To Innovate For Others We Must Innovate Ourselves

When I started Rockhill Strategic, the mission was to provide world-class marketing ideas to clients who value beating their competition with smarter thinking, not more spending. Luckily a lot of companies share that philosophy. Thus, it is still the center of our brand vision. 

The key to success with this strategy is to know where your consumer will be at various points of time in the future. Knowing your former customer and your current customer is important, but not nearly as important as reading the demographic and trend 'tea leaves' and making a plan to adapt.

Deciphering trends for clients requires a lot of research, daily observation and a knowledge of demographics. Then the science is balanced out by the art of naming, branding and creative. In the course of daily client work, you start to also observe missed opportunities. Unexplored gaps in the marketplace. These new ideas frequently find there way into my Moleskine notebook. Random notes, incomplete ideas and sketches. Hundreds of them. I am sure some are good, and some our terrible. 

Now to the point of this post. I have decided that it is time to start picking a few of these ideas and developing them for market. Yes, Rockhill is launching an Innovation Lab. We are starting small with one project. If successful, it will propel the creation of more consumer ready products and projects. At the best, we launch some great products that people love. At the worst? It makes us smarter and stronger for our clients. We are continuing to develop relationships with great innovation centers like DigitalSandBox, the Kauffman Foundation, SparkLabKC and Tumml. We are excited to learn and grow. 

So without further ado, we give you NeighborsGrow. 

More will be revealed as we move to beta.

Until then, please follow the NeighborsGrow Team on Twitter

at @NeighborsGrow and sign-up for the beta here.