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JULY 03, 2014

ARTICLE
MARKETING
Innovation Is
Marketing’s Job, Too
by Beth Comstock

This document is authorized for use only in Fernando S?nchez's Diplomado Marketing 2017 course at Universidad de Desarrollo (UDD), from July 2017 to September 2017.
 MARKETING

Innovation Is Marketing’s
Job, Too
by Beth Comstock
JULY 03, 2014

When I took over as chief marketing officer at GE, the mandate from CEO Jeff Immelt was to make
marketing a vital operating function that could drive organic growth. We realized early on that it
wouldn’t be enough for marketers just to focus on advertising and external messaging. We were in a
unique position to integrate ideas and teams across the company, and to draw insights from the
outside world. So we signed up to fight in a bigger way for the market and GE’s place in it.

GE’s best path to organic growth is to continue the world-changing innovation it has always been
known for. The ethos of restless invention has driven us since the days of Thomas Edison. In
marketing, we resolved to fuel that innovation, and also to make our own efforts as creative and
valuable as the products coming out of our R&D labs.

Now, after more than a decade of experimentation, I can share the formula we’ve developed. Tested
and proven at GE, it might be similarly effective for other marketers looking to create value and drive
innovation in their businesses.

Go to new places. GE’s marketers have to be explorers, seeking out new places and bettering our
understanding of what people need in every corner of the globe. We’ve found this to be true across
industries, but particularly in health care. It’s wonderful to be trusted to create sophisticated
products for highly trained physicians at world-class medical centers. But if we also want to compete
in the world’s fastest growing markets, we also need to see that, in many places, power supplies are
intermittent and the medical professionals interacting with patients are mainly midwives and
practitioners with limited training. Marketers can provide that kind of insight and fight for better
outcomes for customers in the markets we serve.

COPYRIGHT © 2014 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 2

This document is authorized for use only in Fernando S?nchez's Diplomado Marketing 2017 course at Universidad de Desarrollo (UDD), from July 2017 to September 2017.
 Here’s an example of what can happen when we do: GE now sells ultrasound machines that are
portable and durable enough to simply be trekked in to wherever they are needed. Using them is
almost as simple as flicking the on/off switch; red and green lights serve as indicators. And therefore,
pregnant women in remote locations are better served. For GE, the value doesn’t end there. When
marketers are empowered to understand where the world is going, the fresh understanding they
deliver of what customers value and how to deliver that value can be scaled across the company.

Shape the market early. The really good innovations – the ones that change the world – need to be
explained before they’re accepted. Recently, for example, I’ve been posing this question to our
markets: What happens when billions of machines come online and start communicating? As we
enter the age of the Industrial Internet (GE’s term for that invisible web connecting all these brilliant
machines), it’s up to marketers to define for regular people and business customers how this new
reality will drive different outcomes. At the same time, our explanatory powers can push our own
company to do its best thinking about the possibilities for connecting industrial technology,
analytics, and user experiences.

Because this is the kind of breakthrough innovation that GE excels at, one of our mantras in
marketing is “mindshare before market share.” We’ve had to achieve that with ecomagination and,
more recently, with GE’s innovations in advanced manufacturing. It has meant becoming a content
factory – telling stories across media and methods from data to videos to social media. Through good
storytelling and by connecting with others who share interests in getting those stories out, we help
shape the markets in which GE’s offerings will be able to deliver value. We anticipate what our
customers – future and present – will need, and describe it. Long before customers are clamoring for
specific solutions, marketing is setting the stage.

Incubate new businesses and models. Part of marketing’s mandate at GE is to find ways the company
has not thought of before to promote ongoing innovation. That can be as simple as creating a
“protected class” of ideas that are therefore given more time to prove their value. This kind of
treatment gave rise to the Durathon battery, which provides backup power for cell towers in parts of
Africa where the electricity supply is intermittent. The technology began life as a project to create a
battery for a hybrid locomotive; only later was it adapted for other applications. Another boost to
innovation via marketing has been FastWorks, a program designed to integrate startup culture into
our DNA. It simplifies development and gets products to market faster.

Invite others in. At GE, we don’t want to solve every problem alone. Partnerships are the path to
speed and scale. That’s why we’ve established connections with the data competition site Kaggle, the
cloud-based engineering platform GrabCAD, and the invention factory Quirky. We’ve taken to market
several creations that came to us through Quirky inventors, including the sleek Aros air conditioner.
These opportunities evolved from marketing people asking simple questions: Are we open to
creating meaningful new partnerships? Are we experimenting often and in new spaces? Demolishing
the barriers between innovators at GE and makers outside the company has expanded our creative
territory, and it’s just one more way we’re fighting for the market.

COPYRIGHT © 2014 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 3

This document is authorized for use only in Fernando S?nchez's Diplomado Marketing 2017 course at Universidad de Desarrollo (UDD), from July 2017 to September 2017.
 Back when Edison was alive, there were still a few mad scientists around trying to invent a perpetual
motion machine. Of course, given the laws of physics, it isn’t possible. But when a marketing
department helps to fuel the very innovations it promotes, it can feel like it is. Perpetual-motion
marketing – marketing that connects the company’s offerings to markets, and in making those
connections generates new energy around invention – is a minor miracle we can achieve. And for a
company whose future depends on innovation, it might be the only way to go.

Beth Comstock is a vice chair of GE. Charged with accelerating efforts to accelerate new growth, she leads GE Business
Innovations, which develops new businesses, markets and service models; drives brand value; and partners to enhance
GE’s inventive culture.

COPYRIGHT © 2014 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 4

This document is authorized for use only in Fernando S?nchez's Diplomado Marketing 2017 course at Universidad de Desarrollo (UDD), from July 2017 to September 2017.