In Market Research, what do we mean by ‘Disruption’?

Most weeks there is something in the MR media about a new force for disruption, which is often followed by somebody else saying ‘that is not disruption, it is X’, where X tends to be one of ‘Hype’, ‘Same old, same old’, ‘Just the continuation of a trend’ or similar. In a recent GreenBook post Jeff Resnick wrote about ZappiStore and its potential for disruption, and this elicited at least one comment from somebody who wanted the word ‘disruption’ to be removed from the list of words used by MR bloggers. However, I think the attacks on the term disruption in MR blogging probably miss two key points: When writing about the future it important to alert people to what might happen, to allow people to consider and perhaps plan for such contingencies. Disruption in MR is both real and frequent. When we are talking about disruption that has not happened yet, there has to be a probabilistic element. If the commentary waited until disruption had happened, it would hardly be very interesting. However, this means that not every disruption written about will happen, but that does not invalidate the process of looking at changes and considering them. The process […]