that drive adoption.

Yet the commercial success of innovation has always depended on more than the innovation itself. Everett Rogers explored this extensively in his work on the diffusion of innovations. Adoption is influenced not only by the merits of a new idea, but by how potential adopters perceive its relevance, advantages and compatibility with their existing behaviours.

Most founders begin by asking whether a problem exists, yet to gain sales we need to truly understand how customers define that problem, what alternatives they currently use, what barriers might prevent adoption and what would need to happen for them to change their behaviour.

Predicting the barriers to purchase and addressing them before the customer says no is the greatest value marketing can deliver to start-ups.

Marketing is fundamentally bringing the customer lens to the innovation and the business to identify and remove barriers to purchase wherever possible – not lack of awareness, not pricing, not ease of purchase, not ease of implementation nor customer service.

A familiar story

Your innovation is ready and you go to market. The feedback you receive from your first five customers differs wildly. They want different features, delivered in different ways. They have different teams who will need to assess the product and come on board. Different budget authorities, different buying cycles, that guy in purchasing who has to put everything out to tender, whether there is a true alternative to your innovation or not. Particularly in B2B environments, the user, buyer, budget holder and decision-maker are often different people, each with their own priorities and concerns.

Start-ups rarely have the resources to recover from slow adoption.

Cash is burnt and runways shorten. What starts as a problem of adoption soon becomes a problem of finance. Budgets are cut, investment in people and capability is reduced, and the business can find itself trapped in a cycle that becomes increasingly difficult to break.

The strongest founders I’ve worked with think beyond TAM, SAM & SOM. They talk about pen profiles, customer avatars, they know who their customers are, where to find them, how they will engage with them and ultimately why they will buy. They understand that innovation is the starting point of creating a business.

Questions Every Founder Should Be Able to Answer

Before investing the next £, building the next feature or pursuing the next customer conversation, founders should be able to answer a handful of fundamental questions with confidence.

• Who experiences this problem most acutely?
• How are they solving it today?
• What is the true cost of that existing solution?
• What would motivate them to change?
• What might prevent them from changing?
• Who influences the purchasing decision?
• Who ultimately controls the budget?
• How long is the journey from interest to adoption?

The objective is not to have every answer perfectly mapped from day one. Markets evolve, customer needs shift and assumptions will always be tested. The objective is to reduce uncertainty before significant time, money and effort are committed.

When those questions can be answered with evidence rather than assumption, innovation becomes easier to commercialise, forecasting becomes more reliable and growth becomes far more predictable.

Without customers, there is no need for innovation

The reality is that innovation and marketing are not separate conversations. One cannot thrive without the other. Marketing provides the customer lens that validates not only whether a problem exists, but whether it is important enough for someone to change behaviour, allocate budget and commit to a new way of working.

In FMCG where we cut our teeth, marketing comes first. Customer discovery and validation drives the business case before significant investment is made in development. Consumer brands understand customers deeply enough to build products they will adopt.

The earlier customer insight is embedded into decision-making, the greater the confidence that development effort, investment and resources are being directed towards something the market genuinely values.

Founders gain huge benefit by recognising that marketing is not the final stage of commercialisation. It is a critical input into innovation itself.

We stand by our convictions, we must innovate in a way that creates demand, drives adoption and builds a sustainable business. Because without innovation there is little reason for customers to change, and without customers there is little reason for innovation to exist. The two must go hand in hand from day one.