Beyond Disruption: Changing the Rules in the Marketplace

Hving read the first book "Disruption", I'm glad that Jean Marie Dru has decided to compile case studies on how Disruption works in the market place with this new book. I also liked the fact that he invited prominent people in the TBWA family to write about disruption in their markets (they even have a section on Asian Markets). This book is a great book for anyone going into the world of advertising. It helped me as student to improve my creative thinking and the way I think about strategy! Now that I'm in the business, I actually occasionally refer to this book when I'm stuck on something. To me, I feel Disruption and Beyond Disruption are the "Hey Whipple" books for Strategy and should be an inspiration to anyone who works on the strategy side of the business.

You need this book and a little disruption if you: 1. Have lost your role as the center of category value 2. Are relying on deals and costly promotions 3. Are feeling invincible 4. Competitor's products are flying off of the shelves 5. Competitor's customers are more active than yours 6. Your customers of today looks exactly like your customers of yesterday 7. Or, you can't articulate a clear vision of your future. With the proliferation of similar products it takes a disruptive approach to get a customer's attention. You must get into their heart, under their skin and make news! This has been shown to be highly beneficial in marketing. It has recently been shown that 'disruption' is beneficial anywhere where convetion has strongly taken root. There are three consecutive themes that Jean-Marie Dru offers as a plan to keep up the necessary innovation. They are: 1. Study, observe and list what is considered conventional in your field. 2. Challenge these conventions with new ideas 3. Visioneering - envision and act upon the most possible and exciting ideas. Many, many examples are given throughout the book using companies that we are all familiar with. Included is an outline of how to carry out your own disruption workshops to create positive change. 5 Stars

I truly and thoroughly enjoyed this book! It reminded me what it was that got me into this line of work in the first place. This book focuses the reader on using creativity to look at the world in a different manner, and create truly differentiable advantage thereby, and the energy and excitement that I took from it were absolutely wonderful.The book is team-written by a series of folks at TBWA\, (one of the largest ad agencies in the world) and there are definite portions of the book that are only of value to people outside of the ad world in dealing with folks inside, (most notably, the entire third section of the book, which you can honestly skip) and there are some chapters written by Dru's team that contradict some of his basic tenets, but don't let either of these put you off. The case studies, base lessons and some of the discussions about methodologies are highly portable, and certainly can lead to a strong and very valuable transformation in your practices and company, if taken to heart.It will focus you and your co-workers on defining and fulfilling the grandeur of the mission you're on, (regardless of industry or product segment) with the benefits accruing in direct proportion to how widely you can introduce this mindset and maintain the excitement, (much of it self-perpetuating) to your environment.And one very cute suggestion that has immediate value to us all: a company was having a very difficult time with actual output not being achieved due to both the quantity and time span of meetings, (sound familiar?). Dru and his team's suggestion, which was implemented to great success? Remove all chairs from the conference room. Imagine how quickly meetings can be over if everyone has to stand during the entire discussion!

Dru successfully outlines the creation, development and deployment of 'disruptive' marketing strategies used on some of today's most successful brands including Apple and Absolute. In addition, he helps you get an understanding of why disruptive thinking is important, and in many cases, essential for the everyday entrepreneur. The visuals in the book certainly help and the well-organized structure of the content makes for a good read. Advertising and marketing folks, you won't be let down.

This book is valuable because [finally] there are case histories of how Dru's Disruption theory actually works in the marketplace. Dru wrote intro and then drew on his network of TBWA offices to report on how they've been successfully applying this dramatic communication theory for clients over last half decade. If you're interested in how to get your advertising and marketing to be heard and absorbed by the consumer, it's worth a read.Andrew Jaffe, Adweek Books