Gawd dangit! You’ve just been DEEZ RAP TERD!

What are the signs that your business and/or industry is being disrupted? According to IDC, here are four key scenarios of how it may be happening to you, and how other organisations have responded and adapted.

1. The market is no longer viable

Good old fashion letter-writing is slowly becoming obsolete, thanks to electronic mail. But something else was suffering in the postal industry as well. Domestic parcel volumes dropped, but Singpost managed to transform themselves to become a complete e-commerce solutions provider with warehouse, delivery and e-payments.

2. Barriers to entry dropped

Suddenly, everybody is able to do what you are doing! That’s what John Deere industrial equipment found was happening to them, and worse, the competition was stealing their IP, hiring away their managers and causing all kinds of havoc.

John Deere decided to value-add to what they have, with analytical insights into farmers’ crop yields. They turned into a hosted analytics service with data and crop scientists, and have become an analytics services company now

3. Non-premium brands are becoming good enough

Unilever faced stiff competition when new rival brands penetrated their markets in second and third tier cities.Realising that their brand is hidden behind the retailer, Unilever began recognising that voice-of-the-customer is becoming more and more critical. So, they co-designed Axe Twist with consumer feedback, that they gathered by leveraging technology and partners with marketing companies and social media platforms

4. Competition taking high margins

DBS bank in Singapore observed the entry of fintech companies and that foreign bank entrants were increasing.

In response, DBS moved from just traditional banking services, to also selling advisory with analytics and machine learning technologies that learn what customers want in terms of asset management and financial planning, when customers used self-management tools.

In almost of these cases, the companies being disrupted had either reused and optimised existing resources like their data and expertise to create new, revenue-generating business or used completely new technologies and methods to gain more information to help build better products. Singpost however, had to completely undergo a complete transformation of their operational and business processes.