There?s an alarming trend in FMCG firms?the number of new products, concepts or offerings is on a steady decline. One may argue that every year all the companies are busy making new launches. Yes they are, but none of the launches offer anything fresh. They are mostly not about new products, need gaps or approaches. Most of them are about copying somebody else?s offering for a different market or price point. Even if these are considered new launches?according to analysts, they reduced by about 20% year-on-year in personal care alone from 2007 onwards.

The primary reason for the decline in newer thoughts in FMCG companies is that they are mostly governed by marketing. And marketing, as we practise it today, has become a strong deterrent to any process of innovation.

The first step of innovation is setting the conditions and culture for success. And most innovation leaders begin with building a culture that supports experimentation and risk-taking. The process of marketing, on the other hand, is totally committed to the opposite?risk mitigation. Marketing has carefully crafted research methodologies where they go to the same consumers (at times literally the same), asking the same questions, expecting to hear the safe answer. Marketing has created definitions like ?category code? by which they copy each other in product formulation, packaging and even in communication. Risk-free experimentation is an oxymoron and the current marketing practice embodies that.

Innovation doesn?t happen in a vacuum. People innovate in response to new challenges. But the issue is somewhere else?marketing uses dated research techniques like ?need gap analysis? to understand new challenges and opportunities. It?s interesting to hear Steve Jobs?s point of view on this: ?We do no market research. We don?t hire consultants ? We just want to make great products. When we created the iTunes Music Store, we did that because we thought it would be great to be able to buy music electronically, not because we had plans to redefine the music industry. I mean, it just seemed like writing on the wall, that eventually all music would be distributed electronically.? Obvious in retrospect, isn?t it? For finding opportunities one doesn?t need banal research, one needs perceptive and open leaders. Is marketing able to churn out those leaders?

The next key factor for innovation is to get a broad variety of viewpoints. This is possibly the Achilles? heel of marketing today. Most marketers are comfortable viewing the world through the narrow lens of consumption and are often afraid to listen to fundamental points of view from culture, anthropology or even technology. The only viewpoints they subscribe to are related to success and failure stories from the category. Most often the marketing blokes come down heavily on any attempted innovation with a barrage of ?that doesn?t work in beauty category?, ?this is a big no no in food category? and so on. The discipline of marketing was meant to create open minds. The practice of marketing is possibly closing them.

Marissa Mayer, VP of Google, while speaking at Stanford on Innovation at Google talked about the famous ?you?re brilliant, we?re hiring? story. Apparently this got 5 times more clickthroughs and could attract really interesting talent. We all know that at the end of the day innovation is a result of the quality of people and not the robustness of the process. Today?s marketing world is facing a lot of difficulties in this area. For marketing, the story has almost turned into: ?You?re brilliant, We?re hiring. But guess what? I?m not joining.? Marketing is failing to attract top talents. Even large multinationals are not being able to attract interesting talents from the IIMs to join their marketing function.

The purpose of marketing was to create a clear narrative based on deeper understanding of human behaviour, technology and so on for a product or a service offering. But unfortunately somewhere the whole process got short changed. Alex Bogusky and John Winsor in their book Baked In have observed this: ?…the process of marketing is to uncover, coax out and tell a story that?s buried inside the product. Most of the time a story can be found but too often the story is only tenuously connected to the product, and in some cases the story is just wishful thinking on the part of the marketers. Perhaps the product was created without a clear narrative and audience in mind or is just another me-too product with nothing new to offer. A battery of focus groups, ethnographies and more are arranged to go forth and uncover what the consumer wishes the product really was. Then the marketing budget is spent telling lies about the product?. So the process of innovation (if at all) is applied to hoodwink people?strange ingredients are invented. And in that process the real innovation dies a natural death.

Harvard Business School has a popular course called ?marketing innovation?. Soon this term may turn into the biggest oxymoron in the world of business.

The author is managing partner,

BBH India