Disruptive Marketing - Disrupt, Dont Interrupt!

“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two and only two basic functions: marketing and innovation.” Peter Drucker

What does it take to get your attention? The irony is that while there have never been more ways to connect with the consumer because of media explosion, it has never been more difficult to effectively communicate and interact with the consumer. If you disrupt someone's mind with your marketing technique and manage to get their attention, you are using disruptive marketing. It is essentially a form of marketing which changes the conventional form of doing things and attempts to redefine conventional thinking and consumer behavior. It attempts to create a customer by combining the marketing and innovation functions of a business.
One of the most used methods to undertake disruptive marketing is Ambient Advertising; a very unique concept of integrating advertising into our surroundings in order to clinch our attention. The idea is to surprise and create a sense of astonishment in the mind of the observer so that he stands back and takes notice of the advert. The below images might give better insight into the execution.

Disruptive marketing is not about coming in and changing 100% of your media mix. It is about finding the low hanging fruit and looking for small opportunities to disrupt.
 

Effects of Disruptive Marketing

The human brain is designed to remain in a static state enabling it to reserve its information processing power for emergencies or survival. Therefore any activity that disrupts the schema might have a strong impact on consumers’ sensory channels. One of the attributes of undertaking this form of a marketing exercise is that the results might be extreme. The exercise works well if a brand needs to create a buzz in the market. However, a lot lies in the execution. One needs to take special care that it does not annoy people, as it can get very intrusive. Hence you have to be disruptive in a way that is relevant on a very personal level. Disrupt, Don’t Interrupt!
Examples
• One example of a disruptive social media marketing campaign was the Burger King- Whopper Sacrifice campaign — that offered people a free Whopper if they de-friended 10 people from Facebook. The sacrificed souls actually received a notice that they were "sacrificed for a Whopper". Around 82,000 Facebook users deleted over 230,000 friendships before Facebook had the app shut down. Crispin Porter, Bogusky and Refresh Media developed the campaign, which got as much viral branding from being shut down as they did from actually running the app.
• Arvind Kejriwal’s launch of his party. The party which has not even been registered with the Election Commission of India has been pre-launched with a bang by accusing Mr Vadra of indulging in acts of corruption undertaking  and unfolding various other scandals! Not a penny has been spent on proliferating this message as the Indian and foreign media are doing the job for him. By ruffling many feathers Arvind Kejriwal has successfully taken the route of disruptive marketing to market his product/party.
• ITC Foods was able to disrupt the leadership of Parle in the biscuits’ category primarily lead by the Glucose segment commanding almost 55 per cent share of the biscuits’ category. However over the years, cookies and cream biscuits are emerging as the largest segment within the category. This was possible when Sunfeast along with other players came up with cookies and cream biscuits in smaller SKU, priced at Rs 5. A market that led for 95 years, crumbled in two years.
• Nokia tried to regain their market dominance in the dual-sim category by ‘Nokia Blue Brigade’ relying on street plays/Nukkad Natak to rally small towns of Punjab, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. It reached out to 575 towns and villages across six North Indian states through a group of artists entering a crowded market area and enacting a comedy play, which smartly weaved the benefits of dual-sim handsets into the script followed by demonstrations of the device and also prizes for those who purchased on the spot. The company was able to sell over 5300 dual-sim handsets on the spot.

Provided the execution is flawless, disruptive marketing techniques go a long way in achieving high top of the mind recall for brand in today’s cluttered marketing space. Innovation is what makes a company tick as it impacts the consumer’s life in a positive manner. If the brand is able to connect deeply with the target consumer they can trigger that purchase decision at the conscious and subconscious level and create a WIN-WIN!  But remember Disrupt, Don’t Interrupt!