is disruptive innovation only for the young, or could it be about something else?

I find it often stated that disruptive innovation is best started with a younger target consumer because they are more open to new ideas and less likely to have entrenched beliefs about how products in a certain category should work or behave. In general, I can align with that high-level generality because we see often in our research that younger consumers are more likely to be early adopters, are more open to experimentation, and are more likely to be willing to interact with an edgy approach to a new consumer product - Liquid Death Water for example - all which makes younger consumers ideal for driving disruptive innovation that shakes up category conventions.

This thinking usually goes hand in hand with blanket statements such as “older consumers have established beliefs and habits about how products in a certain category should work.” Of course, it goes without saying that it’s more complicated than that. Consumers of all ages can easily form embedded habits and then tend to stick with what they know works best. If someone’s been using a certain type of toothbrush for years they may be skeptical of new oral care technologies and promises regardless of whether they are 22 or 62 years old.

On a recent project I experienced another insight worth considering -

is disruptive innovation actually best suited when it nails the ideal context rather than focusing on the target audience? Does the association of location matter more than who it’s targeting?

Take two case studies as an example:

Example #1: we’ve been working on a beverage that truly shakes up and may even be an anthesis to options in the soda category. For a younger target audience, this new product makes sense as they have been told over and over again that the category of “soda” is bad for you… it has too much sugar, zero nutritional value, and often overwhelms the average food experience with all of its sugary flavors. So why keep drinking the same old thing? Then in a recent in-market transactional test we noticed that this disruptive idea did better in one place over another - even with the same younger consumer checking it out in various contexts… specifically, the associations of one placement opportunity articulated an entire PowerPoint deck of brand strategy without saying a word. Just by being associated with the environment around it, the brand received a powerful context of the environment, embued with a long list of positive attributes that no product label could ever do on its own. Yes the primary target audience was there, but so were other people that the brand did not necessarily consider their target - and they all loved it.

Example #2: we worked on a food innovation that imagined it was going to be able to “disrupt consumers buying products at QSRs (quick serve restaurants)” with its new technology. Delicious, nutritious, and easy to make at home - there was no reason why this product couldn’t succeed… until it didn’t. And it underperformed primarily because of the context by which it was associated with: cheaper, less expensive products that seemed “almost” as good as this new innovation that was placed right next to it on a shelf. When we interviewed consumers, we saw that the context of its placement was one of the biggest reasons why it underperformed - because the context of cheaper items nearby suggested a lower quality experience, a need for a lower price-value, and a less than disruptive context overall. The overall context set-up lowered expectations that minimized trial.

Thinking about your consumer target is always going to be relevant, but brand innovators should also go one step further and think about the context of placement. If the traditional grocery shelf is not what you want to be linked to, then consider going somewhere else! If your idea is so disruptive that it shakes up category conventions, then why would you diminish it by putting it right next to the same old same old stuff? Back in my Oxi Clean days, we could have cared less about what Tide or Clorox was doing in a Wal-mart, because that is not where we knew we could win… we leveraged a whole new context - DRTV - to separate ourselves from the pack and drive all the associations we wanted from our young and energetic brand - excitement, energy, and demonstrability.