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Hi, I'm David Brown and this is Business Wars.

Imagine you're an entrepreneur and you want to start a business. You're lean, you're scrappy, you look at the established competitors and you break down the customer experience.

What's it like? Where are the pain points? You figure out something you could do better and that's your end. You make that thing your business plan and you become a disruptor.

It's an old story really from film fed cameras to digital photography, brick-and-mortar to e-commerce, DVDs to streaming, disruptions just part of the mojo underlying capitalism. You want to be successful.

You figure out how to disrupt or else.

Today we're going to dive into disruption and talk about those scrappy lean startups and what legacy businesses can do to keep up because let's face it. If you disrupt and become successful, you become established and then someone comes along and tries to disrupt you.

Jonah Berger is our guest today. He's a marketing professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and best-selling author of Contagius, Invisible Influence, and the Catalyst. Our conversation is coming up next.

Small businesses are ready to thrive again and looking for resources to rise to the challenge. We've teamed up with Dell Technologies to bring you this episode about business disruption.

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Jonah Berger, welcome to Business Wars.

Thanks so much for having me.

You help new businesses understand how they can disrupt the market. You know, I was thinking about my description. What's the difference between disruption and say just competition? You know, another grocery store enters the marketplace. Some people would say that's a disruption. Certainly the competitor would say that's a disruption.

But how do you think of disruption?

Often when we talk about disruption, we're not just talking about competition, we're not just talking about someone offering the same thing that you might be or your organization might. We're really talking about a company coming in and changing the way that business is done.

Really offering a different product or service, offering the same product or service in a different way. We're really solving a problem or addressing a need that might not have been addressed before.

I think that's really important because when I think of Disruptor and I think a lot of our listeners think of it, it's like the ubers of this world.

It certainly can be ubers and it certainly can be billion dollar businesses, but there's disruption in almost every area of life. It's all about understanding the customer and really starting there.

Well, let's get started there. What do businesses need to think about when they're thinking about the customer and that sort of what customer chain, I guess?

Yeah, well, let's take some disruptors. Most of us are probably quite familiar with. Let's take an Uber, for example, or an Airbnb.

What both of those companies did is they really solved a problem that at least some set of consumers had.

In the hotel space, for example, people were dissatisfied with the options that were available.

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