Mindsets in Marketing for Product Innovation: An Explorative Analysis of Chief Marketing Executives' Ideas and Beliefs about How to Increase Their Firms' Innovation Capability

Abstract

A claim of top managers in most sectors of the industry is to come up with ideas for growth opportunities through incremental and/or radical product innovation. The article describes how marketing executives in pharmaceutical and FMCG companies (i.e. the food, drink and chocolate industry) tackle this claim through issues, tasks and knowledge areas in which they are involved and perceive as being related to radical product innovation. The empirical basis is an exploratory analysis of 26 marketing executives' mental models of marketing management; based on a sense‐making and integrated theoretical perspective on management (a visionary and a strategic perspective, a business process and a task perspective and a knowledge perspective). The article shows that radical product innovation is a key issue for chief marketing executives in both industries and very much related to innovation of positioning, innovation of processes, innovation of company culture, innovation of overall marketing logic and/or innovation of business model. Furthermore, that market actors, new and emerging technologies, company policies and values and/or societal and political issues are perceived as representing important knowledge areas. Accordingly, the article highlights that marketing executives, in their efforts to realize radical product innovation, tend to focus on processes and knowledge areas outside the traditional scope of marketing management.