Cross-Industry Analogical Thinking Method for Creative Marketing Research

Abstract

The cross-industry innovation is the special case of innovation where already existing solutions from one industry are retranslated to meet the requirements of company’s current market or products in another industry However discussions on the application of cross-industry innovation focused on technological problem solving and product innovations There’s no instance in the marketing innovation Therefore in this study we propose the transfer of a marketing program taken from the nail polish industry and fast-food industry to the pudding market in order to explore the helpfulness of cross-industry innovation in marketing domain Baelle is a 4-year-old milk pudding brand in Tainan a southern city of Taiwan This study chose “Besides the value of health delicacy and hand-made pudding how to attract girls to buy Baelle’s milk pudding? ” as the topic of the control experiment After introduction of the marketing program topic and the topic brand 21 participants were asked to write down the marketing program thinking directly in 10 minutes and then followed the cross-industry analogical thinking steps the method is used in the cross-industry product innovation to develop the marketing program from nail polish industry or fast food industry in 40 minutes The creativity of marketing programs was scored by four marketing experts The obtained scores were counted and analyzed by the Wilcoxon signed rank test to discuss the difference between direct thinking results and cross-industry analogical thinking results in the marketing program creativity The final results indicate that the process of analogy thinking in cross-industry product innovation is helpful for enhancing the creativity of the marketing program significantly both in novelty and meaningfulness dimensions of creativity Moreover from the feedback questionnaires most participants think the process of analogy thinking is easy for them and helpful for the developing process of creating marketing differentiation In conclusion the cross-industry marketing innovation is worth researching deeper and using in practice to enhance marketing creativity

Date of Award	2015 Feb 3
Original language	English
Supervisor	Meng-Dar Shieh (Supervisor)