The Secret To Brand Relevance: Disruptive Innovation

Disruptive innovation is quickly transforming how businesses approach product development, marketing, customer acquisition, digital asset management and sales. If you look at the best-known disruptors like Uber and Airbnb, it’s easy to see that you can identify gaps in the market that are left by larger organizations, who have lost sight of what today’s customer wants, and enjoy extraordinary success as a result.

To achieve brand relevance as a business, you must listen to what customers want and continually reinvent your services to meet their needs. But continuously innovating in order to stay ahead of the competition requires much greater foresight. How exactly can disruptive innovation help your businesses achieve sustained brand relevance?

What is Brand Relevance?

In a time of heightened customer expectations and constant change, the greatest danger that your brand can face today, is losing brand relevance. New trends are emerging, markets are constantly shifting, people are ultra-connected and competitors are entering the market and shaking things up. Customers are also expecting more from your business, so you need to stay relevant in an ever-shifting business market.

Achieving brand relevance means you have to adapt fast enough, stay ahead of the competition, make bold and smart moves that amaze your customers, maintain your position in the market and disrupt what people want to buy by creating new categories and markets while remaining authentic. According to a Forbes article on how to keep your brand relevant, your business needs to constantly move forward, innovate, adapt and disrupt, while staying true to the core values of your brand.

How Can Your Brand Achieve Disruption?

Disruption means taking a closer look at existing products and services, existing retail and consumer needs and seeing if you can meet those needs than other established brands in the market. But, it also means experimenting with new ideas and producing products or offering services that address gaps in the market. To achieve disruption, your brand has to:

• Entrench itself into customers’ lives
• Place innovation at the heart of your operations

For instance, Unmade, a made-to-order knitwear brand went further by hiring engineers, fashion designers, physicists and other creatives to address specific issues they saw in the traditional knitwear industry. How did they achieve disruption?

• By looking at issues and problems with a new, bolder perspective
• Finding innovative solutions through those new perspectives

While it’s important not to lose sight of your brand’s main objective, achieving disruption requires that you look for fresh and unconventional perspectives to the way you look at problems and address customer needs. This way, you can better achieve disruption through smart innovation.

Tips You Can Implement

Given that disruptive innovation is such an important dimension of building a relevant brand, it’s important to embrace it into your DNA. But, where do you begin? Here are some things you can do to build brand relevance for your business through disruptive innovation:

• Take Smart and Calculated Risks – Disruptive innovation can only happen when you’re ready to summon the ultimate courage to do things differently, and in a new way. It’s all about taking smart risks, guided by a desire to bring transformative change in the market. There is no perfect information to guide disruptive innovation. You have to work around your brand vision and make your ideas a reality, while accepting the potential downsides of any risk you take.
• Know What Your Brand Stands for – To achieve brand relevance through disruptive innovation, you have to be absolutely clear on your core brand values, competences and ambitions. By understanding what your brand stands for, you can put all your efforts and resources behind your disruption efforts. If you stand for valor, courage and integrity, you could implement different kind of promotional material such as military challenge coins that Embleholics offers.
• Know What Your Customers Want and Deliver – Keep in mind that you’re faced with the need to constantly know what more you can do for your customers before a competitor does. Customer experience matters – Know what your customers want and deliver. Your employees, the first-line of contact between your brand and customers, should have their pulse on your customer needs, new customer opportunities and pan points. Ensure your brand has established customer interaction and listening mechanisms to get you up on ideas.

Conclusion

Brand relevance is today considered one of the chief drivers of growth. In today’s disruptive market, your brand can’t afford to lose relevance. Relevance is what keeps your brand healthy, strong and better prepared to survive and win in the ever-changing market. As a brand, you must be ready to embrace disruptive, relentless innovation to remain relevant.