Interactive Minds Digital Summit Disrupt or Die: How business needs to stay relevant to a shifting audience

20th July 2016

who am i

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WHO AM I?

My professional life is spent understanding and harnessing the changes that digital has wrought on brands and businesses, transformations and disruptions that operate at velocities exceeding Moore's Law.

Important to continually question technologies, push business boundaries and create innovating digital strategies.

I am driven by the challenge of innovating new products and services and removing friction from existing ones.

what is disruption

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WHAT IS DISRUPTION

Transformation and disruption are two of the most used business buzzwords of the past five years. And for good reason: only 12 per cent of companies in the original listing of the Fortune 500 some 60 years ago are still on that list.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THESE GUYS?

“40percentofbusinessesinthisroom,unfortunately,willnotexistinameaningfulwayin10years.Eitherwedisruptorwegetdisrupted.”

how to disrupt: the pivot

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DEFINING THE PIVOT

Companies having the courage and vision to transform and disrupt themselves to their own benefit.

Some, such as Apple, Adobe and IBM, were successful companies already. And some cleverly changed their business model while still in the start-up phase to become household names: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Paypal and Android.

DEFINING THE PIVOT

The favoured Silicon Valley phrase to describe these successes is “the pivot”. It was only coined in 2011 by Eric Ries in his popular book, The Lean Startup.

It gained further notoriety via Silicon Valley heavyweight Marc Andreessen a year later when he commented: “The pivot. It used to be called the f . . k-up.”

Even so, it’s good for Australian CEOs and CMOs, to acknowledge when the current business strategy has run its course, and that they have to reset the company in a new way.

EXAMPLES OF THE PIVOT

For marketers, the obvious pivot tactic is to change the product. When the bosses at start-up Odeo realised that its podcast subscription and search network was doomed with the rise of iTunes, they gave staff two weeks to come up with a new product. Twitter was conceived, and the rest is pivot history.

EXAMPLES OF THE PIVOT

Burbn realised that the majority of usage on its app was for photography, it rebuilt itself, and Instagram was born. And when Game Neverending saw that the most popular part of its online role-playing game was the photo sharing, it minimised its offering to what is Flickr today.

EXAMPLES OF THE PIVOT

Others, such as Adobe, completely overhauled their revenue and pricing model. Only 10 years ago Adobe would send out its latest imaging and design software upgrades on CD-ROMs and charge a licence fee upward of $600 for use on just one computer. Fast-forward to today, and many Adobe products are free, while the equivalent imaging software upgrades are downloaded from the cloud on a subscription model at a smidgin of the price, but by a far wider user base.

EXAMPLES OF THE PIVOT

For many the challenge beyond how to pivot is when to pivot. Joe Schoendorf, the former CMO of Apple and HP, and now a major tech start-up investor, has a great answer to that:

“Every year I get my best people to hack my business.”

defining experiences not technology

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DISRUPTION IS ABOUT EXPERIENCES. NOT TECH.

When we think about disruptive businesses, we focus on the way they change and shift the processes and systems that we’re used to. It’s all about how businesses disrupt, and often the technology that allows it.

But you’ll find most of the Taxi companies who have tried to respond to Uber have done so by releasing their own app, falsely believing that the reason people choose the service is because they can use it via their phone.

DISRUPTION IS ABOUT EXPERIENCES. NOT TECH.

You’ll find that these apps fail. Every time. They fail because they completely miss the point. They fail because Taxi companies see themselves as being disrupted by an app. The truth is, they’re being disrupted by an experience.

UNINTERRUPTED

James is one of the most popular athletes on the planet, and he’s capitalizing on it off the court. He brings in more than $40 million in endorsement deals a year, and he started his own media company back in 2008, Spring Hill Productions, with childhood friend and business partner Maverick Carter

SLACK

Slack started working on the app at the end of 2012. ("Never mind the part where we first tried to make a web-based massively multiplayer game and failed," Butterfield quips—another story for another article.) And by March 2013, he and his team had enough to work with that they were using the product themselves. Still, they knew that they represented just one team dynamic of a nearly infinite set; by May of that year, they were ready for more users

CANVA

Canva touts a user-base of 5 million customers across 179 countries. Perkins seems to be imbued with an optimism and determination she claims was entirely necessary for her perseverance through rejection and failure, a confidence so many experts claim is missing, particularly for young women in the tech industry, and which might go some way to explain the lack of diversity in tech hires and entrepreneurs.

how to do this

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THE ESSENCE OF DIGITAL STRATEGY IS CHOOSING WHAT NOT TO DO.

Thus Digital Brand Strategy to inform disruption must understand how people are behaving on digital platforms and in the world, building relationships with brands and each other and buying products.

It’s impossible to separate the content, or the idea, from media on digital platforms, so digital brand strategies need to be concerned with who and what and where and when and why - a complete system approach based on experiences.

STRATEGIC APPROACH TO DISRUPTION

Define the Customer Journey

Develop an MVP

Know the Problem with Previous Experience

Test and Fail Fast

What is the Value Exchange

ACKNOWLEDGE THE PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE

If you’re working on something that you see as being disruptive, you have to make sure that you’re disrupting the previous experience, and doing it well. It’s not always about being shinier — it’s about how it makes your users feel.

Thank you

Contact: Andrew Kolb Publicis Pusher Level 2, 164 Grey Street South Brisbane QLD 4101 Australia andrew.kolb@publicispusher.com.au M +614 413 464 438