Why Disruptive Marketing Starts with a Customer-First Mindset

When people use the word disruptive in marketing circles I almost always think of the late congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis’ encouragement to get into good trouble to advance positive change.

Disruptive, like trouble, tends to convey something negative when used without context. Unruly second graders are disruptive. A jackhammer outside a library is disruptive.

But in marketing circles, disruption, when done well, is an agent of good. That’s mostly because disruption in a marketing context is synonymous with innovation. If you want to be remembered (Why Memory is the Most Important Marketing KPI), which is the ultimate marketing goal, shake up the status quo.

But don’t confuse disruptive with different. Being different just to be different will only get you so far. There’s got to be some strategic purpose, some tangible benefit behind defying audience expectations to qualify as disruptive.

The other day I watched a TV spot from a personal injury law firm, a notoriously cringe-inducing advertising category, for sure. This one did not disappoint. It was filmed in black & white, without any apparent reason. No nod to nostalgia, no cinematic theme, at least none that I noticed. That’s not disruptive. That’s just arbitrary.

Truly disruptive marketing content comes in many forms. Maybe it incorporates social commentary. Maybe it’s humorous. Maybe it’s an indictment of the staid or status quo, think the iconic “1984” commercial that helped establish Apple as a cool and unconventional tech brand.

But the common thread that runs through nearly all disruptive content marketing is a focus on storytelling or experience, rather than product. Unless a product or service is monumentally revolutionary, i.e., 10 times faster or more productive than anything that’s come before, no recitation of features or benefits is ever going to be mistaken for disruptive.

That’s why I highlighted two non-product-oriented approaches to thought-leadership greatness in a LinkedIn article I posted earlier this month: knowledge hubs and industry surveys. (You can read about them here.)

Both these vehicles are disruptive in that they defy conventional marketing by demonstrating expertise in areas that might be adjacent to the brand’s specialty. This sort of big-picture marketing sends the message that your brand understands that nothing exists in a vacuum and that trends and developments in adjacent ecosystems could eventually influence future product developments in yours.

As recently as 5-10 years ago, few were connecting the dots between cloud computing and artificial intelligence. But the forward-looking cloud and datacenter providers that began tracking AI early saw the coming wave of compute demand and now lead in scalability.

Demonstrating mastery, or even just an awareness, of adjacent technologies and adjacent ecosystems provides customers or prospective customers with the peace of mind that their technology partners have a 360-degree understanding of not just their businesses, but how the future of those businesses could be impacted by innovation outside their spheres of interest.

Working on a thought-leadership piece for a broadband equipment provider a few years ago, I was challenged by one of the company’s leaders to defend references to artificial intelligence, virtual reality, near-field computing and other deeply immersive and futuristic bandwidth hungry technologies.

“Why are we talking about AI and Star Trek holodecks?” he asked. “We don’t make any of that stuff.”

He just couldn’t see the connection between making the case for broadband expansion (which was very much related to the stuff the company did make) and the future technologies that could drive bandwidth demand. That kind of shortsightedness is, sadly, not all that rare. Some of the most disruptive marketing content never makes it past internal gatekeepers.

But the stuff that does, regardless of the form it takes, starts with a customer-first mindset. If you really want to do something disruptive, you need to swap places with your customers.

That means going way beyond persona development or basic customer intel. You need to take customer advocacy to the next level. You need to figure out what keeps your best customers up at night and understand where they think their business will be in five, 10 or more years.

Another way to ensure a customer-first approach to content marketing is to think like a journalist, specifically an investigative journalist. Most journalists are driven by a natural curiosity and professional obligation to provide their audience with new, interesting and valuable information. And the more exclusive (i.e., unique) the better.

The trick or the twist is to make sure customer advocacy overlaps with your brand’s business objectives. If your content, disruptive or not, is not at least alluding to what your company does and does well, it fails the content relevancy test I wrote about in July and should never get past the pitch stage.

The bottom line: Disruption is doable. You just need to think like your customers, craft a narrative like a journalist and not be fearful of getting into a little good trouble.