When innovation matters
Peter Gray, an independent Motivation Consultant, presents a regular Business Events News feature on current issues in the Conference and Incentive industries.
ACCORDING to Malcolm Turnbull we need to embrace new ideas in innovation but there doesn’t seem to be many examples of this in the lives of everyday Australians. Our television stations, for example, play ‘follow the leader’ in just about everything; program schedules are full of food shows and competitions (accompanied by the obligatory very loud music) and house and garden renovation shows. Then there are the endless socalled talent shows. We follow the formats dictated by our US cousins. Television stations, it seems, have little or no idea about how to innovate.
This lack of innovation runs into our radio stations too. When I’m driving I invariably listen to the radio and I’m amazed with the total lack of creativity when it comes to radio advertising. One real estate agent (or maybe their ad agency) came up with the idea of telling their listeners that they were better than the rest because they had ‘local knowledge’. Now every ad for every real estate agency professes to have local knowledge too.
When I left university in the UK I joined a market research company and was involved with consumer research, testing brands and brand names, television ads and so on. I can’t recall any of the brands with which I worked following any of their competitors in terms of their advertising content. All the ads were original, unique… innovative.
This lack of creativity and innovation is in danger of swamping the incentives industry. Incentives work because they offer an opportunity for participants in an incentive program to obtain a reward they feel is sufficiently worthwhile for them to want to achieve by attaining targets which stretch their abilities. These are typically business-tobusiness schemes rather than the endless number of loyalty schemes that are available now.
Loyalty programs serve their purpose - they provide a reason for customers to prefer one brand over another, to shop at one retailer instead of another - but they are increasingly becoming part if the landscape and it’s almost taken for granted that wherever you shop, whatever you purchase, there will be ‘points’ to be earned by doing so! In this age of innovation even the humble coffee card can now rack up sufficient points to treat all your friends to coffee for a year (if the rules permit).
Incentive practitioners must be innovative; they should not go the way of their advertising brethren who, if an ad works for one client, have little compunction about using the same ad for another. Engagement is a vital part of every incentive program and you don’t achieve that by suggesting that participants do for one sponsor exactly what they’re doing for all the rest.