20 Jan Market Disruption and Coco Chanel
As my flight left for the 2016 International Builders Show/National Kitchen & Bath Industry Show in Las Vegas, I settled in for the three-hour flight perusing a newly published book entitled “Disrupt You!” by Jay Samit. Simultaneously, I turned on a movie called “Coco Avant Chanel,” a French flick that profiles the rise of Coco Chanel to global fashion fame.
Both the book and the movie present many interesting examples of market disruption and the success that comes with them. “Coco Chanel – a market disruptor? C’est pas vrai,” you say.
Before we address the Coco question, let’s start with the topic of what market disruption in.
At Axiom, our new product and insights teams are charged with identifying market disruptors that have the potential to replace or antiquate our clients product solutions. It may be slow growing buffalo grass that doesn’t require as much watering and mowing, remote power transfer solutions that don’t require batteries or transmission wires, or hand sanitizing systems that no longer require alcohol-based solutions to kill bacteria.
These are the types of disruptor technologies that we build innovation, channel strategy and content around.
Our goal is to accelerate our clients’ ability to pivot to new product or service solutions. A secondary goal is to help them identify factors in their value chains that they can harness more productively to address or weaken said market disruption. The last goal is to help communicate why their solution or innovation remains viable to their customers and channel partners using content, third party endorsements, videos and motion graphics.
Back to Coco. For those of you who may not know, Coco Chanel epitomizes the classic rags-to-riches story. The film recounts her rise from humble origins in highly class-conscious France to a global couturier. She was the first woman to run a fashion house in Paris.
Her vision? She believed that women’s styles should be simpler and more elegant. Her principles: clean lines, classic colors and casual elegance. She eschewed the popular French style that was focused on cleavage, showing lots of skin and overall design excess. Because her vision was so different from the other designers of the time, wealthy Parisian women began purchasing her hats and her clothing, and she became fashion’s gold standard.
Did she disrupt or did she merely innovate? Most fashion historians she did both.
“In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different.” – Coco Chanel
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