Digital platforms such as Amazon, Uber and Netflix have reshaped industries, seamlessly connecting businesses and consumers, while leveraging data and technology to deliver personalized experiences that redefine modern commerce and entertainment. The success of platforms highlights the transformative power of digital ecosystems in fostering innovation while driving sustainable growth. 

“Winning Through Platforms: How to Succeed When Every Competitor Has One,” a best-selling book by Ted Moser, a senior partner at Prophet, highlights the essential role of digital platforms in achieving business success in the modern age across industries. The book serves as a playbook by diving into the different types of platforms as business models while decoding growth moves from a decade of platform competition. 

This framework guides companies to leverage platforms for brand relevance, customer value growth and efficient customer acquisition. 

Rapid Digitalization of Economies and Shift in Consumer Behavior 

Asia, especially Southeast Asia, is experiencing rapid digitalization and reliance on online platforms fuelled by a multitude of factors – the COVID-19 pandemic, internet penetration, a burgeoning middle class and supportive government policies. This shift prompted digital transformations across businesses, leading to a boom of digital marketplaces and services such as Shopify, Grab and Lazada.

Meanwhile, companies are heavily investing in strategies to create and meet demand across the entire customer journey. Companies focus on Demand Plays and Transformation Plays to meet evolving consumer needs and transition traditional businesses into digital domains. 

Temu: Aggressive User Acquisition Through Demand Plays 

Temu, a brand of China’s Pinduoduo, entered the global markets in 2022. It has quickly disrupted the status quo of the global e-commerce landscape, becoming the No. 1 shopping app on Apple’s App Store, surpassing Amazon, Target, Walmart and SHEIN. Temu’s success is made possible by its unparalleled demand-gen capabilities. Through the campaign “Shopping like a billionaire,” Temu offers a clear yet differentiating value proposition of providing cheap and accessible products for everyone. Beyond a clear brand message, Temu employs a comprehensive demand–gen strategy, from agile supply chain, data-driven user analytics, to aggressive marketing campaigns and pricing schemes, as well as savvy digital marketing and user acquisition tactics. 

Huawei: Leading at the Frontier Through Transformation Plays 

Huawei stands out as a prime example of strategic innovation in action. Initially recognized as a B2B telecom leader, the company seized the opportunity to diversify into B2C markets by introducing smartphones renowned for their cutting-edge camera technology. This transformation underscores Huawei’s unwavering commitment to innovation, as evidenced by the staggering investment of over 11 billion RMB in R&D over the past decade. Amid U.S. sanctions, Huawei demonstrated agility by strengthening its own HarmonyOS operating system. Recently, Huawei entered the electric vehicle (EV) sector by launching startup EV brands AITO and LUXEED in collaboration with automotive players Seres and Chery, respectively. These EV models integrate HarmonyOS for Automotive, seamlessly synchronizing with Huawei’s mobile operating system to deliver a cohesive user experience. This integration reflects Huawei’s vision of creating an ecosystem centred around HarmonyOS, extending its influence beyond telecom. By leveraging its technological prowess and strategic partnerships, Huawei has embarked on a transformation journey to shape the future of multiple industries, cementing its position as a global leader in the ever-evolving landscape of technology and innovation. 

Need for Innovative Solutions in Competitive Markets 

E-commerce, fintech, AI, and IoT have become some of the most disruptive technologies for traditional business models, where a holistic platform strategy plays a major role. In Asia, a fast-growing consumer market that’s largely digital – and mobile first – this is especially the case. Leveraging these technologies to develop their own platform through digital transformation while taking a customer-centric approach now becomes a key challenge for traditional companies. To adapt and futureproof, the most resilient companies are often agile in prioritizing innovation efforts. Prophet’s recent research on how innovation builds resilience revealed that 35% of the respondents in China and Singapore have formal innovation incubation programs, compared to only 15% of the respondents in the U.S. and the UK. 

Consequently, companies are channelling resources into the development of innovative platform features and services, leveraging Innovation Plays to continuously provide new and distinctive platform benefits for a competitive edge. Moreover, businesses strategically explore Portfolio Plays to diversify roles within the platform ecosystem, emphasizing continuous innovation across product development, market approach, and customer engagement strategies. 

Grab: Achieving Impactful Growth Through Innovation Plays 

Grab serves as a standout example of a platform business that maintains sustainable growth by bringing ongoing innovations to market. Originating as a ride-hailing service, Grab expanded into a super-app business, the “Everyday Everything App,” offering new products and benefits including food delivery, digital payments, and financial services. This strategic shift capitalized on Grab’s extensive user base and diversified revenue streams. Additionally, Grab deployed collaborative go-to-market strategies, by partnering with local governments and financial institutions, to extend its reach and tailor offerings to specific regional markets. To deepen its connection with a wide array of customers, partners and stakeholders, Grab has also further defined its company mission – to drive Southeast Asia forward by creating economic empowerment for everyone – while continuously implementing various ESG initiatives. 

