Disrupt your market - but not your customers’ peace of mind.

This is a post about disruption.

Not whether your business should do it or not – that’s a whole other area of expertise – but whether you should include it in your customer communications. 

It was inspired by a speech given by former PM Liz Truss a few weeks before she was unceremoniously removed from office. As with all kinds of things about that brief hallucinatory period of British politics, it is wildly out of date (in partial justification I was on holiday at the time). But it’s also something I have thinking about for a while.

As a reminder, this is what Mad Liz had to say:

“The scale of the challenge is immense. War in Europe for the first time in a generation. A more uncertain world in the aftermath of Covid. And a global economic crisis. That is why in Britain we need to do things differently. We need to step up. As the last few weeks have shown, it will be difficult. Whenever there is change, there is disruption. Not everyone will be in favour. But everyone will benefit from the result – a growing economy and a better future.”

Somehow, Liz and her boosters had mistaken the British economy for a silicon valley start-up and proceeded to unleash £30 billion worth of disruption on the British Economy. Move fast and break things indeed. 

It’s a great story…

Of course, disrupt or be disrupted has become the mantra of our corporate times. There are conferences dedicated to the d-word. There are disruption seminars and disruption consultants. At one point, there was a degree in disruption at the University of Southern California. It’s so hard to avoid that someone brilliant created a plug-in to get rid of it in text. Even copywriting is being disrupted.

Giving the inaugural Bob Gavron Memorial Lecture in 2016, the director general of the Institute of Directors, Simon Walker gave a pretty plausible explanation for why this might be:

“One thing that characterises entrepreneurs perhaps more than anything else is the desire to cause disruption… Entrepreneurs are often great story-tellers, and their favourite stories reflect David and Goliath, the plucky upstart who takes down the complacent giant.”

Pretty tempting. I mean, D&G is a great story, and business communicators thrive on great stories.

But I never advise clients to describe themselves as disruptive when talking to customers or prospects.

…but who’s listening?

The reasons are hinted at in Liz’s speech. It’s got War. Pestilence. Crisis. Poverty. Great for a story - but for real life? Add in the very recent death of a beloved monarch, Brexit and the political merry-go-round in its aftermath and you could argue that the British people had had enough disruption by that point. They could do without any more, thanks very much.

And the British people are not alone. When it comes down to it, most of your customers do not want to be disrupted. They want to things to be better.

That’s the challenge: to convince them that the unfamiliar, the radically new, the previously unheard of is actually going to make their daily experience easier and their business better.

Disruptor is the kind of word that makes bored industry analysts and journalists happy – there’s clicks to be had and insights to deliver when something that is radically different arrives on the scene.

Investors and VCs are also very fond of a spot of disruption – that’s where the money is, after all (although this venture builder points to the problems of being described as a disruptor when everyone else is too.)

But it’s the kind of thing that, 25 years after Harvard Business School professor, Clay Christensen, wrote The Innovator’s Dilemma and kicked this whole thing off, you really want people to say about you. Not something you want to say about yourself. It sounds a bit, well, ridiculous. Self-absorbed. Thirsty.

You’re trying far too hard if you’re building your customer-facing brand around the idea that you are disruptive. This is absolutely a case in which you need to show, not tell. (Something that the very smart people at inc.com agree with me about.)

Show don’t tell

A few years ago, I was working on some sales materials for a European start-up that was disrupting energy management systems for big industrials and manufacturers. They had spent a long time telling investors that they were disrupting this very conservative market and they were pretty successful at it. So they wanted to include it in their sales and marketing materials.

But imagine what it’s like to be a just-in-time manufacturer that’s considering whether to let some start-up come in and install new kit on your physical infrastructure. You don’t want anything to be disrupted. Least of all your energy supply.

And if you’re selling to this manufacturer, you don’t want any decision-makers to have that word association in their heads.

Happily, my bank (not a client) is an example of a company that has got it right. It’s properly shaking up the Swiss retail banking market – and about time too. But the d-word is nowhere to be found in any of its customer-facing materials from onboarding onwards. It is, however, in some of the stuff it’s put together for investors (I had to dig pretty hard to find it). It’s a very smart move. And it seems to be paying off in growth and market prominence. Because no one wants their finances to be disrupted – just more focused and much more efficient.

There are better ways to prove that you are changing things for the better. That you are revolutionising an industry. That you are offering innovation with real, tangible benefits. And that you’re challenging old ways of thinking.

Want to find out how? Drop me a line.

Notes

The article by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker, and its response by Clayton Christensen in Bloomberg are good places to start on disruption and innovation as the motivators for today’s entrepreneurs. MIT Sloan add their thoughts here – but there are many many many more out there.

In researching this piece I found that Stefan Stern, former director of the High Pay Centre, and co-author of Myths of Management: Dispel the Misconceptions and Become an influential Manager and Myths of Management: What People Get Wrong About Being the Boss has covered similar territory in this excellent piece in the Guardian.

And finally, there has been some research about language use and investment success (note: investment, not marketing.) The HBR analysed entrepreneurs who built their profiles around ‘disrupt’ type words and those that relied on ‘build’ type words. The first group received 1.7 times more funding, on average. Always write for your audience!