A lesson in disruption from Sturgill Simpson

Today is a lesson in disruption, sung in the tune of C.

In 2017, Sturgill Simpson attended the Country Music Awards but he didn’t exactly make it through security.

He never even got to the doors.

Instead, Sturgill disrupted the whole event. He stood outside with a sign that said “struggling country singer” and played songs for a passersby audience, answering questions about literally anything, and donated his tips to the ACLU.

A few fans saw this on Facebook live and realized he was there, accessible and playing for tips. A few dozen folks showed up in his 48 minute set.

That might sound small time for the Grammy winner, but it got better. 

80K people live streamed it.

This photo went viral.

Rolling Stone and other news sites wrote about it.

For a week after, it was all the outlaw and Americana country fans were still talking about.

It became legend.

What disruption really means

Being disruptive for the sake of trying to be different will fail. Full stop.

But when you’re showcasing what you do, and it causes disruption (like Sturgill), it gets people talking.

I’ve worked on hundreds of brands. When I was in advertising, dozens of times per year we’d work on a rebranding for a company. In the discovery phase of the process, we were trying to get to know the core of the company. We’d interview leaders and employees alike, and the leaders would often tell us what they wanted the branding to reflect—they’re bold decision makers, live like lions, operate with agility, etc. 

And we’d turn to the employees and discover heaps of mundanity. Often it seemed like a different company. 

Still, the leaders wanted to paint the company an aspirational shade of amaranth. This is the absolute definition of putting lipstick on a pig.

Too often, companies talk about how disruptive they are in a market, when in truth, they’re last season’s flavor with a new name. You can’t brand your way into disruption.

Liquid Death didn’t just come out with a hip brand—they put water in a can and picked plastic as the enemy.

Sarah Blakely didn’t just invent a modern girdle with Spanx—she saw a problem with panty lines and became a billionaire ending embarrassing panty lines for women worldwide.

Slack didn’t just create a chat app—it redefined and organized conversations for a modern workplace.

These companies did not brand their way to category creating products.

I’ll go even further. You don’t brand a company—the brand is something you can feel from the company’s actions. It’s not a logo, color palette or core values on a poster—it’s what people say about the company when describing it to a colleague. 

When companies operate with a real edge and vision, it’s apparent. They’re the companies finding an opening everyone else has missed. And those companies can create new categories (the real disruption) and they can strike gold. 

In the book “Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets,” the authors paint a clear picture of the only disruption that matters. When companies focus on getting building better instead of building different, they stop innovating and end up in a cycle of moderate improvement.

They listen to customers’ requests, slowly launching new versions of the same product in a category that is already defined. When you are focused on being different, you create new market categories. According to the authors in the book, category kings and creators end up owning 70+% of the market, too. 

To simplify, building better leads to a faster horse—different leads to the Model T. 

Sturgill knew his core audience didn’t care about a CMA award. He saw an opening to share why he was different, and the tactic solidified him as country music’s new outlaw. Sturgill’s music broke into a new category of country music, and his disobedient behavior was on message, and on brand.

Brands should take note and do the same. Focus on standing out by not being with the crowd.

Listening vs. Thinking

This mindset is challenging, because you of course have to listen to customers to find their problems. However, if you’ve been in the weeds of product feedback, you know that customers will often give you their solutions to the product. Those solutions are often garbage. Time and time again at GoWild, our members have requested us to add maps, a category that is completely owned by two giants—it would have killed us to even attempt to compete.

Great product minds can digest the customers requests and find the common themes and root problems. As the authors of “Play Bigger” say, if it was as simple as doing what the customer says, they wouldn’t need you. Our observation was that while customers were requesting maps, they were sharing and asking other members about gear on our platform. With this insight, we started leaning into gear functionality, which eventually led to our focus on social commerce. It’s our core business today, because we do it better—and different—than anyone else.

The key to creating a new category lies within digesting the problem, and creating a new category to answer the problem. Salesforce saw an opportunity with companies needing to track customer interactions, but the software sucked. The customers wanted better software, but they found the real problem—the software itself. Salesforce created a cloud-based product that they famously billed “the end of software.”

That’s category creation. 

When you’re building your company, do research to find these kinds of opportunities, and think about how you’re going to approach the problem in such a different way, the solution creates a new category all its own. 

That’s real disruption. 

Know your audience

Sturgill definitely got snubbed in 2017. His album “A Sailor’s Guide to Earth” was and remains an incredible body of work. It’s masterpiece material. 

Instead of fading into irrelevance, he was a bit irreverent. Sturgill did something unexpected. 

He did it without speaking a bad word about those who were nominated, but the action and statement was pretty clear.

And for his target audience?

It was cooler than winning any CMA award.

To this day, Sturgill is the only musician people remember from that night. I promise you no one remembers who won artist or album of the year.

Don’t be afraid to be different.

In fact, being different is all that matters.

Application

My buddy called me recently to ask for help framing up his new company’s product in his pitch deck. We talked about his company for a while, and it was clear to me that he had a story telling problem. The company is killing it and the new product is doing great, but he couldn’t figure out how to frame it as different.

My advice? Read “Play Bigger.” It truly gives the framework on how to think differently, build differently and be different. Rather than paint a story of the existing product, I told him he needed to figure out where they could really focus on a new category instead of chasing after someone else’s pie.

Whether you’re starting out, or have a product that’s ready for scale, I strongly recommend reading “Play Bigger.” It was pivotal into me understanding what we’re doing with our new product, Holler Commerce. And I think it can help any founder better understand the space—and category—they’re building.

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Who I’m listening to: Sturgill Simpson

What I’m reading: “All the Sinners Bleed” by SA Cosby

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