Disruption is more a business model than a marketing approach. Most companies still tend to market through traditional means, which provide plenty of opportunities for rival companies to disrupt current messages. However, consumers have become stubbornly resilient to shifting messages, thanks to an increasingly crowded market. To combat this, a company’s product or service must innovate and pay attention to consumers, delivering exactly what the market wants.
Disruptive marketing involves using experimental tactics that challenge the status quo. Rather than following conventional marketing wisdom, disruptive marketers test daring, new tactics that haven’t been tried before. Some work while others fall flat.
Two Types of Market Disruption
New-Market Disruption: Targets customers who have needs that have been unserved by existing companies. Apple’s iTunes application is one such example.
Low-End Disruption: Targets consumers who don’t need all the features valued by customers at the high end of the market. For example, the personal computer disrupted the mainframe market and took over the computer market; this, in turn, is now becoming the case with laptop computers. Initially, laptops didn’t have the computing power of a PC, but appealed to consumers who wanted minimal computing “On the go.” Over time, innovations have made laptops more powerful; and thus, they’ve taken an even large market share from PCs.
A disruptive company has one of two goals: design its product or service to match the demand of an emerging market, or re-shape an existing product or service to meet the demand of customers unsatisfied by the current offering. From this starting point, a marketing team designs an advertising campaign with disruptive messages that either challenge the conventional thinking in an existing market or speak to a new one.
Tips for embracing disruptive marketing tactics
The Unified CRM
Unified customer relationships management (CRM) systems provide a great example. They track every touchpoint a brand has with prospects and customers. Marketers can use that insight to experiment with new tactics for personalizing outreach and delivering what customers need at each stage of the customer journey.
Use Technology
While technological advances are forcing us to invent new disruptive marketing tactics, we can use technology to do the disrupting.
Technology can help you better cater to rising customer expectations. Customers want a personalized or humanized marketing experience. To deliver one, marketers must maintain deep insight into customers’ needs, challenges, goals, etc.
Leave emotions at the door
You may firmly believe you’ve discovered the golden key to success with a new tactic you devised. And it may be the next best practice everyone adopts. But it might not be.
Be prepared to fall
Disruptive marketers constantly test new ideas and many of those ideas don’t succeed. Be prepared for that because it’s an essential part of disruptive marketing.
Instead of viewing an unsuccessful tactic as a failure, think of it as a learning experience. The best lessons come from picking yourself back up after you fall. Few great things occur without some trial and error.
The benefits of disruptive marketing
Shift the perception of your brand
One of the benefits of disruptive marketing is being able to shift the perception of your brand from just another company selling something unnecessary and boring, to someone who understands your needs and can fulfil them.
Connect to customers
The great thing about disruptive marketing is that it allows you to engage with your customers on a more personal level. This is far more rewarding than churning out the same old repetitive content because it allows you to get creative and start telling a story.
Prevent copy-cats
Another highlight of disruptive marketing is that once you’ve shaken things up in your industry, no one else can duplicate the effect you’ve had. They can try to do something similar but it won’t have the same effect because the impact comes from being original, not being a copy-cat.