Innovation cannot exist on its own – it must be twinned with strong marketing strategy and support. To explain why I say this, I have devised a chart with a catchy acronym of WMNC (Wants, Marketing, Needs, Competition).

There is a difference between what users think they want and what they actually need. You can see this in the choice of clothes we wear, the properties we try to buy and even in the friends that we keep. This of course provides rich pickings for style based TV programmes and personalities such as ‘What Not to Wear’ (Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine) and Location Location Location (Phil Spencer and Kirstie Allsopp).

But the problem is that customers will only buy your product if they actually want it. It needs to go beyond the recognition that the product is needed. Products can be sold to those who want them but not necessarily to those who need them regardless of the level of innovation. This is where marketing comes in. Marketing plays the role of ensuring that the message gets across such that the customer actually wants what they need.

What if the customer already wants your product? Does that not solve the problem and therefore reduce the need for marketing? Yes, it solves one problem, but then creates another one. If the customer already wants your product and knows that they need it too, the chances are that there will be a fair amount of competition in the market already. Hence your product will not actually be innovative, but more of a “Me Too” product.

You can chart your new product idea onto a table where needs and wants are opposite ends of the vertical axis and marketing and innovation are opposite ends of the horizontal axis. Now create a quadrangle between 4 points (one on each of the branches of the 2 axes. In example 1 the need for the product and the desire are strong, but there is little competition and it is not expected that a great amount of marketing would be needed to reach the intended volume of sales. This is an ideal situation and should be exploited as quickly as possible. The quadrangle is a thin diamond shape in line with the vertical axis.

Example 2 is the opposite. Here there is strong market competition, but a weak need and little demand. This would require a significant amount of marketing to make the project worthwhile, and is perhaps best left for the competitors to fight over. The quadrangle is again thin, but this time in line with the horizontal axis.

In reality your new products are likely to be a mixture of both, but it is well worth keeping this relationship in mind and looking for ways that you can shift your WMNC distribution to be thinner and taller as in example 1.

So here I leave you with the challenge of coming up with new product innovations which will match example 1 and a further challenge to come up with a better acronym than WMNC!