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Forget digital transformation – brands need to disrupt themselves

October 28, 2014 | 5 min read

Every couple of years marketers seem to adopt a word and then beat it to death, talking about it to clients and prospects at every opportunity.

Brands like Uber have realised the power of disruption

I am as guilty of this as the next person. Over the last year alone, digital marketers have been obsessed with terms such as gamification, social TV/commerce/business, ROPO and ROI. This isn’t just my opinion; Google any Gartner hype-cycle from the last few years and you’ll discover plenty more.

Inventing new phrases is cool, especially in an industry that changes so fast. But as marketers, I’m concerned that we have an unhealthy obsession with hanging our hats on shiny new terms.

I bring this up because it seems to me that the current term-of-the-moment is 'Digital Transformation'. I have no problem with the phrase itself: many marketing professionals are using it very well and talking about it in the right context. Understanding the challenges that an organisation is facing and why it needs transformation is not an easy task.

But what concerns me about the idea of digital transformation is that it is getting stripped of all its meaning. Just like ROI became a conversation about Return-on-Influence (not investment) a few years ago, I am seeing 'digital transformation' being attached to a project just because it involves more than one channel.

It’s a cool term and it makes the conversation sound 'relevant'. But the professionals who talk about transformation know full well that true digital transformation requires an understanding of people, culture, organisation structure AND technology. It is not a conversation about campaigns, advertising, new Facebook pages or multi/omni-channel marketing.

So here’s my challenge to you. If you are one of the people talking about transformation, please make sure that you discuss it appropriately with the respect and understanding that it deserves. Real digital transformation is as important to HR, finance, sales and operations as it is to marketing. It is too important to be siloed in the marketing or IT departments.

Let me instead suggest an alternative word that you might want to use when you need to have a productive conversation...

Disruption.

Disruption means something.

Three major brands, Uber, Getty Images and Sony PlayStation, are on a mission to 'disrupt themselves every single day' (their words, not mine), and are revolutionising the industries that they are in.

Let’s take Uber. Uber has disrupted the taxi and car service industry so well that it’s now the fastest growing company in the world, adding over 50,000 new jobs to the global economy each month. Industry analysts are already suggesting that Uber is the next company most likely to smash $100bn in revenue.

Getty Images’ entire business model is based upon selling image rights to media content, but because of the way content is now being shared on social media, it knew that it had to disrupt itself. Refusing to be the next Kodak, Getty made the unusual step of giving away half of its entire library (50m+ images) with its embed program, to be used by content makers for free in return for a credit. It is now growing faster than ever.

Digital transformation suggests an evolution of a current way of working, but when I speak to brands like Uber and Getty what I see is a new way of doing things. A revolution. It has been said that a real revolution means ripping everything up and starting again, but I prefer to quote Marc Benioff from last week’s Dreamforce conference. As the CEO of Salesforce, Benioff has disrupted the software industry with innovative messages like ‘No Software’ and his 1:1:1 philanthropic model ever since founding the company in 1999. He said:

“We need a new vision, not a new version.”

Let me give you a couple more examples:

All these brands are obsessed with a new way of working. They are not on a mission to transform existing models. This is why I believe that our success (and the success of our brands, agencies and clients), relies more upon how well we disrupt ourselves and adapt, than how well we evolve.

Jeremy Waite is head of digital strategy EMEA at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and his column will appear here monthly. You can follow him on Twitter @jeremywaite

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