For eight years I’ve visited leading companies in more than 20 industries around the world that claimed to be in the process of being disrupted. Each time, I’d ask the executives of these incumbent companies the same question: “What is disrupting your business?” No matter who I talked to, I would always get one of two answers: “Technology X is disrupting our business” or “Startup Y is disrupting our business.” But my latest research and analysis reveals flaws in that thinking. It is customers who are driving the disruption.

In the common scenario that executives think technology is trying to disrupt their business, they try to find a way to develop that technology internally or buy it from others. Major auto companies like GM and Ford are a good example: they have spent billions to buy and then build electric and autonomous driving technologies.

If the disruption threat is coming from a startup, then the incumbent often tries to acquire it — if the valuation is low enough. They can also try to compete with the startup on price, as a means to block their advance. In most cases I have seen, neither of these responses worked as intended.

For an example of the acquisition route, consider Yahoo. It was once the leader in the nascent search engine space, but lost the top position to Google and then lost the second position to Microsoft’s Bing. In response, then CEO Marissa Mayer went on a shopping spree to acquire technologies and startups in an attempt to regain the crown. As of 2016, Mayer had acquired 53 tech startups, spending between $2.3 and $2.8 billion, and countless hours of her top executives’ time with M&A due diligence. Yahoo eventually shut down 33 of these start-ups, discontinued the products of 11 start-ups, and left five to their own devices, failing to assimilate them. In all, Yahoo only fully integrated two of these companies: Tumblr and BrightRoll. In 2017, unable to grow, Yahoo was acquired by Verizon for $4.8 billion, a far cry from its peak valuation of $100 billion. (Verizon is now reportedly looking to sell Tumblr.)

What these companies seem to have missed is that the most common and pervasive pattern of disruption is driven by customers. They are the ones behind the decisions to adopt or reject new technologies or new  products. When large companies decide to focus on changing customer needs and wants, they end up responding more effectively to digital disruption.

My analysis has grown from visiting or talking to executives of established companies and then having similar conversations with their challengers. In my book, Unlocking the Customer Value Chain, I talk about the incumbent-disruptor pairs in the list below. Based on the interviews and analyses of these industries I uncovered a common underlying pattern of customer-driven digital disruption. Disruptive startups enter markets not by stealing customers from incumbents, but by stealing a select few customer activities. And the activities disruptors choose to take away from incumbents are precisely the ones that customers are not satisfied with. Birchbox stole sampling of beauty products from Sephora. Trov stole turning insurance on and off from State Farm. PillPack stole fulfilling prescriptions from CVS.

When Customers Drive Disruption

Many of the standard ways of thinking about which new growth markets large conglomerate companies should enter revolves around the idea of “adjacencies” and “synergies,” at the firm-side. For instance, by manufacturing motorcycles and lawnmowers, two seemingly unrelated categories, Honda has gained production synergies that allowed it to become better and more cost-effective in both markets.

But if customers are at the center of disruption, companies need to understand how to offer customer-side synergies. Successful growth is dictated by benefits accrued to the customer, not to the company. After all, it is they who choose whether to adopt or acquire your new products or not. This is where a coupling strategy comes into play — it’s the concept of creating new products that create meaningful synergies with your original product. In other words, it makes it cheaper, easier or faster for customers to fulfill their needs as compared to using two products from different companies. One of the clearest ways to couple is to launch new products or services that are immediately adjacent to (i.e., occur before or after) the activities that consumers already undertake with the business.