are you a discounter or a disrupter?

Four Pillars of Business Series - Part 4: Innovations

Read here for Part 1: Culture

Read here for Part 2: Client Experience

Read here for Part 3: Marketing

"We need to reduce the price so we can sell the overstock."

"The product uptake is slow, how about we offer a discount?"

Let's face it, we all love a bargain, but what we love more, are innovative products we are prepared to pay premium price for. Apple's discounts are non-existent or very small, yet the stores are full.

The market is always saturated with discounters, competitors watching you for what they can copy, and imitators.

Being one of them is not the place to be. You're stuck competing on price.

A disruption is the thing that changes the game.

The idea is not to be one of the many, where brand differentiation is difficult, but to create your own movement, where you are the brand.

There are three levels of business:

Core - what you do every day that pays the bills.

Improvements - what you do to improve the Core so it works better, delivers better.

Innovations - what you do that either (1) changes Core completely into something new, or; (2) does something other than the Core that's unexpected.

Amazon's Core is selling books, the Improvement is when they added a service of matching other book selections to your purchase (kind of like the lollies at the supermarket checkout, they tempt you to get one more thing) and the Innovation is when they introduced all the other ranges, when they bought suppliers in the spaces they wanted to dominate.

Become a unicorn in your market.

Read soon in Unicornification about how to launch a new idea and move through your companies disruption.

Christiane is an Agile Coach, Meta Dynamics Coach and Visual Facilitator. She joined The Coaching Institutes’ Professional Master Coach Program in order to gain deep knowledge of human behaviour and business success. She works with businesses, teams and individuals on developing high performance, connected relationships and reaching business outcomes. You can follow her on Twitter under @agiledynamics