Nike: Connecting with Evolving Customers Through Portfolio Plays 

Nike exemplifies effective portfolio diversification, transforming from product innovator to a digital marketplace leader. Nike integrates digital platforms with physical retail, offers market-specific mobile apps, and engages users through customized experiences and robust digital ecosystems. Through digital platforms like Nike Training Club and Nike Run Club as well as offline community activities, Nike engages with users beyond transactions. This platform-driven strategy not only solidifies Nike’s leadership in leveraging digital platforms for growth, but also resonates exceptionally well in the diverse and unique markets across Asia, where tailored experiences and integrated digital solutions are increasingly sought after.  

Regulatory and Cultural Diversity of the Region 

Asia’s diverse regulatory and cultural landscape poses unique challenges for platform businesses. With varying regulatory frameworks, cultures, languages and economies, consumer behaviors and preferences can differ vastly across different Asian countries. This complexity significantly impacts how companies approach market entry and expansion, where adapting their business models and marketing strategies to different regulatory and cultural contexts becomes pivotal. 

To effectively navigate these intricacies, companies employ Design Plays to develop differentiated value propositions that align with local preferences and cultural sensitivities. Meanwhile, companies should also tailor O+O customer experiences to different Asian customers through Interaction Plays, to enhance engagement and foster brand loyalty. 

IKEA: Mastering Localization Through Design Plays 

IKEA’s entry and expansion in China is a textbook example of a strategic design play, reflecting a deep understanding of local preferences and behaviors. Going beyond furniture sales, IKEA adapted its business model to overcome unique market challenges and fit the Chinese lifestyle. Product designs were adjusted for smaller living spaces, which was a shift from its offerings in European markets. As part of its location strategy and with the support from an extensive logistics network tailored to China’s infrastructure challenges, IKEA placed its stores nearer to city centers with easy public transport access, catering to most Chinese consumers who are less likely to own cars. Furthermore, by quickly embracing digital transformation, IKEA offered online shopping, home delivery services and popular payment options like Alipay and WeChat Pay, exceeding Chinese consumer expectations for retail convenience. 

Lululemon: Building a Loyal Community Through Interaction Plays 

Lululemon’s approach in Asia exemplifies a successful full-journey engagement, seamlessly integrating online and offline experiences, offering personalized assistance, and fostering community experiences. Through dynamic segmentation, Lululemon tailors offerings to diverse Asian audiences, driving conversions with personalized recommendations and localized content. Lululemon also adopts an agile content strategy, featuring regional influencers and traditional Asian wellness practices. It leverages user-generated content, including customer testimonials and photos, to foster authenticity and engagement. This customer-centric approach has strengthened brand loyalty and deepened the connection with customers in Asia. 

Reimagine Your Business Strategy with the Platform Mindset 

From Huawei’s transformative journey to Grab’s and Lululemon’s innovative strategies, these best practices exemplify how companies are leveraging platform plays to navigate Asia’s diverse market dynamics and evolving consumer needs. 

Whether your organization is already a platform business or not, adopting a strategic platform mindset is essential for companies to stay competitive today. From developing a comprehensive platform strategy to evolving existing capabilities, the six Platform Plays illustrated in “Winning Through Platforms” provide essential insights that inform actionable next steps for a futureproof growth strategy: 

1. Assess your current capabilities and needs to determine the most suitable platform strategy.  Understand which role your platform can play within your business portfolio and select the one that aligns with your strategic goals.  
2. Consider developing a comprehensive platform strategy that goes across all aspects of the organization. This involves clarifying how the optimal platform role aligns with the company’s strategic objectives to maximize differentiation and growth. Leaders must also identify the strategic implications of what must change in the business.
3. Build an internal case for change and digital transformation while designing a transformation vision and roadmap. This includes the internal moves that need to be made from an organizational perspective, including structure, culture, processes, and capabilities.  
4. For mature companies who have already found success in platforms, find opportunities to evolve your current platform strategy. Revisit customer experience strategies to deepen engagement and conversion; adopt more complex platform roles to drive deeper integration into the business; or harness the power of data and AI capabilities to refine and extend your ecosystems to new, differentiated offerings. 

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Summary

Digital platforms are no longer for just the tech elite. They’re spreading to every company and industry, powered by the growth of sensors, streaming data, and AI. Platforms are to the 2020s what websites were to the 2000s. Websites let a company watch a prospective customer shop, interact with them as they explore, and add enough value during consideration to earn customer choice. Platforms – enabled by sensors, cloud hosting, and algorithms –light the valuable customer user journey that was formerly dark. They enable the company to watch the customer use what they have acquired, interact with the customer as they and others use, and add enough value to energize customer lifetime value growth.   

