Five hundred million people can’t be wrong.
That’s roughly how many times Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone has been played since its release. Yet when Dylan first performed it at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, it wasn’t a triumph. The crowd came expecting the comforting Blowin’ in the Wind, but instead, they got electric guitars and something that didn’t belong. They felt betrayed and soon the boos started a-coming.
But that night, Dylan didn’t stumble. He crossed the line that separated the familiar from the new. And in that dissonant moment, he set modern music on a different course. What looked like rejection became, with time, recognition. He was simply ahead of the curve.
The hidden pattern behind disruption
Clayton Christensen, the American academic and business consultant who came up with the idea of ‘disruptive innovation’ had a term for this tension. He called it ‘the innovator’s dilemma’: the paradox of success that traps even the most capable leaders. Companies rise by serving their best customers, refining their products and maximising performance. Yet these same habits blind them to emerging possibilities. They keep improving what already works, while the future takes root somewhere else: opportunities that start smaller, simpler and easily dismissed.
Disruption follows a quiet sequence:
1. A new idea emerges at the edges. It feels underpowered, unprofitable and irrelevant to incumbents.
2. It attracts new users who value access to newness over perfection.
3. The idea improves faster than expected and more users jump on it (the early adopters who legitimise the innovation).
4. By the time the incumbents notice, it’s too late to catch up.
The irony is that these shifts rarely fail because the technology isn’t ready – it’s because society isn’t. People resist change that threatens their sense of familiarity. They interpret “new” as “unsafe.” Just as Dylan’s fans wanted another folk tune, customers often want the comfort of what they already know. This gap between readiness and acceptance is where disruption brews.
The CMO’s version of the dilemma
For CMOs, this dilemma is alive in every boardroom. The pressure to deliver quarterly performance outweighs the courage to pursue what’s next. Budgets flow to what’s measurable while bold ideas wait for permission. Yet, as Christensen showed, clinging to current success is what guarantees future irrelevance.
The leaders who outlast disruption think differently. They recognise that markets are stories in motion and branding is how you write the next chapter before anyone else believes in it. Brands become interpreters for society, bridging the gap between technology and understanding. In a way, innovative brands make tomorrow make sense.
How to think like an innovator
Create distance from the core
Disruptive bets should be freed from the black-belt processes and profit expectations of the core business. CMOs can apply the same rule to ideas: give emerging concepts a safe space to grow before judging them by mature metrics. Innovation needs air before it can earn.
Listen at the fringes
The next big audience rarely looks like your current one. Disruptive ideas start in under-served, ignored or niche communities. Spend time where the market hasn’t yet formed: in cultural edges, subreddits, underground scenes or overlooked demographics. That’s where tomorrow’s mainstream is rehearsing.
Tell the story before the market exists
Branding the unknown means giving shape to what people can’t yet see. Innovative brands create acceptance instead of waiting for it, often humanising the unfamiliar so audiences feel part of what’s coming, not threatened by it.
Measure belief, not just performance
In early stages, innovation is belief-driven, not data-driven. The metrics that matter are curiosity, trial and narrative adoption. Over-optimise for efficiency too soon and you’ll starve the very ideas that could redefine your category.
The courage to play a new song
Dylan’s performance on stage in 1965 captures what every innovator faces: that instant of discomfort when the world isn’t ready for what you have to offer. He didn’t know Like a Rolling Stone would become one of the most influential songs of all time. But he had the conviction that repeating the familiar would mean standing still. Innovation always feels like noise before it becomes music.
For CMOs, the challenge is to lead audiences through that noise and help them hear what the future sounds like before it becomes obvious.
Patrick Kampff is senior strategy director at Siegel+Gale, a consulting and design agency.
Five hundred million people can’t be wrong.
That’s roughly how many times Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone has been played since its release. Yet when Dylan first performed it at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, it wasn’t a triumph. The crowd came expecting the comforting Blowin’ in the Wind, but instead, they got electric guitars and something that didn’t belong. They felt betrayed and soon the boos started a-coming.
But that night, Dylan didn’t stumble. He crossed the line that separated the familiar from the new. And in that dissonant moment, he set modern music on a different course. What looked like rejection became, with time, recognition. He was simply ahead of the curve.
