Orange Envelopes | Small Business Optimized Marketing > By Design

I believe that I received this morning what may be the single most useless – and infuriating – marketing incentive ever crafted.

Last weekend, Golfsmith opened a golf superstore a mile from my house. As an avid golfer who’s had little time for the game during the past several years, this seemed to be a sign from the golf gods that perhaps I should recommit myself to the game.

So, donning my ugliest pants and my brightest shoes, I wandered over to their new store to see all the expensive new technology that promised to transform my painfully ugly swing into a tour ready game.

For those not familiar with golf, the game is extraordinarily expensive. New drivers typically cost several hundred dollars, and even putters have broken the $200 barrier. Now do the math. There are 14 clubs in a bag. This can get expensive quickly.

Golf marketers know how expensive the game can be, so it made sense for Golfsmith to send email coupons to local customers promising a 15% discount on their next purchase. On a $400 driver, this represented a savings of $60, which is pretty significant, and certainly enough to compel some vacillating golfers to take the plunge and drop a new stick in their bag.

Oops, not so fast, Tiger. If you thought you could use that discount coupon to buy a hot new club, you’d better take a mulligan. It turns out that there was an asterisk next to the promise. Some fine print that really mattered. The exclusions.

The exclusions listed all of the brands that did not qualify for a discount. And the list was extensive.

If you Googled a list of the top golf club manufacturers, you’d get a list that included: Titleist, Ping, TaylorMade, Nike, Cobra, Callaway, Mizuno and Wilson.

If you read the list of Golfsmith’s excluded vendors, you’d get the same list.

Which apparently means that I can buy anything in the store except for a golf club made by any major manufacturer.

I can’t wait to take advantage of the 15% discount on tees and ball markers.

Don’t take things that aren’t yours. 

An admonition so simple that Robert Fulghum included it in his book All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten.

But apparently when it comes to appropriating (a fancy word for stealing) intellectual property, adherence to even the simplest rules can be casually dismissed. Colleges report rampant plagiarism, with studies confirming that nearly 80% of students admit to occasionally lifting text from online sources. So it’s not surprising that in our current digital free-for-all, bloggers will be confronted more frequently with “authors” who pass off other’s work as their own.

Plagiarism 2.0
And this new crop of thieves isn’t just cutting and pasting excerpts from other’s work – they’re claiming authorship of the original work and passing it off as their own. Apparently without any repercussions.

I know. I’m a blogger who’s had dozens of posts written for a previous employer simply assigned a new author and reposted. Which is wrong. And it sucks. And there’s virtually nothing I can do about it short of adopting a regiment of lawyers and shoveling buckets of cash their way while they pursue novel legal precedents that will have precisely no impact on the thieves.

The Scene of the “Crime”
My blog posts at TheJobShopper.com (since renamed TalentAlley.com) dealt primarily with the issues confronted daily by job seekers. How to leverage social media in your job search, how to design a distinctive resume, how to answer the toughest interview questions, how to handle negotiations and other essential topics.

The posts were written from a distinctly personal perspective, almost always incorporating personal stories and detailing personal relationships that amplified each post’s specific topic.

I detailed specific conversations, meetings and instructions that I provided local executives who were undergoing their own job searches. I recounted anecdotes that I collected during nearly 20 years spent working with a national staffing company. And I reported hiring horror and success stories that business owner friends shared with me – not with a randomly assigned author, but with me.

Assign an Author. Any Author.
And now all of these stories and experiences have simply been appropriated by my former employer’s president. His byline attached to nearly 60 examples of writing that he had no hand in crafting, editing or posting. Did he pay for my work? Absolutely. Does that entitle him to assign his name – or anyone else’s name – to work that was not theirs? This is where we differ. They apparently believe that since they paid for the production of the intellectual property contained within each post that they can do anything they want with the content. I don’t agree. But apparently the placement of my ethical bar remains firmly over theirs.

Product innovation is expensive. Too expensive to be mishandled by a careless handoff to your marketing and sales departments at precisely the moment when you could convert interest in your shiny new product into coveted cash generating sales.

I’m amazed – no, actually appalled – at the number of companies who spend tens of thousands of dollars developing a new product, take it to a trade show, gain press recognition and even Best of Show awards and then do absolutely nothing to capitalize on the interest generated or monetize their efforts with a thoughtful sales strategy.