Just as companies wouldn’t have been able to thrive without deploying a website, going forward, they won’t be able to thrive without deploying a platform approach to business.   

How will you use platforms to drive your business success? And how will you succeed competitively when your markets get platform-crowded? Learn how to achieve uncommon growth with the help of the first competitive strategy and growth playbook written for current and aspiring platform companies. In the book, Prophet senior partner Ted Moser uses his years of advising many of the world’s leading technology companies, to reveal how to win through platforms.  

“Winning Through Platforms” decodes growth moves from a decade of platform competition, then communicates those moves through a platform playbook. It includes 24 proven platform strategies―such as customer coalition design, in-use enrichment, AI branding, and more.  

These playbook strategies are delivered through engaging stories of over 50 companies, plus proprietary frameworks and workshop-style questions that lead you to act. 

This impactful playbook will teach you how to: 

• Use platforms to recharge your business portfolio 
• Design platforms that are compelling to customers and hard for competitors to match 
• Accelerate in-market growth through brand and demand engagement that spans your customer’s entire Choose and Use platform journey 
• Innovate in high-impact areas that differentiate your platform and drive ROI 
• Elevate your customer’s personalized platform interactions 
• Transform your enterprise, operations and culture to drive superior performance 

CEOs, innovators, go-to-market leaders, and aspiring professionals alike will gain valuable insight from this book. Whether your company is just starting on its first platform journey or is a born platform disruptor, this book will transform your ability to win. 

Learn the platform playbook. Find and apply your plays. 

Take a sneak peek and read an excerpt from the Introduction here. 

Endorsements

“If you value fresh thinking, you’ll love this playbook. I’ve led platform initiatives across multiple industries – architecture, engineering, manufacturing, and trust intelligence – and the book’s platform plays apply insightfully to each one. It’s a thought-provoking guide, supported by compelling business examples, that can help you unleash broad growth opportunities through the power of digital platforms. It seamlessly leads you from strategic business decisions that unlock growth to best-in class-execution that produces tangible results.”

Lisa Campbell
One Trust CMO; former CMO & EVP – Business Strategy and Marketing, Autodesk 

“I wish I’d had Winning Through Platforms while I was at Microsoft evaluating our opportunities to apply AI for business and build ecosystems for platforms like Power BI. Creating shared value through cloud platforms is never accidental; fortunately, the authors systematically explain to readers how to creatively make platforms their catalyst for future growth, across industries. This playbook is an important new tool for leaders as they make strategic choices for the future of their business.”

Greg Nelson
Former Microsoft VP- Partner Ecosystem and General Manager -Business AI

“Winning through Platforms isn’t just any playbook – it’s a conceptual and practical blueprint for creating value in a world that increasingly runs on digital innovation. As a healthcare executive who leads systems transformation, I’ve found the book to be an indispensable strategic ally. It will speak to everyone charged with developing platform approaches to business. The clear and actionable ideas it provides for navigating the human dimensions of platform change are essential for every executive.”

David Grandy
VP-Strategic Innovation, Kaiser Permanente  

Benchmarking Digital Maturity in the COVID-19 Era

The COVID-19 crisis caused a major upheaval in the first half of 2020. Within weeks, organizations made drastic changes that were expected to take years, like shifting employees to remote work and digitizing customer offerings. The digitization of organizations that was previously anticipated to take years happened in a matter of days.

There is now more pressure than ever for digital to perform in ways that can power meaningful business transformations.

This year’s annual State of Digital Transformation report:

• Examines how organizations pursue digital transformation, analyzing differences based on digital maturity stage, industry, geography, and organization size.
• Examines the impact of COVID-19 on digital transformation efforts.
• Offers a comprehensive benchmark of digital maturity across five areas that define customer-focused digital transformation: Leadership and culture, customer experience, marketing and sales, technology and innovation, and data and artificial intelligence.

The report has four major takeaways:

• Operations support, agility, and revenue are top priorities given COVID-19. The lead use cases are working from home (82%); digital marketing (78% investing to improve); digital selling (76% trying to close compatability gaps); virtual product/ service delivery (52%); and growth initiatives (37%).
• The more digitally mature the company, the more they are focused on responding to and taking advantage of the COVID-19 crisis. The less digitally mature the company, the more they are working on implementing digital basics.
• Digitally mature companies are maintaining their strategic focus despite the pandemic; they focus on digitally-driven innovation, incorporating a new wave of technologies with an intensity that is outpacing the market.
• Leadership from CEOs and CIO/CTOs — supplemented by CDOs, Innovation Officers, and Boards — helps ensure firms chart and follow their digital transformation ambitions.

Download the full report below to learn more.

