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Disruptive Marketing: What It Is and Why You Need It

By John Wysseier, CEO and President, The CEI Group, Inc.

In today’s rapidly evolving world of business, disruption is both a universal opportunity and threat. That’s why companies that want to survive and thrive need to practice disruptive marketing.

But what, you may ask, is disruptive marketing and how does it differ from traditional marketing? To answer, we first have to agree on what marketing is in general.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines marketing simply as “the act or process of selling or purchasing in a market.” Investopedia.com takes it a bit further: “Marketing refers to activities undertaken by a company to promote the buying or selling of a product or service. Marketing includes advertising, selling, and delivering products to consumers or other businesses.” And I’ll just add two more pieces to these: market research and the creation of products or services.

If there’s one overriding characteristic that distinguishes disruptive marketing from traditional marketing, it’s the extent to which disruptive marketing takes advantage of digital information technology and the Internet, to which I will add another: disruptive marketing is driven by customer needs and desires. To illustrate, I’ll describe in more detail their differing characteristics.

Traditional Marketing

  • Creates products or service first and then seeks buyers for them.
  • Self-promotes by advertising advantages and benefits of the company’s offerings.
  • Uses generic messaging: one pitch to all potential buyers.
  • Relies on print, radio, television and direct snail mail advertising.
  • Utilizes brick and mortar distribution methods.
  • Uses spreadsheet analysis to measure success.

 

Disruptive Marketing

  • Finds out what customers need and want most, and creates products or services that match.
  • Takes advantage of customer reviews in social media to promote its offerings.
  • Educates customers on the challenges they face and how its offerings uniquely solve them.
  • Personalizes customer messaging.
  • Engages in e-commerce: interacts and conducts transactions with customers, via the internet, using email, digital ads, videos and interactive websites.
  • Makes use of advanced business intelligence technology to gather and analyze huge quantities of data that describes customer behavior, their satisfaction with their customer experience and the quality of the company’s response to them.

 

The premise behind disruptive marketing is that established companies and industries are disrupted for two reasons. The first is that there is a weakness in what they offer customers. It may be the degree to which it actually meets customers’ needs, the ease and speed with which customers can obtain their offering, the price, or all three. The second is that disruptors have discovered a way to address those weaknesses, often through the use of emerging digital information technology. Companies that are the victims of disruption, on the other hand, aren’t aware of their own weaknesses, the new technology or how to apply it – until it’s too late.

The Internet and social media have radically changed today’s buyers, both in the consumer and B2B marketplace. Their attitudes, values and expectations are different from those that prevailed as recently as two decades ago. The result is that buyers are fueling and driving disruption and innovation like never before. Consider these findings from several recent surveys:

  • Episerver, a digital e-commerce services provider, found this year that 84% of B2B decision-makers say increasing digital expectations from their customers or partners is their top external threat. Like consumers, a survey confirmed that business buyers want effortless interactions – even if they struggle to deliver them at their own company.
  • Salesforce.com found that 84% percent of consumers want personalized service, and that 70% of consumers say that both a company’s understanding of how they use a product or service and a seamless digital connection with those they buy from is essential to earning their business.
  • In another key finding, Salesforce.com says 67% of consumers believe that their standards for a good experience are higher than ever, but only 51% say that most companies fall short of meeting them.
  • According to the McCarthy Group, a marketing consulting firm, 84% of Millennials don’t trust traditional advertising.
  • Writing in Forbes, Dan Schwabel, director of research at Future Workplace, says 33% of Millennials rely mostly on blogs before they make a purchase, compared to fewer than 3% for TV news, magazines and books. Older generations rely more on traditional media, whereas Millennials look to social media for an authentic look at what’s going on in the world, especially content written by their peers whom they trust.
  • Gladly, a customer service platform company that conducts an annual consumer survey, found that customers have limited tolerance for poor service. While 76% of the consumers it polled said they are willing to give a company another chance after a service failure, the number drops to just 8% after three service failures.

 

Advantages to Both Approaches

I’m not advocating that companies abandon traditional marketing methods. They still work, at least for certain markets and market segments. But disruptive marketing offers a distinct set of advantages that companies that want to avoid suffering from disruption cannot afford to overlook.

Salescorce.com sums up the situation well: “As disruptive companies leverage breakthroughs in cloud, mobile, social, and artificial intelligence technology to deliver personalized, valuable, and immediate experiences, customers have more choices than ever. As a result, they grow to expect this superior experience from any business they engage with.”

Disruptive marketing is the best way the winners of the future can meet those expectations.

 

Browse previous Disruptive Leadership columns

The post Disruptive Marketing: What It Is and Why You Need It appeared first on Fleet Management Weekly.


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