Two recent examples stand out for me:

At last month’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Griffin introduced an iPad mount that screws onto the end of a microphone stand. It’s the perfect solution for me since I like to use my iPad as a teleprompter for online videos that I post to assorted blogs, and the mic stand holder would let me position the iPad directly above the tripod holding my camera.

Apparently I’m not the only one who sees the appeal of  this innovation, since Griffin generated a lot of media mentions including major technology blogs like Gizmodo and tuaw.

Glad You Like Us. Now Go Away.
But heading over to the Griffin website, I discovered that despite its announcement, the product wasn’t available for sale but was Coming Soon. What does that mean? It means that if I want the mic stand mount I have to keep checking back every few days until it actually becomes available. Griffin took no steps to capture my identity to inform me when it becomes available, didn’t ask me for an email address to keep in touch, didn’t  take a pre-order (which I would have paid for) and, in general, did absolutely nothing to connect with me and potentially sell me on this or other Griffin iPad related products.

They wasted an ideal opportunity to convert innovation into sales.

Based on the size of their booth at CES, I’d bet that Griffin spent more than $100,000 to attend the CES and showcase their products, not including the cost of developing the products themselves, yet their  efforts resulted in annoyance and alienation because they failed to implement any method to satisfy customer interest or plan to get their new products out of their development lab and into our hands.

It Gets Worse
As badly as Griffin handled the handoff from innovation to sales, they’re all-stars compared to MacWorld Best of Show Winner Scosche.

At this month’s Macworld Expo, the device manufacturer introduced a terrific innovation that iPod and iPhone users have been clamoring for: a Bluetooth connected pulse monitoring strap that will track your pulse and calories burned throughout your workout.

The product was so innovative that Macworld name the myTrek one of the Best in Show winners and published a lengthy article detailing the product’s features.

Result: Nothing
Who could ask for more? Well, I could. Because I actually tried to visit their website to buy the product. I’ve been waiting months for someone to introduce this precise product to track my workouts so I clicked over to their website and found…nothing.

That’s right. Nothing. Not a product page, not a press release, not a blog post, not a single mention. Confused, I turned to their Search utility and entered myTrek. Again, nothing.

Innovation FAIL
So Scosche invested thousands to develop a highly sought after product integrated with the single most popular mobile phone in the world, they introduced it at the biggest Apple show in the country and gained Best in Show honors yet they failed not only to promote the product on their corporate home page, but failed to create a web page for the product at all.

And the only thing truly surprising is that they’re not the only innovation-focused company that treats its products with such disregard.

Corporate innovation is intended to produce results. Results that can be measured in dollars collected. There’s simply no excuse for any company to invest in innovation projects yet ignore the revenue  producing potential of those projects by failing to integrate sales and marketing functions from the  start so that the company can maximize the return on their investment and realize the full potential of their innovation.

Friday night was shaping up badly. In addition to turning 50 and learning that I was now eligible to play in my tennis club’s championship in the Seniors (Seniors? Really? At 50?) division, I was down big money in my celebratory poker game.

It was a night of bad beats. Three fives was beaten with three sixes, trip queens was beaten by trip queens with a higher hole card, and a jack high straight was beaten by a queen high straight.

My stack of chips was disappearing faster than a mound of cocaine at Charlie Sheen’s house. I needed help. So I turned to Twitter.

Holding a full house, but running low on chips, I tweeted:

Hoping Quicken Loans can come through quickly while I’m holding a full house. That’s enough collateral isn’t it?

And come through they did.

Obviously monitoring the Twitterverse for mentions of their name, I received a response:

@quickenloans Poker, huh? anything I can help with?

Now it was obvious that both they and I knew that my original tweet was in jest, but the wonderful thing was that they played along. They responded precisely the way my original tweet was intended: with levity. They showed their human side, not their corporate veneer. And by doing so, they distinguished themselves from every other company that would have monitored Twitter for mentions of their company name and sent some canned and inappropriate marketing pitch in response.

Quicken Loans made themselves memorable simply by having a real person respond exactly as they should: personably.

Now why don’t you do the same?

Update: Quicken Loans has been monitoring my posts this afternoon also and followed up with thanks for the positive post and friendly birthday wishes. The result: I won’t forget them, and they’ll be at at the top of my list should I need financing in the future and they’ll be included in my Social Media Studio seminar series detailing successful social media case studies. I love a good story, and they delivered one.

