- Who is your competition in the digital economy?
Your company should conduct
competitive landscape assessments on a regular basis,
and this should entail understanding
who are the major competitors, who are the minor competitors
and which companies are in adjacent spaces,
and may become more direct competitors soon.
You should monitor the evolution of their product
and service offerings, comparing those to your own.
These are practices as relevant this year
as they were 30 years ago.
The difference is, that this isn't enough.
In the digital age, businesses need to think more broadly
when thinking about the competition.
Today, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Uber, Airbnb and Netflix
among other legendary digital native companies,
are your competition as well.
They are because your customers use these companies.
And others like them.
And the residue of that experience
colors their impressions of your company
and especially your digital offering.
You might be thinking, wait a minute,
I work in a business to business company.
The companies you've just noted are all
business to consumer companies.
That's true but those other businesses
that your business sells too, are made up of people also.
Each of them are consumers,
and they continue to get a fine tune perspective
of what good looks like in the digital age.
Of course the members of your team buy the products
and services of the legendary digital companies
I mentioned as well.
You should encourage them to think creatively
when they do so, trying lessons about what they like,
what they don't, and how it all might apply
to your digital offering.
One of the areas that should be of special focus
is digital customer experience.
I'd argue that, as important as product or service
and price have been historically,
customer experience will be as important
in determining who wins and who loses.
Selling products and services
and managing customer relationships digitally
means that a company can reach millions
of customers overnight.
Where as the automobile took 62 years
to reach 50 million customers,
and the telephone took 50,
and the television took 22,
by contrast, PayPal took five years.
Facebook three, and Twitter, two.
Ironically, one of the key differentiators
is that one has a mass audience
that is piratically unconstrained as to geography.
But the digital customer experience
can also be highly personalized,
giving the feeling that any individual
is the only customer of the company.
Amazon knows what you last bought, what you looked at,
and decided against, and it can leverage this information
to do a better job of helping you find things
that are tuned to your taste.
More than 50% of what is watched on Netflix
is based upon recommendations that Netflix provides
to customers, so effective are the company's algorithms
to predict what each individual might like
based on what they've watched in the past.
The work of translating how what works
for digital native organizations might translate
into digital immigrant companies.
This is a great assignment to give
to younger members of your team as well
as they are the ones who often have
the deepest experiences with modern digital technology.
For the best and brightest among them,
this could be an interesting stretch assignment
that keeps them motivated and yields interesting insights
to your company.
To help your company truly seize the opportunity
that digital business provides requires creative thinking
and drawing inspiration more broadly
and connecting dots that others are not.
That is the faster path to true innovation.