Executive Summary

In the last few years, marketers have had to adapt to the increasing demands of their businesses and customers alike. Customers now demand compelling, personalized content and experiences to be delivered to them on an ever-increasing list of digital channels, while CEOs now expect marketers to deliver results that go beyond brand awareness and ring the cash register. As a result, marketers, especially digital marketers have had to learn new skills, adopt innovative new technologies, and fundamentally reassess the role they play in driving the business.

While learning new skills and deploying sophisticated technology are key drivers of digital marketing excellence, their effectiveness is limited if the digital marketing teams aren’t structured or organized in the best way possible. Many businesses struggle with this crucial step as it could mean breaking legacy hierarchies and defying embedded cultures.

In our research report, we’ve defined four essential steps to help marketing leaders understand the key elements of a modern digital marketing organization and the choices they have in positioning them to best deliver on the needs of the business and its customers.

In this report, you will find:

• A four-step process for organizing your digital marketing team
• Three organizational models, with accompanying case examples
• Recommendations for building out the core functions of your digital marketing team
• A list of key questions to help you begin evaluating how your digital marketing team is organized

Download the full report below.

Victim or Victor? 

That’s a choice all CMOs face today in responding to the multitude of changes rocking the marketing landscape. If CMOs let change put them on the defensive, marketing’s role at their companies (and their job tenure) may shrink. But if they get in front of change, the role that marketing plays at the company can become more strategic than ever, with the CMO’s role on the c-suite team more critical.

The average CMO tenure remains short, just 44 months. In many cases careers are brief because CMOs struggle to master a confluence of changes:

• The businesses that marketing supports are changing,
  including key aspects of their go to market / commercialization
• The behavior of customers served by those businesses is changing
• The way marketing gets done is changing
• The role that marketing needs to play in the company is changing
• The talent that marketing must inspire to join and stay with the company is changing

This presents CMO’s with a pivotal question, every Monday morning. Is that marketing leadership hill that I’m climbing a mountain that I’m going to stand atop?  Or is it a volcano that’s going to erupt?

The answer depends in large part on the existence and quality of the CMO’s transformation agenda. It also depends on CMO success in linking their marketing transformation agenda to the company’s overall transformation plan.

“Once developed, refined and socialized, the agenda serves as a guiding light that CMOs use to inspire their workforce and company leadership to invest in new impact.”

Creating a CMO Transformation Agenda

What is a CMO transformation agenda? Very simply, it’s a CMO’s game plan for how a marketing organization undergoing transformation can better serve a company that’s undergoing transformation. Every good agenda includes three elements:

• Clear ambitions for change
• Concrete moves per ambition in a roadmap
• A headline theme that captures the agenda’s overall impact.

Once developed, refined and socialized, the agenda serves as a guiding light that CMOs use to inspire their workforce and company leadership to invest in new impact. Five steps will help CMO’s to effectively develop their agenda.

1. Gather a brain trust who will walk through the agenda development journey together.

The marketing transformation leadership team should be large enough to look at the business and its marketing function from multiple angles, but small enough to keep discussions confidential and minimize politics so that free-thinking ideas can be generated. A team that can be counted on one hand is optimal.

If resources are available, it helps to supplement the effort with an outside advisor in touch with marketing transformation trends across multiple industries to stimulate creative thinking. A good advisor will also provide a helpful sounding board and help synthesize team inputs and outputs into effective communication documents.

2. Prepare the team with common inputs to enable everyone to brainstorm effectively.

The agenda needs to address the underlying forces that are compelling marketing to undergo a transformation. A CMO and team should identify those forces to craft a vision that is on-target for impact.

Start by studying the company’s current corporate strategy and business plans, and compare them to their 3-5-year-old versions. How are the roles of marketing and go-to-market channels changing?  Is there leadership talk today of even more change over the horizon? If so what are the implications? Repeat this thought process BU by BU, region-by-region, customer type by customer type, always looking for major patterns (vs. niche instances) of how marketing needs to show up differently.

Key questions to answer in this exercise include:

• How are customer behaviors, priorities, and segments changing?
• How are business models and offer value propositions changing?
• How are routes to market and post-purchase relationship opportunities changing?

Keep bringing these questions back to the implications for marketing:

• What new market-facing capabilities does the business need?
• Which of those capabilities might marketing provide, including new roles?
• How will marketing need to redefine and shift emphasis from its current capabilities?

Beyond taking inspiration from the company’s business requirements, explore changes occurring in the world of marketing, not only in your industry but in other industries that may prove insightful. This exploration will help identify opportunities for marketing to add value in ways that company strategists and peer executives don’t yet know about.

What are key trends in marketing? Our next blog post is devoted to that topic – we’ll share a handful of marketing trend themes that we’ve observed, each one in its own right a combination of 3 to 4 trends.

