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SATIS?

To appreciate the innovator's dilemma of whether to ship at the "good enough" or at the "ready" stage, you need only google any episode in the first season of "Seinfeld." Twenty-five years after the fact, you can still see the producers hadn't realized Costanza and Kramer would be the real comedy draws and that beginning and ending each episode with Jerry delivering stand-up would become a contrivance.

Instead of waiting for all that, however, the producers did their very best, deemed their creation "good enough," and unleashed it into the world in all its imperfection.

So what if the show wasn't quite ready? The first Mercedes wasn't "ready" nor was the first iPhone or Prince's first album. Each of them were good enough to earn the right to evolve in public, however, and that is plenty good.

You'll never see a motivational poster of someone standing atop a mountain with a caption reading "I climbed Good Enough!" yet when we're innovating, that standard must suffice. There's a pretty obvious good reason for it, of course: If we wait for when "it's Ready," we'll never ship.

"Good enough" isn't a bad term but it could stand a touch of positive pr. How about "satis," instead? Sounds much more elevated in Latin.

MAY I QWOTE YOU?
It's a given that all organizations should be innovating. And just like every other vital mission, innovating involves lists. There is no single list a company maintains, however, more important than its QWOTE list; short for, "Questions Worth Our Time & Energy."

There are shortcuts, highlights, and summaries for just about everything but not nearly enough time to digest them all. It was when the Information Age morphed into the Information SURPLUS Age that QWOTES became indispensable.

Examples of good QWOTEs are: Is this idea worth seeing through? Should we just maintain the status quo? Is the market ready for this?

But here's the thing, QWOTEs aren’t really about finding the answers to the questions posed. Those will be revealed and in due time you'll either be proved right or wrong. No, effectively leveraging QWOTES is all about asking the right questions in the first place.

THE PACKED THEATRE

Big Beer has been in the packaging industry for decades. Packaging is a poor substitute for innovation which occurs in markets where a few players dominate and all the choices are pretty much the same. While packaging is a form of theatre, don't think theatre isn't important in marketing.

It may be intellectually easy to believe the carrier isn't going to change the flavor of the six longnecks it holds, except that it does. Illusions to bucolic settings where dalmatians roam and a brewmaster grades hops are powerful because they're stories people can glom onto; this, even though on some level we correctly intuit that the brands on supermarket shelves were most likely brewed inside sterile, industrial facilities.

What clever marketers know is that because customers can't truly judge a beer until they drink it, they're open to telling themselves a story. They also understand the placebo effect: Having bought into the story, the customer pops the top biased toward being proven right about the choice he's made.

The trouble for upstarts is, no matter how good YOU know your product is, if customers keep passing it over, it never gets a chance. That's why, given its importance, it's so amazing that most just take a good guess instead of bothering to actually try and understand the worldview and the biases of the folks they seek to connect with and delight.

Commerce Artists who play the innovation/marketing game well do so because they understand its two vital rules: (1) The product will definitely be judged in advance. (2) The story it elicits is at least as important as the product itself.