If you looked behind most marketing campaigns, one of the main motivations is standing out from the competition. Companies try to stay one step ahead – with price, product offering, customer service or any number of small advantages they can add that set them apart.

They focus on matching and beating their rivals, and as a result, their strategies often converge.  Most companies are operating within the rules of their market: whether it’s investment banking, gallery curation or advertising, there are predefined boundaries.  What organisations are not doing is offering a product or service that no one else has thought of.  Why would they?

To stay ahead of the competition, businesses need to think outside of conventional boundaries and find an unoccupied territory.  The iPad – a portable device that is a phone, camera, computer and book all in one – has no direct competitor.  Twitter - a way to send short messages, promote your company and connect with like-minded people globally – cannot be touched.  LinkedIn – where you can post your CV, join professional communities and find jobs – is the first of its kind.  While these businesses can be replicated – and they have been – they’ve paved the way for a new market, and reaped the rewards as a result.

blur Group is one of those disruptive leaders. When it built the Creative Services Exchange (CSX), the idea of an exchange for trading creativity was off the scale in an industry that hadn’t changed in over a hundred years.  That’s jumping so far ahead of the competition that the competition isn’t even in place yet.

If other organisations want to join us in disruption, they have to carve out a fundamentally new market space, by creating products or services that don’t have direct competitors.  This change requires an entirely different pattern of thinking – and a willingness to take on a huge risk.

We’ve developed a platform that is a paradigmatic shift in how to develop creativity.  Finding creativity is now faster, cheaper and leads to more groundbreaking work. This method is shattering the mould of convention and breaking away from the pack.  By developing a crowd of specialized creatives and agencies, the CSX can easily find global solutions.  And the beautiful thing about it is that we’ve taken all the risks, and now you don’t have to.

You can submit a brief for your marketing campaigns knowing that – the creatives have been approved, the process is fine-tuned and you will get just what you want – a completely new approach but with very traditional success.