In developing strategies for Internet-based offerings, you should pick the opportunities that give you low risk and high reward.
The big problem with creating many wonderful ideas for improving competitive position is that many will have a hard time choosing among them. Pick wrong, and you may miss an opportunity to create a gigantic success.
Here is where looking for the best always-win, no-lose options makes a difference. Let's look at the Disney theme park business.
Disney could probably find a large number of potential partners to develop many new services. If the partners would pay for all of the development and the initial implementation of the services as well as the time of Disney employees working on the tasks, Disney could go after a large number of alternatives. Not wanting to inundate its customers with new services, the company could then simply pick those that did best in tests.
Most partners would probably be willing to go along with this way of working with Disney as long as the partners felt that they had a good chance of succeeding.
How hard would it be to fund an Internet start-up that had a development contract with Disney? The experience of Pixar in providing animation for Disney movies suggests that this would be easy to do.
What if you do not have the appeal of Disney? How can you find always-win, no lose options?
Partners will probably not be willing to fund your development and start-up costs, but you can certainly emphasize projects where those costs will be quite small. After you find many low-cost projects, you can then evaluate them for how hard it would be to recover your expenses.
Some opportunities will pay off in a few days, others in decades. Go for those opportunities with the fastest benefits. You will probably have a long list at this point.
Now compare the choices for the size of the long-term benefit, net of any on-going costs you will have. Here are some categories that should emerge. Any program that builds the recognition of and reputation for your enterprise should be near the top.
This means that existing customers are more attracted (making them easier to retain), plus you get new customers. Anything that enhances your proprietary advantages in knowledge about your customers should also be attractive.
Eventually, marketing, products, and service will be totally unique to each customer. But you cannot create the right individual solution that unless you know what is uniquely attractive and useful to the customer.
A third category of opportunity is where the customer can provide the service they want better for themselves and at lower cost to both of you than you can provide it to them. An example is the tracking of packages by overnight delivery companies. You can usually get the information faster, better, and cheaper on the Web site than by calling the toll-free line. You will probably think of better ideas.
Copyright 2008 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved
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