When most people think of innovation and innovative companies, they mistakenly envision creative geniuses holed up in research labs pursuing that Eureka moment when they miraculously discover The Idea.

You know The Idea. The one truly transformative, groundbreaking and revolutionary business concept that will change not just a company, but an entire industry. That’s The Idea.

The problem is, The Idea really isn’t about innovation at all. In fact, ideas are actually pretty easy to come by. Spend some time at an entrepreneurs conference and you’ll hear at least a dozen ideas that you’re convinced can be the next Google, or Groupon, or whatever tomorrow’s raging hot company is.

Talk to any company that set up an idea forum for their employees to contribute to. They’ll they’ll you that they have so many great ideas that it’s damaging their capacity for innovation. With so many ideas – including those that are genuinely brilliant – to sift through, analyze, prioritize and assess, actual innovation bogs down.

Ideas are a Commodity
Ideas aren’t the problem. Execution is.

Those companies that you envision as innovation leaders aren’t brilliant because of The Idea, they’re brilliant because they had the nerve, the talent and the resilience to actually develop, refine and launch The Idea. They took The Idea from boardroom to showroom.

The Life and Death of an Idea
Several years ago, I witnessed both the inception of The Idea and its ultimate demise while running a company in the packaging industry.

As the manufacturer of label applicators (the machines that apply labels to products), I worked with companies that had special material handling issues that we were uniquely positioned to solve. While working with a major memory card manufacturer in San Diego, we were confronted with a production bottleneck that centered around label application.

The manufacturer was set up for short runs of memory cards with different memory capacities and needed to run 500 16GB cards, then run 1000 8GB cards, then run 300 32GB cards. The problem was that automatic labeling systems took over 20 minutes to changeover from one roll of labels to the next and was killing their productivity, forcing them to resort to hand applying labels to each tiny card.

Ask Why Not?
While brainstorming with my engineers, we asked a question that had never been asked before: what if we changed out the entire labeling head instead of the roll of labels? What if the labeling head itself were made as an interchangeable component instead of a fixed component?

This was The Idea. There was nothing like it in the industry and we had the engineering ability to rapidly prototype, gain proof of concept and ultimately execute The Idea.

And it worked. Product changeover time was reduced from 20 minutes to as little as 40 seconds. The client was so eager to get several machines that they paid the initial development costs in exchange for exclusive rights to the system for one year.

Death Was Swift
Then I sold the company and witnessed how The Idea can meet a swift and brutal demise, despite its promise and potential.

As novel as The Idea was, its brilliance would lay in its execution. The interchangeable labeling heads weren’t enough to guarantee success. The Idea’s success lay in its ability to handle and present the memory cards to the labeling head, to apply the labels with 1/32″ precision and to collect the labeled cards at the end of the process. Nothing that devoted engineers couldn’t resolve.

However, as most companies find out, conceiving The Idea is the sexy, fun and exciting part, but execution determines The Idea’s ultimate success and requires months of boring and tedious work to perfect in the real world. Ultimately, The Idea died when the new business owners declared that they were in the production business, not the innovation business and abandoned The Idea’s refinement process.

And now The Idea awaits another company to discover its potential and put it into production. Or maybe we weren’t as innovative as we thought, and we were just creative thinkers with an idea, not The Idea.

Update:

I found this raw footage of the labeling system on an archived hard disk. Note that even with my clumsiness in loading the labeling head, I still get it locked on in about 20 seconds.

AT&T Wireless suffocates innovation

I was reminded directly and personally this past week of the single most suffocating business phrase that stifles innovation and destroys your customer experience:

“It’s our policy.”

The culprit was AT&T Wireless, until this week the sole provider of iPhone wireless service. The issue: I wanted my college attending son to become responsible for his own phone bill and remove his line from my family wireless plan.

From a customer perspective, this should be a relatively quick and easy transaction. We were both in the store, so permission wasn’t an issue, there was no new equipment involved and we were keeping the same phone number. All we wanted was to change the billing name and address from mine to his.

AT&T’s response: that will be $500.

That’s right. AT&T wanted a $500 deposit, to be held for one year, to change the billing responsibility to my 19 year old son.

