Driving Digital Strategy

Sunil  Gupta

Book | 2018

Driving Digital Strategy: A Guide to Reimagining Your Business

Abstract

Disruption and transformation get a lot of hype and for good reason. Digital technologies have disrupted entire industries and incumbents have often struggled in this new world. Typical approaches used by legacy players such as using technology to improve efficiency, encouraging business units to do digital experiments, or launching independent units to spur innovation have met with limited success. These players have to strengthen their core and build for the future at the same time. It is like changing the engine of a plane while it is flying. Based on almost ten years of research, this book provides a framework for companies to reimagine their business. Using rich case studies and rigorous research, it shows how the rules of business have changed and why it is no longer enough for firms to be better or cheaper to gain competitive advantage. These new rules make it essential for companies to reexamine four fundamental aspects of their business to thrive in the digital era—their strategy, value chain, customer engagement, and organization structure. Done right, digital technology can be a tremendous opportunity for established players as demonstrated by Best Buy, New York Times, Weather Company, and others.

Keywords: marketing; digital strategy; competitive advantage; Technology; Transformation; Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Value Creation; Customer Focus and Relationships; Organizational Structure;

Format: Print

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Citation:

Gupta, Sunil. Driving Digital Strategy: A Guide to Reimagining Your Business. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2018.

Othellonia surprised the Japan’s mobile game market by supporting the launch of the game with an unusual approach: Offline community management. The management team favored a slow and steady launch entirely focused on bringing very loyal users instead of attracting too many users at once. Doing so had positioned Othellonia among the mobile games with the most loyal customer base and with monetization rates above the levels usually observed in the industry. However, after a few years of steady growth, strong loyalty from its users and healthy monetization, recent acquisition, engagement and retention metrics were worrisome for Yu Sasaki and Taku Kojo (KJ). Should the team invest in the promotional activities that drove acquisition in the past? Should they rely on the loyal base of players to keep growing the game? How could they increase user engagement without hurting monetization?

By 2018, Amazon had become one of the world’s largest e-commerce players with over $233 billion in annual sales. Although its profitability had been uneven even after 23 years of its inception, its stock price had risen almost 130,000% since the company went public. During this time Amazon has spread its business across a variety of products and services that some saw as unrelated. Was Amazon spreading itself too thin or were its investments positioning the company for the future?

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Driving Digital Strategy: A Guide to Reimagining Your Business

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