Is BlackBerry on the wrong end of a competitive wave?
We've often talked about a "wave" of competitive advantage, in which insights form the basis for the launch of an offering, a company gets to exploit it for a while, and then inevitable erosion sets in. Well, imagine my surprise at seeing almost exactly that pattern in a Business Week story about Blackberry's attempts to stay relevant in a world of ever more intriguing smartphones. Have a look!
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Customer experience innovation at the Disney Stores
A major theme that I’ve been following for a while is that rather than conventional product or service innovation, companies that attend to their customers’ total experience with an offering can craft powerful, sticky, and long-lasting advantages. I was intrigued, therefore, to learn that the Walt Disney Company is taking this seriously with respect to their retail stores. In a New York Times story, reporter Books Barnes describes the million-dollars per store plan that Disney is hatching to create completely enchanting children’s experiences in their stores. The new, rebranded stores are destined to become destinations in their own right - places where kids beg to go, rather than utilitarian mall display spaces with an unnerving number of unimaginative but Disney-themed playthings.
My co-author and I actually picked up on the trend toward creating experiences in toy shops as part of our discussion in the book Discovery Driven Growth. We use the example of Sacramento-based “G. Willikers” toys to show how a model that involves customer experiences has far more power than one that involves just moving piles of shrink-wrapped novelties. Other toy shops capitalizing on experience include the “Build A Bear” workshop (suffering in the recession, but a powerful business model nonetheless) and the “American Girl” dolls.
I’m looking forward to seeing if Disney is a harbinger of trends to come. I mean, imagine how cool life could get if corporations actually focused on giving their customers rich, intriguing experiences rather than simply trying to lure them into buying more stuff?
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- Posted Rita McGrath on November 18, 2009
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Business Value of a Temporary Advantage - Video describing the BareBones NPV
My esteemed colleague, Mac, is featured describing the application of the “BareBones” NPV tool in this video.
We’re working on uploading a new version of the software.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on November 05, 2009
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rethinking audience attraction in the media business model
In an article that is forthcoming in Long Range Planning, I’ll be talking about a discovery driven approach to identifying new business models.
One of the points I make in the piece is that with the advertising model, businesses are paid by advertisers to attract an audience and provide the advertiser with access to that audience. It struck me somehow this evening that this simple idea is one which could really have changed the way conventional media work—if the core of your business is audience-attraction and leveraging, then it only makes sense that you want to promote any place readers might congregate. If someone else (like a search engine or repackager) diverts the audience you have attracted, well clearly that is directly competitive. It makes me wonder anew where producers of digital content got the idea that they should give their material away for free to allow other players to attract the content producers audiences to their locations.
It will be interesting indeed to see how the media companies dig themselves out of this. I do think we’re going to see a lot more walled gardens and a lot more subscriptions required to premium content. And won’t that produce some interesting power shifts.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on August 03, 2009
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Consumer Leverage Ratio - A tool to measure the ticking credit time bomb lurking for your customers
My co-author, Ian MacMillan and one of his colleagues, William Jarvis have just weighed in on a topic near and dear to my heart—the deadly situations companies create when they lend more and more to over-extended consumers (see post on why the smartest behavioral economists in the world work for credit card companies). In an article forthcoming in the Harvard Business Review, they show how devastating accumulations of such debt can be, and offer a simple tool to help companies figure out when it could come to harm them. Check it out - very interesting stuff.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on June 04, 2009
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recent entries
- Discovery Driven Planning Makes an Impression on CFO’s
- An application of Discovery Driven Planning by one of Mac’s students
- Video about “Leading Strategic Growth and Change” now up on YouTube
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- Sagantia Innovation Boot Camp - Kick Starting Innovation
