Companies are spending billions on digital and much of it is wasted. Digital strategy consultant Christopher Vollmer walks through examples of failed or failing digital marketing approaches that you should try to avoid.
Companies are spending billions on digital and much of it is wasted because they're actually missing three big things in terms of how they're approaching it.
One is they really don't have a clear strategy. They're trying to take a journey without a good map and don't really know where they're headed and they haven't really put a stake in the ground as to where they want to go. So missing a really clear and well-defined strategy is often a pretty critical thing companies are lacking.
The second thing is they're not really putting the user at the center what they do. The user could be a customer, could be a consumer, and what they haven't done is really surround their focus on the user with the right kind of insight, with the right kind of intense focus to really understand how they can solve that user-customer problem better now through digital.
And the third thing that are doing is they're not moving fast enough. Legacy companies really have a big issue where they move too slow in terms of taking action in the market or with their customers or with innovation. Some of that's related to decision-making. Some of that's related to legacy ways of looking at the market.
Too often it's because they're taking an old playbook and trying to take that old playbook and take it online, and that's really a recipe for failure.
A lot of companies have focused on reengineering as a pathway for creating more value through digital. And that's not a bad thing. There's actually quite a bit a value that can be created by applying technology to make things better. Make them more efficient and make them more effective. Take what used to be done by people and make it down by machines. But the issue is you can't stop there, because everybody is doing that. And you're not going to get ahead of your competition just by reengineering.
The only way you're going to get ahead, the only way you're going to move from from being a follower, of keeping pace with everybody, and actually become a leader, is if you start to as we start to reimagine your position and reimagine the art of the possible through what you can do with digital. You take a white sheet almost to what your company's positions look like what you can do with your capabilities and you kind of take a new view as to what's possible.
The art of the possible is a really important view as to how you think about digital. You really have to think about reimagination versus reengineering. And when you take the view of reimagination, you start to consider what's really possible, what's the art of the possible? What can I do now that I really couldn't have done before because of the changes in technology, because the changes in user behavior. And the art of the possible is really the window into opening up a whole new set of opportunities that can drive tremendous growth for your company.
With that reimagined view, it opens up a whole new set of possibilities, allows you as an executive, as a CEO to look around the corner to see what's coming and say, that's where we need to go, that's where we want to be first, and that's actually where we're going to win. And it's that view that actually translates into driving an organization at scale towards real market leadership in a time of very significant disruption. That's the view that's going to help you unlock new ways to make money versus more the same.
That's the view that's going to translate into very significant top-line revenue growth and higher multiples in the market. That's the view this going put your company in a real market leadership position and be a leader versus be a laggard.