As you review external marketing trends, ask yourself:

• Which trends obviously apply to our situation? Why?
• What factors underly other trends?  Might those factors apply to our situation?
• Do some trends link to our corporate strategy choices?   What are dependencies?
• Will key trends be easily understood and received by the company’s leadership team?  If not, how much socialization is involved?

3. Over the course of several meetings, brainstorm 3 to 5 transformational ambitions, several moves per ambition, and a unifying vision.  

We find the brainstorming process is best served by starting first with ambitions, then moves, and finally vision. That’s because most teams don’t have a clear vision in mind when the process starts. The vision will be more powerful as a “golden thread” expression of what the ambitions have in common rather than a “beacon” that serves as a guiding light throughout for the ambitions.

What does a CMO transformation/change agenda look like? Here’s a hypothetical example inspired by several CMOs who have gone through this process:

Note that the vision statement addresses the “why”, the ambition statements address the “what” and the move statements address the “how.” It’s at the move level that a management team can sequence investment, focus management attention, and harness organizational energy to bring ambitions and vision to life over time.

4. Socialize the Agenda with senior management, the board, and marketing leadership.

When a strong draft of the transformation agenda exists, socialize it with the CEO and other key executives in private. Once their feedback has been incorporated, it’s time to socialize the agenda with the senior management team together.

If possible, strengthen support by presenting an up-leveled version of the agenda to the company’s board of directors. If the CEO arranges for such a presentation, it’s a good sign that the CEO views the CMO’s agenda as a core part of corporate transformation.

After getting buy-in from company leadership, share the plan with the extended marketing leadership team. More times than not, transformation agendas will involve top-down shifts that can be unsettling – a shift in resourcing, a change in skillsets, a re-organization – so become a relentless source of inspiration and encouragement around the agenda to top marketing talent. With leadership, a transformation agenda can mobilize and unite that talent.

5. Build the Foundation for Successful Implementation.

Execution of the change agenda will take several years (vs. months). The team will go farther faster if the CMO builds a strong foundation for change prior to implementing. Depending on the situation this might include steps such as:

• Re-organize to enable new competencies to emerge
• Shift resourcing levels from legacy capability teams to future-focused teams
• Promote new cultural values for new capabilities
• Request extra investments to make needed transitions
• Nurture peer relationships to expand marketing’s role in the company –
  often in white spaces involving data, digital monetization, and/or digital CX
• Institute agile change processes and pilots to make change happen quickly
• Design enterprise-level programs that change the company, not just marketing
• Find a way to measure and monitor impact with a keen eye on ROI

Common Ambitions in CMO Agendas

Every CMO transformation agenda we’ve seen has a few key elements in common. The most frequent ambitions that we have seen adopted include:

Digital marketing excellence:

Digital marketing is the greatest zone of disruption and innovation in marketing. Unsurprisingly, digital marketing excellence is the most frequently mentioned transformation ambition. Goals might include expanding the number of business use cases that digital marketing empowers (e.g. adding cross-sell and up-sell marketing to new customer acquisition), improving specific capabilities (e.g. real-time personalization) or marketing through new engagement channels (e.g. a conversational commerce platform). Identifying key initiatives on each of these three dimensions is the first step for driving digital marketing transformation.

Data responsibilities:

Thanks to digital touchpoints, customers generate exponentially more data than they ever have before. Data about location, segmentation, digital journey stage, browsing behavior, preference indicators, physical factors, distribution channels, and purchase triggers are all critical for companies to use in their best-move rules. Yet most companies still struggle with capturing, storing, and acting on this data. Will the CMO Transformation Agenda convincingly offer to step up and take responsibility for 360° customer journey data? If not, new executive roles such as chief digital officer or chief customer officer will emerge, narrowing marketing’s role.

New monetization:

Digital enables marketing to create or enhance 1:1 relationships with customers in a way that used to be the sole domain of the sales force or channel partners. Thanks to new digital relationships, marketing can extend its role to help drive growth through monetization techniques never used at scale before. This use of marketing’s competencies for new growth can take several forms:

• Direct sales to fragmented, long-tail end users (e-commerce, AI advisory, etc.)
• Direct management of small channel partners (vs. multi-tiered distribution)
• Next-best-move support to account leaders, sales reps and customer service reps

Varying Ambitions in CMO Agendas

Despite the common patterns above, every CMO’s agenda is unique, reflecting the fact that no two companies and marketing departments are alike. There are dozens of potential ambitions to adopt – here are 20 to help jumpstart your reflection.

