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Relationship Based Marketing – True Innovation

In today’s climate, where it is all about what AI can deliver for businesses, innovation and disruption are hot topics. 

It is important to note that innovation is often assumed to be only related to technology; this is why the idea that innovation in marketing comes from how we best use AI is so enticing. However, innovation in marketing, communications and brand is bigger than just technology or how we use a particular tool. 

I recently read a white paper written by Netwealth IQ, titled “Innovation starts with Curiosity”. This paper outlined 10 areas of business innovation; 4 of which were in marketing: service, channel, brand and customer engagement.

While it is great to see this structured outline to innovation in marketing and comms, I do think that there are really only 2 key areas where businesses can truly innovate in the marketing space. 

But first, are the areas of service, channel, brand and customer engagement pillars of innovation?

Service

The way that we elevate and enhance our offering through creating meaningful customer experiences. 

Understanding how to best serve your customers is not innovative. This is simply what modern marketing is – understanding what it is that you are offering, understanding who you are offering it to and the best way to connect those two things. We need to be observing and understanding client behaviours and using that to build the right communications plan. But in 2025 this is a fundamental principle and not an innovation. 

Service innovation = combine service with the development of audience personas, and link the needs and wants of these groups back to the best way to connect with them.

Channel 

How a business delivers its messages – via digital means or traditional channels. 

Here we are simply talking to our customers in the place where they are. Whether this is on the radio or on social media, understanding how to reach your ideal audience is a key step in effective marketing. 

When considering innovation across channels, it is not innovative to deliver customer experience via channels such as WhatsApp. It is not innovative to just meet your customers where they are.  

I went to a marketing conference in 2015 where the innovation section talked about the use of SMS. SMS really started as a platform in this country in 1999, with text messages a very popular form of communication by 2000. It was quickly and widely adopted 15 years before this conference. I am still unsure how the use of a mainstream communication platform to reach your customers is innovative. This is the same now for WhatsApp (launched in 2009) or social media (even earlier)  – all our customers have access to these platforms on their person 24 hours a day. 

Channel innovation = personalised customer journeys. 

Brand  

How brands evolve their positioning to change the way they are understood by their customers. 

To do brand innovation right, you need to start with what you stand for as a business and how that translates into values that your ideal customers can be emotionally connected to. To do this well, you need to consider a few things:

  • What your business stands for currently 
  • What is important to your ideal customer
  • Where the gaps are between these two points

The question then is if you want to amend your brand values to align closer to what is important to your client base, or if your business should maintain its current branding. 

Brand innovation = storytelling that links brand values to different audience groups.  

Customer Engagement 

It is interested to see that customer engagement as a point for innovation is listed last on this list. I believe that this is really the most important source of innovation when it comes to communications. The way businesses build their understanding of customer journeys and audience segmentation, to create unique and deliberate content for those audiences is the way that a business really sets itself apart. 

Customer Journey and Audience Segmentation

Innovation in communications to me comes down to two things – customer journey and audience segmentation. 

The key to success here is to understand how your customers find you, the different touchpoints they have with your brand on the way to conversion, the different channels they finally convert from and why each different path can provide value. 

Overlay this with the different characteristics of your audience – not just their demographics but their engagement patterns, which of your content resonates with them, the likelihood of repeat purchase etc. 

It can be hard to create valuable audience personas. If you are thinking of this for your organisation, I would recommend you start with taking a look at the way your customers or clients engage with you. Are there a group that always buys the same product, or that are repeat purchases each month, for example? Did you acquire your clients through different channels and as a result do they show different behaviours? If you can start to answer these questions, you can build audience personas that you can use as a starting point for true service innovation through tailored messaging. 

Businesses that understand that their audience is nuanced and who create different pathways and customer service initiatives based in each persona are the businesses who demonstrate innovation. 

By blending customer journey with audience segmentation you can create meaningful content and purposeful journeys that build community. 

The goal is a transition for organisations from standard, traditional interactions to personalised and unique customer journeys that not only align to brand values but also adds real value to their customers. 

Moving away from transactional engagement to relationship based engagement, even for products and services that are not traditionally relationship based? That’s true innovation.