How to Benefit from Brand Disruption

I had the opportunity to attend a summit hosted by the Silicon Valley think-tank known as Singularity University, or SU. The theme of the conference was about the impact of exponential technology on society and the economy. This included two days of presentations by SU thinkers in a format similar to TED Talks. The following builds the case for marketing leaders to engage in rather than resist brand disruption.

Exponential technology is defined as the more than doubling of technological innovation annually and the resultant disruptive stress and opportunities which it creates. The SU speakers applied this concept to traditional industries like energy and manufacturing to illustrate the challenges of our more traditional, linear business models. Examples abound in current media of how companies will be replaced if they don’t adapt to change, “In the next 10 years, 40% of Fortune 500 companies will not exist”. Peter Diamandis, the co-founder of SU expounds on many of these theories with an engaging video hosted on YouTube.

Brand Disruption

This made me start thinking about the potential disruption of established brands and how marketing leaders can effectively embrace the challenge of something I would now describe as ‘brand disruption’. There is an interesting school of thought on the subject, which suggests that marketing leaders should become less linear and manage brands as a frictionless portfolio. The former global marketing officer of Procter and Gamble, Stengel, advises that “Many brands are still in the product and service mentality rather than a service and frictionless mentality.” The theme of how to adapt non-linear thinking to brands is in it’s early stages:

• Exponential technology is creating mounting performance pressure as well as expanding opportunity. To harness these new opportunities, we will have to shift from businesses driven by scalable efficiency to businesses driven by scalable learning.
• Artificial Intelligence will take over virtually all of the work we do in scalable efficiency businesses. This will hopefully be a catalyst to help us re-think work in ways that tap into our unique capabilities as humans.
• There are significant challenges for large businesses – especially those with powerful cultures that will resist efforts to transform. Those that take more of a frictionless, learning and adapting approach have a better chance of success.

Exponential Brand Conclusions

If you choose a scalable approach and promote learning in your organization; you will benefit from incremental change. Traditionally failure is ‘not’ an option and yet scalable learning would dictate that if you’re not failing, you’re not learning. A recent Adweek article describes this challenge as “Brands have to take a portfolio approach to experimentation and learning.” Interesting thinking in our somewhat risk-averse economy as we start a new year.