Did your business get off to a flying start, only to find that growth has begun to slow? Brand innovation can help you move beyond the plateau by uncovering new sources of value and creating fresh growth opportunities.
Are you feeling that the momentum has started to slip and things are beginning to stagnate? If so, the growth plateau phase of your journey may have just arrived. Fostering a culture of innovation can help your organisation break out of the doldrums.
When growth begins to plateau
Perhaps your market has changed or become more competitive. Your original proposition may have lost relevance, or a lack of strategic direction may be delaying important decisions. Sometimes the business has simply become too focused on protecting what worked before.
A plateau does not have to signal failure. It can be an opportunity to regroup, reassess your strategy and consider whether rebranding or repositioning could unlock growth.
Innovation requires patience. It may create value for customers before delivering financial returns. Resist short-term thinking and focus on strategies that can build sustainable growth.
1. Create the high ground
Jean-Noël Kapferer argues that innovation can renew brand leadership and shift attention from price to value. It gives organisations a reason to keep progressing rather than relying on past success. [1]
Brands such as Dyson, Apple, Netflix, Spotify and Airbnb became leaders by changing customer expectations, not simply by presenting conventional offers more attractively. They combined product innovation, new business models, and distinctive experiences to build stronger market positions.
Richard Rumelt uses the military concept of high ground to explain competitive advantage. A strong position is harder to attack and easier to defend. Innovation can create that position by establishing technical, experiential or commercial advantages that competitors cannot immediately replicate. [2]
Gore-Tex created high ground through technical innovation. FedEx did it through a business model built around overnight delivery. In each case, the advantage came from changing what customers could expect from the category.
Creating high ground is not about being different for its own sake. It means finding a valuable position that your organisation is equipped to occupy, and that competitors will find difficult to copy.
2. Look beyond existing markets
Competing in an established market is unavoidable, but competing only on existing terms can limit growth. When every business pursues the same customers with similar propositions, marketing must work harder to earn attention. Price pressure also becomes harder to avoid.
W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne describe this established competitive space as a Red Ocean. Their Blue Ocean Strategy provides an alternative: identify unmet demand and create new market space in which direct competition becomes less relevant. [3]
This does not mean abandoning your current market. It means looking beyond its accepted assumptions.
Ask:
- Which customer frustrations has the industry learned to tolerate?
- Which customers are being overlooked or poorly served?
- Which features add cost without creating meaningful value?
- What could be simplified, removed or delivered differently?
- What alternative experience could change what customers expect?
A blue ocean opportunity emerges when innovation creates a meaningful leap in value for customers and the business. It is not simply a new product or a more imaginative campaign. It changes the basis on which customers make their choice.
3. Make brand innovation continuous
Brand innovation is not a one-off project. It depends on continuous experimentation, close observation of customers and a willingness to develop solutions they may not yet be able to articulate.
Listening provides evidence, but judgement and invention turn that evidence into progress. Customer research can reveal unmet needs, tensions and behaviours. It cannot be expected to design the answer.
Lean branding applies experimentation and iteration to brand development. In their 2014 book, Jeremiah Gardner and Brant Cooper propose testing brand assumptions, learning from audience response and refining the brand continuously. [4]
Their approach draws on lean startup thinking, including Eric Ries’s Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop. [5] Rather than investing everything in an untested idea, businesses can develop a hypothesis, test it with customers, measure the response and apply what they learn.
This approach can help you:
- Identify weak assumptions before they become expensive mistakes
- Test propositions and messages with relevant audiences
- Learn which ideas create genuine customer value
- Improve the brand through evidence rather than internal opinion
- Build innovation into everyday decision-making
The objective is not constant change. It is continuous learning. A strong brand retains a clear strategic core while adapting how it creates and delivers value.
From plateau to progress
Do not become fixated on what similar brands are doing. Competitor awareness matters, but imitation will not create meaningful advantage.
Instead, look for the strategic high ground. Explore unmet needs, question accepted category conventions and identify where your organisation can create distinctive value.
Then make innovation part of how the business operates. Encourage experimentation, give people permission to challenge established assumptions and use customer evidence to guide investment.
A growth plateau may be telling you that the strategy that brought the business this far will not take it any further. Brand innovation can provide the next source of momentum, but only when it creates value that customers recognise and the organisation can sustain.
References
- Kapferer, Jean-Noël (2012), The New Strategic Brand Management: Advanced Insights and Strategic Thinking, 5th edition, Kogan Page.
- Rumelt, Richard P. (2011), Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters, Profile Books.
- Kim, W. Chan and Mauborgne, Renée (2005), Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant, Harvard Business School Press.
- Gardner, Jeremiah and Cooper, Brant (2014), Entrepreneur’s Guide to the Lean Brand: How Brand Innovation Transforms Organizations, Discovers New Value and Creates Passionate Customers, Market by Numbers Press.
- Ries, Eric (2011), The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, Crown Business.
