James L. McQuivey, Ph.D. is a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research serving Consumer Product Strategy professionals. Follow him on Twitter at @jmcquivey. Growing up in the '70s, I was the world?s biggest fan of The Bionic Man. Every Sunday night at 7 p.m. you could find me glued to our Trinitron TV to watch Steve Austin battle every villain from Bionic Sasquatch to the evil Dr. Dolenz. The appeal of the show was simple: Amplified by technology, the Bionic Man is better, stronger, and faster than his enemies.
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It turns out to be a morality tale for our own day. But you are not the bionic man in the drama I?m unfolding -- you are his target. Because while you were carefully planning your business strategy, hundreds -- if not thousands -- of individuals and competitors have been exploiting technology to make themselves better, stronger, and faster than you.
We call these people digital disruptors. And they?re coming right for you.
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No matter what industry you are in, you are their target. Where you could once dismiss digital disruption as the sole province of the music or other media industries where it destroyed billions in value, digital disruption has now expanded. These disruptors employ technologies -- and the platforms they enable -- to build better products than you can, establish a stronger customer relationship than you have, and deliver it all to market faster than you ever thought possible.
Oh, and it doesn?t cost anywhere close to six million dollars for them to get started. I offer Lose It! as one of many case studies worth considering. Targeting the weight loss and fitness business -- one of the most analog industries on the planet -- Lose It! is disrupting the more than $40 billion Americans spend on weight loss each year. It?s a costly industry to enter -- think of Jenny Craig?s marketing budget alone, then add its hundreds of physical locations, prepared meals, and all the infrastructure to support the entire enterprise. So while franchises like The Biggest Loser have succeeded in entering this business recently, they have done so at great cost.
Meanwhile, a single app that helps dieters keep track of the calories they consume on their smartphones has gone from 0 to 7 million downloads in just a few years. FitNow, the company behind the app, pulled this off with four employees, establishing an unheard of customer-per-employee metric of 1.75 million.
This is digital disruption at its finest: better, stronger, faster. The app got to market quickly, partly because as a digital disruptor, FitNow could afford to launch something that didn?t try to solve all the problems in the weight-loss world. As Charles Teague, CEO, told me recently, ?Let?s not pretend that we know the endgame here. Let?s do the least amount of features to know if it will work. Then improve it if people use it.? And improve it they have, adding fitness tracking and more recently a robust social community of like-minded dieters.
Because it sounds so easy, a CEO I shared this with asked me why, if digital is so quick and dirty, his company?s website redesign was over time and over budget. I told him it was precisely because he staffed up his business under assumptions about design and functionality that were true in 2005 but are no longer the case. Digital disruption has even disrupted the digital businesses that preceded them.
While digital disruptors are better, stronger, and faster, they are not untouchable. Their ease of entry comes from the fact that traditional barriers have fallen to zero. That means your direct cost to emulate their practices can also be low.
That?s why I recommend you steal the digital disruptor?s handbook. Use the iPad, the Kinect, and whatever platform is next to build a digital bridge to your customers. Like with Lose It!, your bridge must engage customers more often than your current product can, packaging and delivering benefits that you didn?t realize were part of your consumer contract because before now, they weren?t. You have to change your understanding of your product so you can then change your customer?s understanding of it as well. This will require better thinking than you currently do ? I previously explained how digital disruptors take advantage of a type of thinking called "innovating the adjacent possible." It?s crucial to generating more ideas more quickly so that you can find the nearby opportunities that will succeed while quickly culling those that will fail.
There?s more to do, but before you can even begin, you have to know: Are you ready to do this? Does your company have the energy, skills, and policies to turn into a disruptor or are you more likely to be displaced by the digital disruptor nearest you?
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Nikada
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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