78 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW SPRING 2020 SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU
DISRUPTION 2020: FOCUSING ON THE CUSTOMER
companies’ founders. We purchased pretty much
all their products, we read all their terms and con-
ditions, we talked to their big investors. We asked
about their patents and found only about 50 total.
And my theory is that these companies are not
technology disrupters.
Instead, I think we’re seeing a new species of dis-
rupter emerging in our economy, a species I call
experience disrupters. These organizations all have
great products, but they offer even better experi-
ences. How they sell is why they win.
Of course, all companies aim (or should aim) for
great customer service, but that’s not what I’m talking
about here. These companies have fundamentally
reshaped what their customers come to expect in the
experience of purchasing and using their product
or service. This is a central insight of Clayton
Christensen’s Theory of Jobs to Be Done, which tells
us that customers don’t simply buy products or ser-
vices. They hire them to do a job for them. Doing that
job well for customers involves creating the right ex-
periences for those customers, from the moment they
begin to think about purchasing the product to their
everyday use of that product. It’s an essential part of
developing a deep relationship with customers: You
solve their struggle for them.
What I think we are seeing now are companies
that outmaneuver the competition by excelling at
this. After studying such companies, what they’re
good at, and the customer experience with each of
them, I’ve come up with five things I call modern ad-
aptations that allow these experience disrupters to
run over the incumbents in their industries. Here, I’ll
discuss what I’ve observed about those adaptations,
leaving you with a playbook to use in your company.They Give You Experiences You
Didn’t Know You Wanted
The first adaptation is that while incumbent com-
panies focus on product-market fit, experience
disrupters work on experience-market fit. Product-
market fit, when you’ve found the right mix of
product for just the right target market, is considered
by these companies as necessary but insufficient to
get the disruption they’re really after. For experience
disrupters, what matters is offering experiences that
surround the product and that customers didn’t
even know they wanted or could ask for.Let me give you an example. I first heard of
Carvana when we started this research project. It
turns out a bunch of my colleagues had purchased
cars from this online used-car company and were
raving about it. Carvana was founded in 2012 and
was the eighth-largest used-car dealer in the United
States in 2018.^2 It went public in 2017. As of this
writing, it has a market cap of roughly $12.5 billion.
And it is a killer experience disrupter.
How did Carvana become so successful so fast?
You might think it was about inventory: Typically, a
car dealer has cars all over parking lots, and Carvana
instead has a giant online car vending machine.
Now, that step is necessary, but insufficient, to
get the crazy growth it’s had.
The reason Carvana has exploded is that it’s fo-
cused on the experience-market fit. The company’s
leaders set out to create a whole new way to buy a
car. You have a very Amazon-like experience, in the
sense of how user-friendly the online interface is.
You choose the price range, mileage, condition, and
type of car you want. You can get alerted when a car
in your range is available near you. Once you select
a car, you can view a 360-degree inspection with
annotated zoom-in areas to see where there is wear
and tear.
But you don’t just buy the car from Carvana:
The company deals with the department of motor
vehicles, it deals with the taxes, it deals with the reg-
istration. It does all the crapola that none of us
wants to do. Then you tell Carvana, “Hey, I bought
the car, and I want it delivered to my house on
Tuesday afternoon” — you pick a time and a place,
and the company brings it to you. Awesome. And
then you drive the car around for a week, and if
you’re not happy with the car for whatever reason,
you can return it, no questions asked.
Carvana has taken the cringeworthy process of
buying a car and automated it, institutionalized it,
and made it awesome. That’s experience-market fit.They Make Interactions Frictionless
The second adaptation is that experience disrupters
pull the friction out of each customer interaction.
The analogy I like is the mechanical flywheel — the
circular device that can provide a continuous power
output. In this analogy, the less friction customer
interactions have, the faster the flywheel spins, andWhile
incumbent
companies
focus on
product-
market fit,
experience
disrupters
work on
experience-
market fit.