Putting that into perspective, his monthly plan was $39.95, so AT&T wanted him to essentially prepay an entire year for the privilege of remaining with AT&T.

Why? It’s their policy.

Since most 19 year olds have not yet established credit, AT&T is concerned that they will sign up for an account, get a new phone then disappear without paying their bill. AT&T would then be out the cost of a new phone (very expensive if it’s an iPhone) and whatever minutes they racked up. I understand their dilemma.

What I don’t understand is their adherence to a strict policy despite circumstances that clearly demonstrate its ridiculousness.

These include:

1. they were dealing with a long-term client whose total billings exceed $15,000. I’m pretty certain that I fit the profile of their ideal client: many devices, heavy data usage, big monthly bill.
2. there was no equipment involved. My son owns his phone, so there was no risk of AT&T losing hundreds of dollars in equipment.
3. the amount they were requesting exceeded his anticipated annual bill.

But, “it’s our policy” prevented them from considering reasonable options that would have protected their interests while addressing a highly valued customer’s concerns.

Had they been innovative and truly concerned with their client’s experience they could have:

1. enabled me to bear co-responsibility for my son’s bill (I volunteered, and they refused)
2. reduced the deposit amount to a reasonable fee of $100-150 (I requested this and they refused)
3. put a cap on the monthly usage so that his bill could never exceed $100 without payment or his service would be shut off (they certainly have this capacity, but refused)

OR… they could have examined my lengthy history with their company, taken into consideration my desire to establish my son as a direct client with their service, considered their near absence of risk and done the right thing: transfer the number, welcome my son as a new valued client and congratulate me for having a responsible son striking out on his own and taking care of his personal obligations. How many businesses wouldn’t welcome a client’s effort to introduce their son or daughter as a potential long-term client? AT&T could have elevated an ordinary transaction into a memorable rite of passage.

Instead, their adherence to “policy” destroyed my limited goodwill towards AT&T, will compel my son to switch carriers in a few months when his contract expires and will propel me to examine Verizon as an alternate service provider when my contract expires later this year.

The cost of their insistence that nothing can shake them from “our policy”? In addition to my personal enmity and determination to inform as many people as possible to their miserly and miserable customer service, when I shift my service to another provider, they will lose thousands of dollars a year on voice and data from six different devices.

Because it’s my policy to cease doing business with inflexible, short-sighted and uncaring companies.

Oregon football tonight combines two of my favorite things: the national football championship game and Nike innovation. And, believe me, there is no way Oregon would be playing in the BCS championship game without Nike’s passionate involvement in the Oregon program.

For most of my life, college football programs attracted and retained talent largely on the basis of their reputation. The college powerhouses remained largely unchanged from year to year. For those of us who grew up humming Boomer Sooner or admiring the steadfast simplicity of Alabama’s field presence, all was good. Year after year, these successful programs could count on attracting fresh recruits and replacement talent due solely to their prominent reputations.

So, what’s a poor doormat program like Oregon to do when facing in conference rivals like USC, UCLA and Stanford? Without a Rose Bowl appearance since the Eisenhower administration, and a lengthy record of on-field futility, the Oregon Ducks decided to outimagine their gridiron opponents. Not on the field, but in the recruiting trenches.

Oregon embarked on an innovative program to become the most recognizable, technologically advanced and, quite simply, the coolest collegiate football program in the country.

They decided that all those historic, legacy football programs could keep their history. Penn State generic uniforms? Snooze. USC’s cardinal and gold? Keep ‘em. Michigan’s maize and blue? Yawn.

Oregon fields a different uniform every single week. They never wear the same combination in the same football season (and there’s even a website that tracks every week’s uniform combinations). They have entire tractor trailers devoted to inventory of every color component of every uniform. 15 years ago, Oregon was green and yellow. This year they’re any combination of carbon fiber, black, neon green, white, silver, dark green, yellow and grey.

They receive hypercool products directly from Nike’s Innovation Lab, before any competitor, collegiate or professional, is even aware they exist. An entirely new “uniform system” that incorporates the latest lightweight, moisture wicking fabrics with Flywire strands to increase their strength while reducing their weight, integrated lightweight Deflex padding enabling the players to run faster without sacrificing any protection, receiver gloves that display the Oregon “O” when the hands are positioned to catch the ball, and an all new football cleat that incorporates the Flywire construction and introduces a new cleat pattern to promote speed.