1. Category Reframing: redefining the company’s value context, proposition and edge
2. Launch Re-invention: from launching single products to holistic product line updates
3. Influence Scaling: developing a systematic influencer cascade
4. Pricing Sophistication: dynamic pricing systems and new value capture approaches
5. Solutions Innovation: customer-focused design and partner ecosystem enablement
6. AI Integration: enriching marketing and CX through AI / machine learning use cases
7. Intelligence Branding: updating Brand Portfolio and Architecture for intelligence
8. Re-segmentation: blending best of online and offline information insight sources
9. Content Re-invention: redesigning content for personalization and digital touchpoints
10. AR/VR Adoption: engaging customers through immersive experiences
11. Digital Customer Experience: improving CX monitoring and analytics
12. Customer Re-connection: building digital buyer relationships after channel sales
13. Social and Experimental Listening: gathering customer insights via digital feedback
14. Account Based Marketing: collaborating closely with sales to grow top accounts
15. E-Commerce: developing a new channel for customer convenience and lower cost
16. Channel-partner Data Sharing: collaborating for win-win business growth
17. In-Use Marketing: messaging inside cloud hosted applications and digital services
18. Global-Local Role Shifts: centralizing and decentralizing tasks for flexibility and cost
19. Silo-spanning: agile funding of integrated marketing initiatives across budget owners
20. Impact analytics: calculating return on marketing spend in new and better ways

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Six Drivers of Digital Marketing Success

Digital marketing has come a long way from simply putting banner ads on the internet. It has evolved from mass messaging to personalized messaging, and finally to integrated communications in blended physical and digital environments.

In addition to the traditional goals of creating awareness about the brand, marketers can now choose from a new range of goals, ranging from demand generation, driving digital commerce, and optimizing the customer experience of products and services.

In order to deliver on these new goals, marketers need a next-gen digital marketing strategy, one that goes beyond the scope of what marketers could traditionally achieve and harnesses the power and complexity of today’s marketing technology and data platforms.

This report defines the key characteristics of a next-gen strategy, and identifies 6 drivers of its successful implementation to help you evaluate your team’s readiness for the next phase of its digital evolution.

In this report, you will learn:

• What defines a ‘next-gen’ digital marketing strategy
• What key factors drive success in this new marketing paradigm
• How to prioritize the use cases and technologies that are most important to your marketing organization

Download the report below.

As early as 2012—which seems like ancient history in social media—Altimeter researched the uncontrolled spread of brand pages on social. The first sentence of our 2012 report captured our message:

“Like a disease, social media proliferation will leave companies crippled — unless they develop a strategy to manage now.”

Problem solved? No. The problem still resonates with social business leaders today, including Alison Herzog, Director of Social Business Strategy at Dell. Herzog said, “Global businesses like Dell are complex – they’re made up of many regions, varying languages and cultures, diverse audiences and interests and wide-ranging areas of internal focus. Creating a focused, scalable social architecture and implementing this with a governing body is paramount. We knew that centering on customer experience, strategic pillars and where the real impact was possible matched with the appropriate resources would guide this, which became imperative when we completed the largest tech acquisition in history.” Prophet had the opportunity to work with the exceptional team at Dell to solve this challenge.

Social teams keep growing the number of owned accounts to keep up with continuous changes in social platforms, consumer behavior and business priorities. The result is a growing operational burden and a decrease in effectiveness per account. For many firms, like Dell, optimizing social account architecture is a requirement for effective social media innovation and performance.

Reinforcing the need for a solution is a telling data point from Altimeter’s 2016 State of Social Business report: 79% of the more than 500 strategists surveyed globally reported that “the social team is becoming more operational and a platform for other innovation teams.”

As a former social business leader at a major brand, that result didn’t surprise me. But, it heightened the importance of getting to the root of account proliferation. Business units will have a hard time using social platforms for business if they are too fragmented.  As a mature practice, we can expect the scope of social business operational responsibilities to grow, but an unchecked proliferation of pages amplifies this burden needlessly.

Can this be solved? Why hasn’t it?

Lack of governance lies at the heart of the problem. As a community of social business strategists, our “test & learn” approach has led to many impactful innovations, but rarely do we take the time to look back and decommission ideas that aren’t meeting objectives (especially individual pages/accounts that are perhaps perceived as low risk to leave abandoned).

There is a disconnect between the business objectives that initiated the page and the social team tasked with managing it. Or, the page’s creator may have left the company, making it difficult to remove. For many brands without an account management team for the social platform, filing a DMCA notice of copyright infringement may be the only option.

Another key issue is the low bar required to create a new branded page—especially if listening tools or rogue page trackers aren’t in place. Well-meaning employees may create pages for their store, an event or as a test. A few abandoned or underperforming pages may incur a little financial cost, but they quickly add up: crowding social metrics, complicating listening, confusing prospective customers with conflicting messages and – worst of all – creating the user perception that the brand doesn’t care or understand social media.

Simplifying a complex problem

As a governance problem, this is solvable—but it’s more than that. Not only do we need to fix the problem before it gets out of control, but better yet, this is the time to rethink the brand’s architecture of social media accounts.

