I was honored to be included in the Brand Quarterly list of “50 Marketing Thought Leaders Over 50” released this week. I can now cite one clear advantage of passing 50…

The 50 marketers listed were asked to share and explain their marketing mantra for 2017. Not surprisingly my mantra came from principles of service innovation:

“Just do it!  Try, observe, and then iterate or pivot.”

Even though Service Innovation was completed in February and published in May, the collaboration is still fresh in my mind. Despite our focus on innovating service, issues of branding and broader marketing kept arising from examples and discussions among the four of us writing the book.

Just as social media and the Internet have made it fast and cheap to fail in developing new service, testing marketing ideas has never been so easy. Marketers: Try, observe and iterate!

• Check out all of the mantras in the current edition of Branding Quarterly.
• Amazon is discounting both the Kindle and Paperback versions of Service Innovation.
• Service Innovation has been selected by Harvard Business Press to pair with some of its cases…