You can argue that the Nike gadgetry is all marketing puffery and has no impact on how the players actually perform, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the 18 year old Southern Californian running back who’s picking his preferred football program thinks all the technology, the choices, the national exposure, the affiliation with Nike HQ and their Innovation Lab is the ultimate in cool. So cool that he’s willing to trek to Oregon to go to school instead of UCLA.

Great football programs are built on talent, and Nike’s founder and Oregon alum Phil Knight created the ultimate player draw: unattainable Nike swag. Every week. Showcased on national tv.

And, by the way, with just hours to go before tonight’s kickoff, we still don’t know for sure what Oregon will wear on the field. White pants, grey or black? The Beatles never generated this much pre-show anticipation.

I’m rooting for Nike tonight. And hoping Oregon pulls it out, too.

Examining Sony’s abject failure to make any impact in the personal MP3 player market, noted author and blogger David Akers concluded that Sony’s failure was largely due to unfortunate bad timing, not Sony’s strategic decisions or lack of innovative thinking.

Having examined Sony’s repeated failures to exploit their overwhelming market positions and brand magic to gain traction and market share in personal MP3 players, notebook computers, e-books, digital cameras and flat screen tvs, I believe that Sony’s failures can be attributed almost exclusively to their inability to incorporate design thinking into their product conception, development and execution and a singular reliance upon hardware appearance and technical distinction to define themselves with consumers.

That previous sentence was personally painful to write. I’ve been a Sony devotee since the early 1980′s. I’ve owned virtually every type of media device that they’ve ever created, starting with the cassette playing Walkman, the CD playing Walkman, the mini-Disc playing and recording Walkman, digital cameras, digital video cameras, ebooks and VAIO notebooks. I was a Sony fanboy before the term was even coined.

And I was perpetually disappointed.

Not by the quality of their products, which was uniformly excellent, but by their perpetual embrace of proprietary standards and refusal to open their technology ecosystem to their industrial compatriots. They did not play well with others.

Sony cameras worked only with the Sony MemoryStick, a media format adopted by exactly zero electronics manufacturers. So, while other PC users could slip their SD memory cards directly into a slot in the side of their PC, Sony users had to perform an intermediary step and find a USB dongle with a Memory Stick slot. But, since the quality of the pictures was great, I put up with the inconvenience.

Engaging with the Sony video cam was significantly worse. The camera would only connect to a PC with a FireWire port, not the universally available USB port. But, since I had a FireWire enabled VAIO, I was OK. Until I imported the video and discovered that Sony would only import the video in a proprietary Sony file format that could not be edited in any third party movie editing software program.

Their VAIO notebook introduced similar user frustrations. Although my VAIO was a gorgeously designed unit encased in a distinctive metallic purple, Sony simply refused to play well with third party accessories and ultimately had to be retired in favor of an HP tablet computer that promised to behave better.

And Sony’s recent foray into the ebook market did nothing to reclaim their previously held mantle as developers of the best designed electronics in the world. Although their ebook was visually distinctive, solidly manufactured and a pleasure to read, it enraged its users with its needlessly complex steps necessary to load content onto the ebook. Relying, as always, on a proprietary PC -based software platform to display and deliver ebook content, Sony infuriated Mac users who had no ability to load content on the Sony ebook. And even when I did load the proprietary Sony software on a Windows partition on my Mac, the software was so poorly designed, buggy and difficult to use that the entire experience of using their ebook was irreparably diminished.

It’s my decades of experience with Sony’s failure to deliver a single consumer focused, delightfully engaging and thoughtfully designed user experience that convinces me that Mr. Akers’ conclusion is dead wrong and will only provide another excuse for Sony to hide behind.

Sony’s problems with the MP3 players wasn’t that they mistimed the market. It’s that they never conceived the market that Apple imagined and created. It never occurred to them to create an absolutely delightful device AND a surrounding user environment that included finding music, listening to music, buying music, sharing music and syncing music. Apple didn’t win the MP3 player war because they timed the market better. They invented an entirely new immersive mobile music experience that just happened to rely on the iPod as the handheld component necessary to provide mobile music.

For Apple, it wasn’t about the hardware. For Sony, it’s always about nothing but the hardware.