Make a quick mental shift from today’s situation: If your current company had never implemented social media before, and had the benefit of starting from scratch, what would your social media brand architecture look like? You would want to consider the following:

1. The Customer’s Journey. How do my social media pages fit within our broader, omnichannel customer journey? What pages do customers need and how do we create an intuitive experience that results in the outcomes we’re focused on? Does each organizational unit determine its own accounts in a silo, or is there a higher-level perspective where fewer, broader accounts could make the journey feel seamless? When is an account so broad that it loses effectiveness?
2. The Social Network Landscape. Where is there alignment between my business goals and the capabilities, culture, user demographics and consumer behavior of social networks? It may be easy to name Linkedin for recruiting, thought leadership or B2B sales needs, but what if alignment like this isn’t so obvious?
3. Your Team & Resources. What social account architecture meets customer needs and has teams in my organization who are ready to commit to ongoing content and engagement? While internal reorganizations may be a constant challenge, finding teams who have strong alignment between goals and a new social page (that they can run with) is ideal. Of course, the danger to avoid here is an “inside-out” architecture, where your pages reflect your internal organizational structure, rather than the market and customer you’re serving.
4. Your influence. Beyond the issues above, if you manage social for your company, you know the decision to take down an underperforming page can be problematic. How do you convince that leader that set up a Twitter handle she rarely uses that she should re-invest or decommission the account?  What if you only have a single page in Chinese for that market, but it isn’t performing?  Do you take it down, merge with others or reinvest? These are just some “tip of the iceberg” issues that emerge.

3 steps to redefining social account architecture

In our work with Dell, we found the secret to success is to work on three fronts:

1) Identify “social account territories” that reflect coherent customer journey needs. Once identified, it is possible to optimize the social account architecture (steps 2 and 3 below) one territory at a time;

2) use a data-driven, quantitative model for making easy decisions (e.g., those pages showing great or very poor results); and

3) use a decision tree—based on governance principles that leadership supports—to make tough decisions. Decisions range from removing the page, maintaining as is, re-investing, creating a new page where there is a missed opportunity, or merging the page with another.

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Harness the power of data integration to provide more powerful B2B solutions

For B2B suppliers, finding ways to strengthen and increase the value of the solutions they provide is a proven and effective way to accelerate growth. Over time, solutions-driven companies have moved beyond the predictable precepts of “solution selling” and product bundling to solve important customer problems by linking products, services and advice in ways that deliver significant customer value. Hewlett-Packard’s move to link systems integration and networking support to its hardware offering is a classic example of the effectiveness of moving from products to solutions.

Our client work has highlighted the opportunity to move to higher, more integrated and more comprehensive levels of solution delivery by integrating the power of exploding digital data sources, predictive analytics and digital information interchange with customers. These solutions do not merely use big data to target customers or improve how companies promote existing products or services. Instead, they integrate data into the actual solution so the solution adapts and becomes more valuable as a customer uses it.

Data-integrating solutions are emerging because data has reached a tipping point, with 90 percent of it generated within only the last two years. The power of integrated solutions is all around us. Caradigm, a joint venture of GE Healthcare IT and Microsoft has begun providing data integrated solutions to help hospitals better coordinate patient care and fill in treatment gaps. Logistics companies such as UPS are incorporating traffic congestion data into route planning to improve package delivery times. Facility managers have begun using smart heating and cooling systems that adapt the use of resources to the environment, energy prices and demand.

Monsanto is an example of a company at the forefront of unleashing these new, data-integrating solutions. Over the course of less than a decade, it has moved from leadership in producing seed with improved yield characteristics to becoming a greater partner with farmers in improving field productivity. And at the same time, it has outperformed its industry peers by nearly five-fold. The shift from seed-product producer to field-solution provider has involved several steps, including the introduction of an agronomist force that helps farmers make better choices.

Recently, Monsanto has accelerated the solution shift by purchasing Climate Corp., a data source for weather and climate information and is integrating its information with soil and crop data, creating powerful new solutions that improve farm performance. Importantly, these solutions are not static. They learn and become more meaningful as weather and soil conditions change and as farmers experiment.

Data-integrating solutions are emerging because data has reached a tipping point, with 90 percent of it generated within only the last two years. Yet few companies have a plan to use these new sources of information and customer value effectively. To achieve gains that are truly transformative, B2B companies must learn to harness this data to build integrated solutions that elevate them above the role of the vendor. It requires harvesting the most relevant customer information available and offering insights that make them genuine business partners.

Pitfalls in the search for solutions

The rare B2B company is able to prosper through a steady flow of extremely innovative products and services, offerings that are so unique and protectable that competition cannot keep up. But most must use every tool possible to avoid becoming commoditized, to stay relevant as customer requirements change and to differentiate in more global and competitive markets.

