Marketing’s New Mission: Drive Innovation in Your Company

An interview with

Stephen Liguori
Executive Director, Global Innovation & New Models

GE

  

Interviewed by Sam Narisi

At GE, Stephen Liguori leads the company in building break-through customer offerings in new growth areas. Prior to this position, he served as the company’s executive director of global marketing, and with this background, he understands the value of marketing in helping companies develop and shape new business models.

We recently spoke with Liguori about marketing’s role in innovation and how CMOs and their teams must get ready for marketing’s new mission. Liguori will join as at the upcoming 15^th Anniversary MARKETING WORLD 2014: A Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange, July 14-17 in Boston, to discuss these ideas in more detail.

Describe your role at GE and how you connect marketing and innovation.

The role is very much at the intersection of outside startup-type activity, internal GE businesses, and how those intersect with new business models. New business models are not about new technology per se; we call that invention. Innovation is how you bring ideas to marketplaces in different ways. The app store is the classic modern-day new business model. There’s nothing new about the software, what’s new is the business model.

A lot of what I do is get people to understand that the way buyers want to consume products and services is becoming a combination of digital and physical. GE has grown up making very physical things – jet engines, ultrasound machines, power turbines, washing machines. Those are now being connected digitally, developed digitally, and monitored and maintained digitally. That creates a whole new ecosystem.

When you talk to marketers about digital, they talk about finding a better way to mine social data to get you to buy their flavor of yogurt or their color shoes. That’s only the tip of the iceberg. The message I bring to executives, at GE or outside, is that innovation is going to be disrupting business in every way, shape, and form. This whole idea of digital meeting physical will completely radicalize every aspect of business.  

We’re trying to get marketers to understand that they need to get more involved in how business is run. Innovation is a 360-degree term now. Marketing has to go from end-to-end in a company. You’ve got to be involved in the company’s total business strategy, not just its promotional strategy. That’s where a lot of marketers get hung up and put their jobs at risk because they’re taking too narrow a focus.

How should marketers adapt to fulfill that changing role?

First of all, you should go hug a programmer, and you yourself should get some programming experience and hire people who know how to do programming. You’re going to need a much broader skill set, and you’re going to need to navigate in the world of IT. One example is data science. How many marketers are truly facile with data? And I don’t mean just mining social data, I mean someone who can do complicated algorithms to help companies run their businesses better.

Marketers have to go and get skills around things like data science, programming, and finance, and number-one on the list would be understanding the implications of new business models for your organization. If you’re a CMO, you’ve got to get those skills on your team, and if you’re a young marketer, I’d encourage to you become comfortable in those areas.

You’re going to have to get much more expansive. The role of marketers is changing and you will need to adapt or you should fire yourself, because this is where the world is rapidly going. Marketers, by virtue of being able to step back and connect customers to their firms, are the ones who have a chance to pull this all together.

What’s the best way to build a marketing team with those needed skills?

The team that I’ve built is a combination of different types of people. I hire traditional marketers, and I’ve brought in engineers, because engineers can talk to engineers. It’s rare for an engineer to understand what’s going on from a customer and a market standpoint, but when you find an engineer with those skills, their ability to function as a translator is invaluable.

You want a blend of skills, and you want a blend of inside and outside hires. You should bring in change agents from the outside, but if you only bring in change agents, you get what I call “organ rejection.” When you have that, nobody wins.

When it comes to innovation, how can established companies compete with small startups?

We have a strong relationship with a number of startups, venture capital firms, and things like that. The trick I can tell you is that the principles are the same in a big company in terms of what you need to look out for, but the application of them is night and day. You cannot pretend to be a startup when you’re a billion-dollar company. You have a whole finance department and a whole legal department, for example.

I can’t fire all the lawyers at GE because that’s just how a big company has to be run. So what do you do if you want to be startup-like? How do you adopt those ideas in a big company? That’s where we work very hard on simplification. We have a project called FastWorks, which is focused on figuring out the customer problem we’re trying to solve, and getting the bureaucracy to be adaptive and flexible enough to develop solutions. The bureaucracy can’t go away, but you can do a lot of things to streamline it.

A question we use here that’s a personal favorite of mine is, “How do you become comfortable being uncomfortable?” As the global director of innovation for GE, I can guarantee I don’t know the answers to everything I’ve started doing, but I know I’m headed in the right direction. The way you get there is to keep experimenting and keep learning. I know I’m going to have bumps and bruises along the way, and that’s OK. You have to get your team, your boss, and your mentors to understand that it’s a learning journey. If you can get comfortable being uncomfortable, you can be a successful entrepreneur inside of a big company.