Dec 04 2007
Disruptive Technology – The “Why” not the “What”
Unique technology solutions are rare. Most technology comes with evolution… emulation combined with progress, in other words not reinventing the wheel, is often the preferred development path. Even when technology is, indeed, new, it is usually produced with some kind of consumer need or want in mind.
Marketers are frequently challenged with finding not the “what” in the branding of disruptive technologies but the “why”? Prior to founding my own company, Mitra Creative, I was once the marketing and sales lead for a startup enterprise which was developing a genuinely business-transformative video software solution. The fundamental concept of this solution was to replace numerous existing video services with a single, economical platform which would not just streamline existing processes but revolutionize them. While certainly an enticing prospect to the market, this made conventional video technology providers, as well as professional consumers who use their solutions to produce media, understandably nervous… but a ”good nervous”. However, the risk of market anxiety represented a huge sales challenge. Branding is about identification–even if new, something has to have at least a sort of conventional application to be sold and proliferated.
Our initial bypass of conventional selling practices for the special but disruptive video software solution to was to reach to alternative markets. Still, we could not do this with a “copy-and-replace” strategy, as these markets were decidedly different than traditional ones. That meant demonstrating real business value to entirely new audiences. We were very successful in articulating that value through identifying other critical business issues that this new technology would address. For example, as video has become more prevalent in communications, the technology could be used to better support the socialization of media content in any industry, even in those which may not have been considered before.
Finding special niches helps technology companies to address audiences as opposed to reciting to consumers and others what they make and/or deliver. It is therefore critical that the “why” is applied when marketing disruptive technologies. Leading with “what” may cause the most valuable of new technologies to be ignored. When the why is discovered, rareness, specialness, newness and much more can be applied to the consumer need and extended.
