You want your company to survive in digital-era? Four potential areas to check are: channel approach, processes, scope and people. Failing to be digital in any of these areas may significantly hinder down your capability to survive in ever increasing competition or just make your profits go down.
Channel – online first
Choosing digital first approach is often ignored in traditional media organizations. This influences into way how products are defined and also most probably have impact into pricing models too. If product and related processes are created purely based on expectations from sales organization, it might be difficult to sell in online channel. Often this is ignored by claiming that most of the sales happen in traditional channel. That might be true, but if you don’t even try to change that, situation will remain the same in future too. No pain, no gain.
Process – pure digital
Products could be digital, but you need to keep in mind also the delivery process of them too. Usually digital products have much lower price points than traditional products, thus also giving less space for creating profitability. This is why you need to rethink fulfillment and delivery from scratch to fit into digital worlds demand. Also expected speed of delivery is usually faster, which could be hard to do in non-volatile way with manual process steps. Large volume changes can be expected with pure digital products as sales organizations capabilities are not cutting off excessive demand.
Scope – plan for global
If you create digital products, why limit availability? Often it is stated that it is clever to take home market first. This was true in pre-digital era. Now you might want to make you product available globally and tune/target marketing or visibility efforts based on your financial capabilities into more focused areas. If you say your product is only suitable for one market, then i need to ask, why not redesign it? Think big in first place, it is always easier to scale down later.
People – digital mindset
People (or organizations) need to tune their thinking also into age of digital world. If people are left into old world, companies or their products will most probably be stuck in the middle. So take care that you grow digital mindset among all people. This will boost innovation and avoid the trap of doing some part of the process in the old way.