What If You Had ZERO Marketing Budget

By Bo McDonald

Imagine that you were told that as of January 1st 2013 you would have a ZERO marketing budget. What would your response be? Break out in a cold sweat and panic? Would you throw in the towel and call it impossible? Or would you pick up and find innovative ways to tell your story?

I recently read about some large corporations that have adopted a policy of “frugal innovation.” The article describes frugal innovation as the ability to generate considerably more business and social value while significantly reducing the use of scarce resources. “It’s about solving—and even transcending—the paradox of “doing more with less” the article noted. Of course, frugal innovation on the part of these companies refers more to the use of natural resources. But it also includes product innovation on limited budgets.

Navi Radjou, author of the book Jugaad Innovation summed up the art of frugal innovation. “The need to develop the jugaad mindset in their organizations so they can perceive scarcity as an opportunity to innovate and leverage employees’ ingenuity to create frugal solutions that offer greater value to customers at lower cost.” For reference, the term Jugaad is a Hindi word meaning an innovative fix or an improvised solution born from ingenuity and cleverness.

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