The Marketing Awards for Excellence—the MAX Awards—use a short but surprisingly stringent set of criteria. The innovation must be a new product, new service, or new way to market. It must be introduced by a Georgia company or be introduced in Georgia in the prior calendar year. The innovation must have demonstrated results. Excelling within these criteria is a challenge, which explains why so few MAX Awards are handed out. Judging whether an entry meets these criteria can be quite a challenge, too.
The first one doesn’t sound like much of a hurdle. We’re awash in new products and services. However, so many products are line extensions or “me too” offerings. You have to be careful, of course. Some brilliant innovations are perfectly obvious after the fact, just as so many unfortunate events seem so easily avoidable in retrospect. Online offerings are especially tricky, because innovation moves so quickly—yesterdays’ insight is tomorrow’s cliché.
And what about “new ways to market?” Is anything really new when it comes to marketing? Actually, I think there is lots of room for new approaches to marketing. We become so quickly accustomed to the constraints in our lives and jobs that we don’t recognize the pain of these constraints, and we stop looking for better answers. My wife used to work on a sheep ranch in Oklahoma. Those sheep were used to a gate being in a certain place, and they trooped over there with minimal encouragement. Well, seeing that it would save steps if the gate were somewhere else, one day my wife moved it. The sheep were completely lost. Once they were herded over to the new gate, they stood there, with the gate wide open, and wouldn’t go through for anything. They knew there was no gate there, and no point crashing into the fence, no matter what my wife and her herding dog were doing. Eventually, my wife half-picked up a terrified ewe and shoved her through the empty space of the open gate . . . and then another . . . Eventually the flock got the idea (sort of), and individual animals started to cross. (Even then, the animals jumped over the fence line, perhaps guessing that the fence had merely fallen.) It can be hard to imagine different ways of doing things, and most people get paid to do, not to think. We say, never stop thinking, because innovation is crucial.
The second criterion causes a certain amount of confusion. Innovations that are imported into Georgia from somewhere else don’t qualify. Their introduction in Georgia, or by a Georgia company, must be the first introduction. There are some fine concepts out there which have been implemented elsewhere and then line-extended into the Georgia marketplace. Heck, we’re Georgia State University, and while an international perspective is in our DNA (we are helping to launch the first Western-style business school in the Caucasus, and our Global Partners MBA program unites partners on four continents), the MAX Awards are about celebrating our “local” innovators (whether they are the global enterprises or small businesses).
Another challenge is the combination of “in the previous calendar year” and “with demonstrated results.” Our judges won’t give a MAX Award to an entry, no matter how spiffy, that can’t demonstrate marketing results. Yes, it takes a while for most innovations to demonstrate results. That probably means that we miss some great potential entries, and we’ve talked about tweaking the criteria in recognition of this difficulty. But we just can’t bring ourselves to do that. “We‘re for great ideas” (our theme last year), but we think that great ideas are those that generate results.
–Ed Rigdon (erigdon@gsu.edu)
