Invest in the Creative Destruction of your Website
When it comes time to change things up within most organizations, goals for the “grand plan” are often based on pre-existing conditions and strategies built with a “what has worked before” mentality. These tried and true approaches to business wind up being as risky as the audacious and unimaginable – but less exciting.
“Creative destruction” is the disruptive process of transformation that accompanies the essence of innovation and its prerequisite for success. Pioneered by Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto, the concept of “creative destruction” has been applied to the business cycle in a multitude of industries and discussions on business across the 70 or so years since it was introduced.
At its foundation, this concept speaks to replacing existing processes and assumptions within a business ecosystem to start anew. The goal is to rebuild and recreate the business from step one in lieu of the more tried method of remedying problems with the business to save time and keep things “moving.”
When redeveloping a website, a creative destruction mindset would challenge “what is” to question “what could be” if anything were possible (using no pre-existing criteria or judgemental filters). This approach encourages dreaming, imagining, and playing out ideal scenarios. This process needs a constructionist’s point of view focused on driving interaction, engagement, conversions, and sales despite existing constraints, limitations, or the day’s prevailing wisdom. The success of a new website depends less on which of the latest technologies are used to build it and more on the opportunity to change, fix and recreate using a new foundation of thought.
To begin the process define what is needed before thinking about what is possible, conventional, acceptable, or “safe.” While the “surface purposes” of building a new website are to strengthen an organization’s online marketing channel, build relationships and move visitors further down the sales funnel, it is also the perfect time to shift momentum, deconstruct and eliminate barriers that serve no purpose. Once the stationary impediments in the buying process are removed or re-engineered, an organization could then realize its true potential.
True creative destruction jars your senses and disorients your mind’s eye so that you begin looking at the familiar as you would the unknown. When you re-examine elements with fresh eyes, you begin to question assumptions, challenge unfounded beliefs and notice what was once missed. While this is an uncomfortable and time-consuming phase, it is essential to recalibrate and clear the cache from your own memory banks, reacquaint yourself with your customers, their brand perceptions, your competition, and how to make sense of it all relative to your marketing and sales goals.
Remember, to generate breakthrough insight, you need to break away from existing momentum, your organization’s culture, or blind acceptance. Doing so will help you not only create a new paradigm of business but generate options and alternatives that you would never have imagined before.