Digital marketing in the field of accelerating disruption

The second day of this year's Inbound Conference feels like a power package:

- 26000 participants - a new record!
- Hundreds of speakers and several top keynoters
- A wide range of topics

This means that today's report cannot be a summary of the many contributions, but rather a selective choice of relevant statements as food for thought.

Inbound 2019 got off to a flying start with 26,000 participants.

Tech companies are becoming more human

Today, it was clear that many tech companies are undergoing a profound process of change - not towards the ultimate new technologies, but towards valuing employees who have a private life, a family, etc. to manage alongside their work. The founder of Reddit, Alexis Ohanian - a major community platform - illustrated this very impressively and vividly. He was able to use his own example to show that it was only as a young father that he realized that the balance and flexibility between work and leisure time is fundamental to the success of a company. Reddit is, after all, the third largest website in the USA and Alexis, as the founder and CEO of this company, took the three months of parental leave as an example, learning a lot in the process and showing employees that this is also feasible for the CEO. At the end of his keynote, he called out to all (tech) companies: become more human and therefore more successful.

Marketers become "friction spotters"

It's not what you sell, but how you sell that makes the difference. Emily Haahr, Vice President Global Support&Service at Hubspot, got to the bottom of this sentence. She explained that many of the disruptions we are familiar with from companies such as Uber, Lyft and Spotify were successful because these brands knew how to remove friction from people's lives. Be it the annoying physical CDs, the inconvenience of ordering and paying for a cab, etc.

CD shelves - that was once upon a time.

Marketers would therefore do well to identify frictions in existing customer processes from the customer's perspective and find solutions to eliminate them. The area of self-service in particular is a treasure trove for eliminating friction, be it by offering FAQs on the website, providing an intelligent content management solution that is available to customers 24/7, or by enabling customers to network in peer-to-peer communities that can relieve the burden on the company and speed up the solution process. The modern marketing department is therefore required to have as many friction spotters on the road as possible.

A new species of disruptor on the horizon

The term disruption, introduced by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen in the 1990s, is now completely worn out and unjustly discredited. However, in his keynote speech, Hubspot CEO Brian Halligan made it clear that when we talk about disruption, we mean the usual suspects such as Netflix, Uber and Spotify - in other words, all tech companies. In a recent study on this topic, however, he came to the conclusion that there is a new type of disruptor and the number is growing rapidly. These are so-called experience disruptors - companies that are not trying to make their product even better, but companies that manage to take the interaction experience with customers to a whole new level. The US company Carvana has achieved this in a short space of time and has become one of the largest car dealers. The approach is to buy the car as if from a vending machine with home delivery and the option to return it within the first seven days.

Experience disruption when buying a car using the example of Carvana.

Now I'm looking forward to seeing what awaits us tomorrow at Inbound.