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Why it is vital to explore disruptivebranding COPYRIGHT MATERIALNOT FOR REPRODUCTIONFrom London to Shanghai, Paris to São Paulo and Istanbul to Lagos,businesses and industries are experiencing seismic changes in the waythey work. New challenger brands are appearing, apparently over-night, rewriting the rules of industry and reaping impressive marketcapitalizations. In their wake they leave disoriented boardrooms andexecutives – not quite sure what happened, how they could have pre-pared and whether their company will survive in the new landscape.Whether transport, entertainment, hospitality, photography, energyor retail, it seems that no one is safe from the pull of disruption.Every brand now falls into one of two categories: the disruptors orthe disrupted. While Disruption may only recently have reached the radar of thegeneral public, the concept dates back a long way. As early as the1950s Joseph Schumpeter spoke about the ‘gale of creative destruc-tion’, a term that described ‘process of industrial mutation that inces-santly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantlydestroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one’. Then in the 1990s Jean-Marie Dru, Chairman of advertising groupTBWA, coined the French termstratégie de ruptureto describe theinnovative strategies he and his colleagues had to develop in responseto clients that had brands in trouble. As Dru describes, the termtended to have negative connotations. ‘It was employed to describesomething that was problematic or even calamitous, like an earth-quake or an epidemic’ (Dru, 2015). In 1995, American academic and business consultant ClaytonChristensen came up with a theory he called Disruptive Innovation,which strove to capture the relationship between new challenger start-ups and more established businesses. Christensen defined dis-ruptive innovation as ‘a process by which a product or service takesroot initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market andthen relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing establishedcompetitors’ (Christensen, 1997). The idea gained traction in thebusiness world, with its romantic framing of start-ups as a kind ofDavid against the Goliath of established companies. COPYRIGHT MATERIALNOT FOR REPRODUCTIONThis tends to be the idea that journalists write about in headlinesabout every new start-up on the block. Therefore, this is also howmost of us have come to view disruption. The story of disruption hasbecome one of geeks working out of garages in Silicon Valley puttingfear in the hearts of out-of-touch corporate fat cats. It is the domainof tech-savvy start-ups and the scourge of big business. It is some-thing that small, daring companies do, and that all other businessesmust try to either protect themselves from or simply avoid. Expensiveadvisors come up with strategies akin to building a castle with a deepmoat; they speak of battening down the hatches and waiting out thestorm. We disagree both with this protectionist approach and certainlywith its polarizing definition of disruption. Disruption is not some-thing to be hidden from, to protect against or wait out. It is not awave that only start-ups can ride to fame and fortune and establishedbusinesses are somehow forbidden or unable to capitalize upon.Disruption as a principle is much older than any of the descriptionsgiven above. It has been at work in human history, certainly eco-nomic history, for many hundreds if not thousands of years. It hasbrought us industrial revolutions, amongst many other big steps for-ward. For businesses, it should not be an end goal, but a mindset thatis used to examine and improve what it does and how it does it. It isthe act of changing perspective, thinking differently, stopping to dosomething the established, usual way and finding a better one. It is anattitude of creativity, agility and innovation that all brands, no matterhow big or small, young or old, should strive to incorporate into theirbusiness. The diverse audiences of brands today are more connected, moreinformed and more empowered than ever before. At the same time, they also have more choices than any other generation. In order tosurvive – and thrive – in this environment, brands have to be pre-pared to continually push themselves to deliver the best possible ex-perience for their audiences, even if this sometimes means changingin leaps and bounds, not only incrementally. In other words, theyneed to learn to think and act disruptively about their own brand.They should ensure that everyone inside the organization, especiallyif it’s a big and established one, is prepared to question what hascome before and engage in the hard work to improve an already suc-cessful brand – in how it speaks, how it is designed and how itsaudiences can experience it. If they don’t, they can be sure that acompetitor will. COPYRIGHT MATERIALJean-Marie Dru wrote: NOT FOR REPRODUCTIONWhen it comes to defining Disruption from an academic perspective,w