For proof, simply look at the litany of missed opportunities that should have been directly in Sony’s sweet spot: game players as mobile phones (Sony missed it entirely, while the Apple iPhone is now the world’s largest selling portable gaming platform, eclipsing the multi-year headstart of Sony’s PSP), notebook computers (Sony’s insistence on incorporating proprietary components relegated them to single digit market share), MP3 players ( a market that Sony owned and surrendered entirely), digital cameras (again, an insistence on proprietary components limited their appeal, and they’re now an also ran), ebooks (they had the early lead with a gorgeous product that made the Kindle look like a cheap plastic toy, but again Sony’s insistence on proprietary software and file formats allowed Amazon’s Kindle to grab a dominant position they will not relinquish) digital music sales (Sony has an enormous catalog, but their feeble attempts to sell digitally were hampered by proprietary software and file formats, fanatical concern for piracy and a miserable user experience in finding, buying and syncing music.)

Every failure in every major segment can be attributed to the same institutional arrogance, intransigence and strategic ineptitude that has defined Sony for over 30 years. They believe they are wonderful technology designers because they produce visually distinctive products. But physical design simply isn’t sufficient to create an entirely new market and deliver an exceptional user experience.

Sony didn’t fail to extend their domination from portable cassette and CD players to MP3 players because of timing. They failed because they lacked vision. They perceived the market for mobile music as just another pretty device. Apple proved that the market actually wanted a thoughtful and delightful music experience. The difference between the two is software, not hardware. And Sony has never demonstrated nor developed the capacity to envision and create a software experience that delivered more than frustration, confusion and exasperation.

In the technology arena, there are several competitors who strike fear into the hearts of their competitors: Apple, Microsoft, and Google so dominate their technology sectors, that entrepreneurs and investors will intentionally avoid any attempt at direct competition with these behemoths.

But, as evidenced by last week’s Fortune list of the 20 dumbest business moments of 2010, being big doesn’t guarantee market success.

While Apple had a banner year and generated an entire new computing segment with its iPad tablet, Google had three major failures with their Buzz service, Nexus One mobile phone and GoogleTV, and Microsoft killed their Kin mobile phones just over a month after their widely hailed, billion dollar launch.

What each of these product disasters had in common wasn’t a necessarily a lack of innovation, but an absence of design appreciation and the essential need to delight and amaze their users with a products simplicity and utility.

Size Doesn’t Guarantee Success
In fact, I believe that many large companies believe that they can compel the success of their new ideas through the application of brute marketing force. After all, who is going to tell Microsoft that their social media friendly phones will fail if Microsoft is willing to commit $1 billion to their launch? Did I mention that they’re social media friendly? How could they fail in a Facebook world?

Easy.

Just like Google’s Buzz and GoogleTV, Microsoft’s Kin phones delivered miserable user experiences. They were too complex. Too difficult to use. They violated users’ assumptions about how things should work without offering a better alternative, just a different alternative.

Ideas Are Easy
What these failures demonstrate is that coming up with a creative idea for a product is actually the easy part. The hard part is selecting the right idea and implementing it exquisitely.

As a design company whose culture is rooted in delivering exceptional user experiences, Apple hit another home run not just with its conception of a touch-controlled tablet computer, but with its execution of a thoroughly delightful and intuitively simple device that resonated with virtually every user who picked it up.

Apple relied not only on its genius for creative concepts, but on its organization, its internal processes and its metrics in determining what products to pursue and when they’re ready for release.

It’s not their size (which recently surpassed a $300 billion market cap) that fuels their success, but their innovative business model.

Culture Trumps Strategy
Microsoft and Google may rival Apple in size, but what they lack is the design culture that infuses Apple. Microsoft may try to copy specific Apple successes (see their attempt to replicate Apple retail outlets) but without the corporate DNA that fuels innovation and insists on delivering memorable user experiences, their duplicative efforts are nearly guaranteed to disappoint.

Google has fallen into the same trap, believing that their dominant success in the search engine market will transfer just as easily into any technology venture they elect to pursue. But, despite being named one of the most innovative companies in the country by both Fast Company and Business Week, their inclusion seems reliant upon their intentions to enter new markets, not their ability to actually succeed in any new venture. At some point, the magic of their search engine prowess will fade and their perception as an innovative company will become dependent upon delivering memorable, exciting and successful new products and services.

Will this be the year?