Lateral Marketing – A Source of Entrepreneurial Innovations

In practice, we are often faced with innovations that are the result of joining two or more incompatible components, which at first glance are illogical and sometimes even scandalous. These innovations, initially unacceptable for a large number of people, are accepted and applied as something normal and routine over time. Those innovations are by their very nature lateral, creative, innovative and unimaginable novelties. There are many examples of such innovations, but as more significant we will mention the merging of wristwatches with the Internet and telephone, bookstores that offer jazz concerts and bar services, gas stations that sell medicine, chocolates with toys, housing buildings with botanical gardens and rooftop restaurants, etc. The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on how these innovations become significant for marketing as well. The paper should highlights the positive, but also the limiting barriers and criticisms of lateral marketing. Lateral marketing is a recent term, still vague, undefined and therefore the paper mostly uses secondary data.