And adding related products and services and providing expertise for broader solutions has certainly been effective in avoiding being treated as an ordinary supplier and more like a strategic partner, enabling interactions with higher-level decision-makers. These stronger, more solid relationships—at least theoretically—also decrease the risk of losing business to a competitor.

But creating a tangible and measurable return on the added investment continues to be a challenge. Many B2B companies find it difficult to charge for the extra investments or generate a premium through their core pricing. Customers begin to see such innovations as a “favor” for giving a supplier all the business, value-added service with benefits that are hard to rely on or quantify. When solutions don’t yield margin or a platform for meaningful growth, they don’t remain sustainable and wither without additional support. Companies may start a pilot project here or there, but the risk tolerance is low. If they can’t figure out a way to make it profitable rapidly, they shut it down.

The power of data-integrating solutions to create customer intimacy

Digital technologies are enabling B2B companies to get close to end customers quickly and cheaply, and these insights are providing tools that jump-start growth. Dunn & Bradstreet has joined forces with Salesforce Analytics Cloud to build a more valuable prospecting solution by making financial and firmographic data available to millions of salespeople, even via mobile device. Avery Dennison has found new ways to combine high-technology labels with data to improve end customer package line speeds. The label, packaging, data solution increases overall packaging productivity without giving up on-shelf impact.

At Prophet, we’ve become adept at finding new ways to help our clients leverage data integration to achieve growth. Here are four data-driven strategies that show plenty of promise. With this new data and fresh insights, the odds of success are better, and the stakes for failing to do so are higher:

Combine product, expert service with data Cisco has shifted its primary business away from just communications and networking/switching components to include systems integration, software, network design advice and monitoring. It’s enabled them to build and maintain powerful collaboration communities around key issues, such as productivity or call-center management. Landis + Gyr has moved beyond the sale of electrical meters to smart meters and provides data collection and analytics. It’s now working to improve the energy efficiency of the entire electrical grid, making it more resilient and robust.

Enhance your product with powerful data Halyard Health, formerly the Kimberly Clark Healthcare division, makes the gowns, masks and gloves that help control infections in hospital settings, a process that has come under intense scrutiny with the rise of such illnesses as MRSA and Ebola. In providing data on best practices, hygiene, and ER and OR efficiency, Halyard launched a service called AiRISTA, installing a simple tag at hand-washing facilities that tracks when and how frequently providers wash their hands. It helps ER personnel become more compliant with washing their hands, which in turn reduces infections and lowers hospitals’ re-admittance rates. In doing so, Halyard has moved from selling gloves and gowns to selling data powerful enough to significantly improve patient health and ultimately lower operating costs.

“The rare B2B company is able to prosper through a steady flow of extremely innovative products and services, offerings that are so unique and protectable that competition cannot keep up.”

Leverage data to go direct B2B companies can no longer sit on the sidelines and let others disintermediate their distributor relationships by appealing to their end customers. Channel conflict is an age-old issue, which expanding data access is rapidly making more complicated and more difficult to manage. Airlines such as United are no longer sitting and watching intermediaries (data collectors like Kayak) take control of the travel planning of large corporations with heavy travel needs. Others with historically restricted access to end customers, such as pharmaceutical companies, are providing data to build direct (if not actually transactional) relationships with physicians and sufferers around ways to improve overall patient health while keeping within regulatory restrictions.

Harness the power of data companies such as Citibank don’t just issue credit cards or use big data to improve campaign targeting. They are also organizing and finding insights based on their billions of transactions to use as a separate business to support their B2B clients. They are helping their B2B clients improve forecasting demand for products, adjust merchandising plans and modify staffing assignments based on improved access to high-quality data.

Make this search for solutions better than the last
Often, our clients tell us they’re not sure where to begin the search for the best ideas for integrated solutions. We’ve found three guidelines keep B2B companies on track:

• Get closer to your customers: Putting the customer—and your customer’s customers–at the center of your decision-making has never been more important. Understand deep needs and behaviors, and study what they do on the web. Push beyond traditional market research methods to collect and mine actual behavioral data on your customers.  Augment everything you do with collecting data on web traffic.  The best solutions come from a more nuanced understanding of customer behaviors based on data and traditional insights gathered from market research.
• Build, buy or partner: In many cases, the data and insight landscape is changing too fast for you to become an expert. You can choose to build, but it will require a multi-year investment with low NPVs in the short term. Explore partnerships and potential acquisitions. You can accelerate your knowledge more quickly by leveraging what others already know about how to effectively use data.
• Stay committed: Integrated solutions take time to get right. Be ready to fail fast, but don’t back down. Failures are to be expected, and even encouraged, because in regrouping, you’ll improve your organization’s agility.

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