Marketing Intelligence And Business Model Innovation

This video provides the very insightful view of understanding the strategy. David Kryscynski commences the video explaining the possible statements that were actually goals but used as strategy in business conservations. It is because this term is loosely used by many people without understanding its real meaning and usage. This video has explained the strategy starting from its origin and how the term was first coined and used and what is its meaning and what are real ingredients that goes into making of an effective strategy. Effective strategy should have clear distinction of the market organization will compete, its unique proposition about its offerings, its key capabilities and sustainability vision (Kryscynski, 2015). IKEA example was used to clearly explain the strategy and I am very much agree that IKEA has very effective strategy as it has all the 4 ingredients. IKEA knows that its markets, unique proposition of ready to assemble furniture and very clear on its focus of being a cost leadership  (Kryscynski, 2015). At the same time, IKEA never talks about competing in the high end markets or high end furniture because they are not the targets. I fully agree with the author and would like to stress on the fact that it is very important that organization should spend considerable effort in defining its strategy before beginning the implementation in order to have a better results.

The insightful learnings about the strategy discussed by the author in the video are quite relevant in the number of business challenges and situations that business organizations faces frequently in their operation. Not only this, organization can have different strategies in different parts of the world. For instance, while IKEA uses product standardization and ready to assemble strategy in all parts of the world, it provides ready to use assembled products customized to taste and requirement of China people. Thus, this strategy is designed specially targeting Chinese population. Also, UPS and FedEx are 2 logistics companies and biggest rivals of each other but they have a different strategy. UPS competes on cost leadership while FedEx competes on its speed and on time delivery rate. RyanAir in Europe and Southwest Airlines in America competes on cost leadership. Dell competes on providing customized products to their customers by using delayed differentiation strategy. All these are different strategies used by organizations for maintaining their competitive advantage. All these companies RyanAir, Dell, UPS, and FedEx are the leaders in their respective areas and that does not happen overnight, instead all these companies have very well crafted their strategy (Gong, 2013) and keep on refining their strategy with time and thus able to maintain their competitive advantage and leadership.

Business Model Innovation

This is the very good video in which author communicated how the innovation is linked with business models and does not necessarily means inventing new products and services. I really found this thought very interesting as I always thought that innovating means inventing something but here author clearly says that anything that lowers the cost of your products or add more value to products is innovation (Gallen, 2013). Innovation has become a ways of life for the corporations in order to sustain and survive in this age of disruption where change is so fast and the only thing constant  (Muravskii, & Yablonsky, 2015). Organization who is a market leader today may become a laggard if it does not reinvent itself. Kodak which was a leader once has become a laggard as it could not judge and respond to the dynamic market changes. Yahoo was a leader once and also plans to buy Google once but does not buy because it feels valuation of google is too high. And today Google is the leader. Blackberry which is a leader in selling mobile phones are couldn’t catch this new wave of smart phones and become a laggard. This video has also defined a 4 step framework that any organization could follow to reinvent their business model. This framework consists of initiation, ideation, integration and implementation.

Reinventing business model and constant innovation in the existing business models are some of the reason for the success for any organization and should be applied to every organization. Author has also given a 4 step framework to reinvent business model. Take the example of Compaq. Compaq was the leader in selling personnel computers but once Dell comes into the market, it innovates its supply chain and thus provided personalized configuration to each customer and become a leader. It did the same thing but differently. Apple is a market leader even today because of constant innovation. Innovation is ingrained in a culture of Apple and this is why it is continuously scaling new heights. There are numerous organizations that are disrupting existing way of doing things and thus becoming a leader. Uber Inc, Air BnB are some of the organizations that have quite innovative business model and changes the way people uses transport services and hospitality services  (Igbaekemen, 2014). Google is quite innovative however once the Google’s Orkut not able to reinvent itself and keep the pace with the growth of the Facebook and lost the market. The crux of the video is to keep inventing and changing in order to survive in the market. Author stressed on this idea by giving example of firms like Kodak, Yahoo, Blackberry and Xerox which were leader once but has become laggards now.

References

Gallen, S. 2013. Business model innovation. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4ZSGQW0UMI (25th April 2017)

Gong, Y. (2013). Competency-Based Fundamentals. In Global Operations Strategy (pp. 101-140). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Igbaekemen, G. O. (2014). Marketing intelligence as a strategic tool for competitive edge. British Journal of Marketing Studies, 2(5), 17-34.

Kryscynski, D. 2015. What is strategy. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TD7WSLeQtVw (25th April 2017)

Muravskii, D., & Yablonsky, S. (2015, January). Disruptive innovation potential of multi-sided platforms: case of digital books. In ISPIM Conference Proceedings (p. 1). The International Society for Professional Innovation Management (ISPIM).