New Marketing Dictionary

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With over 70 years of big company marketing and innovation experience I've come to learn that the best answers are always so obvious, they're not obvious. Journalist and feminist leader Gloria Steinem said, "When I got there there was no there there." To get there today, a marketer must strip away the veneer of what they think they know, information on which their category operates for example (something Business Week Innovation Editor Bruce Nussbaum calls the Commodity Knowledge Economy) and operate with the lowest common denominators.

For example, a brand is nothing more than something that someone started that caught on -branding is something you do when you don't have anything important, or highly differentiating to say. A category is nothing more than a bunch of brands all hanging around on a street corner all saying and doing the same things about themselves different ways. Anyway, you get the point. To innovate, you must remain humble, even if you are number one. Otherwise arrogance will blind you to the open mind required to create a different future.