What Is Disruptive Marketing🤔

I know what you’re all thinking…

“Whaaaaa the hell is that? Another buzz marketing jargon word probs! Right?”

Maybe not if you’re tired of true marketing tactics losing their impact? Perhaps you’re wondering how to adapt and stay relevant with consumers?

While dining with friends, I once noticed people quietly standing up and walking to stand outside the restaurant. Curious, I and my companions abandoned our food and drinks to see what was happening. Outside, they discovered a drone show lighting up the night sky—an animation promoting a new television series that concluded with a QR code. Activating the QR code on a mobile device led the viewer to a trailer for Halo.

This experience captivated me (especially as a drone guy) and made me wonder: Could I create a story so compelling that people would leave their meals to view, record, and share it with their social networks? The answer was maybe but likely no—and that realisation sparked my journey to understand how businesses can stand out in an increasingly noisy world. Perhaps why you are all here letting me waffle on about creative ‘STUFF” 🤷🏻‍♂️

Anyways, I decided to identify and pattern—a system for creating a disruptive story that demands attention. This system revolves around three key focal elements:

1. What is your story? (Your narrative)

2. Where do you tell the story?

3. Who tells the story?

To thrive, you must disrupt your narrative, where you tell your story, or who tells it—ideally, all three.

Disrupt Your Narrative 📖

The strategy here is "breaking bad rules for good reasons"—pushing boundaries and industry norms to create something memorable for consumers.

One of my favourite examples comes from two Australian brothers, Andrew and James McKinnon, who run an agency called Taboo in Melbourne, Australia. During an on-stage presentation called "Taboo by Design," they announced that they would remove a piece of clothing whenever someone left the room during their talk. I mean, talk about keeping you gripped in your seat 😏

Andrew shared that they'd been told numerous times this was a bad idea but told the audience, "I would rather be humiliated today than be forgotten." By the end of their presentation about breaking industry norms, they stood on stage in their underwear, showing their company name across their undershirts.

This approach taps into what researcher Jonah Berger identified in his book Contagious: stories that go viral have a strong emotional impact. While marketers often focus on creating positive emotions, the McKinnon brothers demonstrated the power of creating anxiety—an emotion that gets internalised and remembered.

Disrupt Where You Tell the Story 👨🏻‍🏫

The second element involves telling your story in unexpected places. 

A prime example is e.l.f. Cosmetics. Their marketing philosophy is to lean into the “signal"—studying where their customers are showing up and how they're behaving differently, rather than obsessing over-optimisation and metrics that every brand has access to.

For instance, while most cosmetics brands advertise in magazines like Vogue, e.l.f. Beauty created an experiential world in Roblox. Why? Because many of their customers—generally young women and preteens—spend time there. How SIMPLY clever is that? These are the kind of things I live for when working with you or clients!

Another creative example comes from Litographs, a company that prints the entire text of popular books on merchandise like t-shirts and blankets. They created temporary tattoos featuring individual sentences from popular books and sent them to fans. Customers applied the tattoos, took pictures, and sent them back to Litographs, allowing people to read an entire book displayed across various body parts. This unique approach created an engaging customer experience for minimal cost. Now, when the company releases a new line of products featuring a new book, they have a proven word of mouth marketing mechanism in place. It’s not always rocket science coming up with “creative” aspects for marketing. I should know, I’ve done some WIERD and WHACKY things over the years for clients or brands and damn! It was not only result driven, but it’s fun too. People like fun, it breaks from the norm of our indicated world of enidated flaccid advertising / marketing.

Disrupt Who Tells The Story 🗣️

The final element involves getting someone other than your marketing team to tell your story, otherwise known as word-of-mouth marketing. This kindaaaa works well, drop me a email back and I’ll tell you all about some fun stories

Despite being the oldest form of marketing, word of mouth remains an afterthought for most marketers. "How many people have word-of-mouth marketing in their marketing budget? Almost nobody," I like to point out 🤫hehe! So, there's BASICALLY plenty of untapped opportunity for this one. Go try it yourself and let me know how it goes!

DEEP DIVE! …Why does it work so well?

We live in a streaming economy, where people pay extra for Netflix, Disney+, and Spotify specifically to avoid advertisements. Nielsen research shows that people will believe a stranger before they'll believe an ad. They trust friends, family, influencers, reviews, and testimonials over traditional marketing. Yes! Better believe it ladies and gents!

I saw once Yeti, the premium cooler and drinkware company, exemplifies this approach and Red Bull followed a similar path in its early days, building its business almost entirely through word-of-mouth marketing rather than traditional advertising. Back in my “he was a skater boy” days I saw this happen first-hand with Red Bull as I knew a lot of the BMX team riders being a sponsored BMXer myself. It’s actually such an easy tactic that we COMPLETELY just dismiss it in this digital advertising era!

Involving employees can also be effective, but as someone who’s worked in big corporate companies, I’d personally caution against incentive programs. Instead, he recommends making storytelling a career development opportunity.

So… that’s it today! I won’t waffle on anymore, but I really do hope you can go away and use this disruptive marketing tactic + strategy in your business. Otherwise, drop me a line we’ll chat… I don’t bite! Wait 😉 

Q&A

• So, are you ready to harness the power of using the clever disruptive marketing tactic for your business?

• Do you have any pain points I can help you with smoothing out regarding planning your own disruptive marketing campaign/project?

• Which of the above do you think you could utilise from the most and how would it impact your business?

Whenever you’re ready, here’s how I can help you:

1. Book a {10 MINUTE} Business Power Call with me, to arrange working together to make your social media videos stand out online as I tweak your approach, and analyse how to improve your current video, business strategy or marketing.

2. Don’t have time to create great content or marketing yourself? Focus on your business, whilst we focus on creating the content and marketing that you’ve always dreamed of. Get in touch to find out more.

Until next Friday, love to you all!

My Partner Services
Sky Adsmart  | Cheekymonkey Marketing  |

Fire an email back to me at [email protected] and let’s keep the chat going 👌🏻