By Vikas Nehru

Well-known blogger Seth Godin recently noted that the best marketing strategy is to destroy your industry before your competition does. He’s absolutely right. Especially in today’s economic climate, you must out-innovate your competitors, or they will out-innovate you.

Many companies are tiptoeing around innovation. They are opting to maintain the status quo, rather than expand. They continue to make small improvements to their existing product suites instead of developing new, revolutionary solutions. These companies are at risk. Like Singer (the sewing machine manufacturer that Godin references in his blog), many once-proud industry leaders will find themselves stuck in the also-ran column.

The need for new, improved products hasn’t dissipated. The downturn in the economy is causing customers to get introspective, to examine their internal processes. More than ever before, customers are looking to improve themselves and are hungry for better solutions. With the economy speeding up, this need will only intensify. Those industry leaders that had the courage to dedicate resources towards new product development and are ready to sell right now have eager customers waiting, looking for new solutions to improve upon existing investments.

At KANA, we want to remain an innovator. We took a bold, provocative step forward with the recent introduction of KANA 10. We chose to harness what we had developed and learned in the past, and apply it in a completely new direction.

As Bob Thompson of CustomerThink wrote, “[KANA CEO Michael] Fields and his team have done an amazing job to stabilize the company while continuing to build for a brighter future.” Forrester’s Chip Gliedman completed his thought, “This is exactly the direction that the industry is heading and [KANA is] the first company to deliver it.”

With the release of KANA 10, we’re hoping to redefine the customer service market and ring in a new era of enhanced flexibility and control. We’re not going to become another Singer.