The railways signs say it all… Beware of Trains.
As you approach a pedestrian or road crossing over a railway line you are met with a warning sign: Stop Look Listen and Beware of Trains. Quite simple really. Have your eyes and ears open, sense what’s coming and if all is clear, carry on your journey.
How similar is this to the way in which your competitors probably produce marketing and communications. They do something year after year. It works, kind of, and so repeat and repeat again. Evolving marketing and how predictable. How easy to beat. You may be copying them. Following the rules, written or unwritten. Listening to the ‘best practice’ spouted by consultants, the media and your Facebook friends. Often it’s just the same thing, re-presented in a slightly different way.
And herein lies your opportunity. It’s called Disruptive Marketing (definition: “A disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology. The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically first by designing for a different set of consumers in a new market and later by lowering prices in the existing market.” source: Wikipedia).
By taking a completely different look at your market, your customers, your products, the technologies that help you to do business, your systems and processes and your people… dare to dream. Take time out and think “what if…”. Try not to be bound by the past but think of an ideal future. Don’t be constrained by following the same old tracks. Yes stop, look and listen, but not to reinvent an iteration of the existing, but rather to sense something new, something that will fundamentally change for the better, a feature of your marketplace.
We are currently doing this ourselves and it’s a fascinating exercise. You can expect to see some disruptive new things from Viper in the coming months. We’ll retain our core values and personality but add in some special new ingredients and we look forward to hearing about what you disrupt too.