You’re right that this is a stereotype. If you’re implying that this is still true – I’d argue with it. Today, innovation is as sociable as is marketing/branding and the two are working together to achieve significant creative progress.

I wasn’t clear, I guess. I meant that that precision/clarity is true of both. But in innovation language tends to be only accessible to experts, whereas the precision/clarity of marketing is lay precision/clarity. Take the precision of a mathematical theorem statement, an IEEE protocol definition, or the phrase “eigentrust” to describe the workings of Google’s algorithm (very clear and precise to mathematicians and engineers who understand matrix theory, meaningless to others).

Well-defined innovation blue-prints are in fact models of clarity — modern-day Apple couldn’t survive without them and thrives in part because of the success of them. And our friends at IBM live and die by them, for better or worse.

Flip-side, there’s lots of marketing-speak that barely passes for English (often infected with techno-speak, admittedly). Microsoft would be the classic example of this problem, and they are kind enough to produce fresh examples every quarter. Tried to “bing” anything yet?

Otherwise, though, this post is a great meditation on one of Drucker’s best aphorisms. Look forward to the next one.

I agree with your point, except I wouldn’t call it “irrational”… I’d call it “super-rational” or my preferred phrase “narrative rational” (since storytelling is how we integrate the visible and invisible rationalities). This goes beyond reason to the meta decision making of when to listen to your gut and when to listen to your reason, and which leap of faith to make, and when a problem is computationally too complex to allow for strict deterministic reason. We don’t see all the workings of the thinking, but it doesn’t mean it isn’t logical in a subterranean way.

I haven’t finished this train of thought: to finish the analysis, we need to understand profitability in the Drucker sense, as a constraint on business rather than an objective.

You leave me speechless (almost*) with a brilliant exposition on a fundamental of business, starting with a Drucker gem. This piece immediately provokes thought. Bold attempts to provide fresh defintions of customer and innovation!

* Almost, because I am saying a few things here

Both marketing and innovation benefit by and are inhabited by irrational thinking and people operating on faith! Both have a place (and need) for big-ticket/disruptive and small/incremental/mass.

Another interesting dynamic is each needs to contain the other as follows:

If marketing is everything between defining/identifying a need and fulfilling it, simply continuing to meet known needs in predictable ways won’t do, there is need for innovation in marketing.

Similarly innovation by definition involves creative/original ideas translated to practical implementation of those ideas, which always requires marketing of those ideas to a relevant audience.