The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change - Hardcover

Anand, Bharat

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812995384 ISBN 13: 9780812995381

Verlag: Random House, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

“My favorite book of the year.”—Doug McMillon, CEO, Wal-Mart Stores

Harvard Business School Professor of Strategy Bharat Anand presents an incisive new approach to digital transformation that favors fostering connectivity over focusing exclusively on content.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BLOOMBERG

Companies everywhere face two major challenges today: getting noticed and getting paid. To confront these obstacles, Bharat Anand examines a range of businesses around the world, from The New York Times to The Economist, from Chinese Internet giant Tencent to Scandinavian digital trailblazer Schibsted, and from talent management to the future of education. Drawing on these stories and on the latest research in economics, strategy, and marketing, this refreshingly engaging book reveals important lessons, smashes celebrated myths, and reorients strategy.

Success for flourishing companies comes not from making the best content but from recognizing how content enables customers’ connectivity; it comes not from protecting the value of content at all costs but from unearthing related opportunities close by; and it comes not from mimicking competitors’ best practices but from seeing choices as part of a connected whole.

Digital change means that everyone today can reach and interact with others directly: We are all in the content business. But that comes with risks that Bharat Anand teaches us how to recognize and navigate. Filled with conversations with key players and in-depth dispatches from the front lines of digital change, The Content Trap is an essential new playbook for navigating the turbulent waters in which we find ourselves.

Praise for The Content Trap

“A masterful and thought-provoking book that has reshaped my understanding of content in the digital landscape.”—Ariel Emanuel, co-CEO, WME | IMG

“The Content Trap is a book filled with stories of businesses, from music companies to magazine publishers, that missed connections and could never escape the narrow views that had brought them past success. But it is also filled with stories of those who made strategic choices to strengthen the links between content and returns in their new master plans. . . . The book is a call to clear thinking and reassessing why things are the way they are.”—The Wall Street Journal

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bharat Anand is the Henry R. Byers Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in economics from Harvard University and received his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University.
 
Professor Anand is an expert in digital and corporate strategy. He has studied how new technologies affect what we watch, read, and hear, and how companies navigate digital change. He has written more than fifty articles and case studies, received awards for his research and case-writing, and chaired various executive education programs. He is a two-time winner of the “best teacher award” at Harvard Business School.
 
Anand has advised leading organizations and entrepreneurs around the world. Recently, he helped create Harvard Business School’s digital learning initiative, HBX, which he now oversees as faculty chair.

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1

A Tale of Two Geographies

Scandinavian Warriors

Norwegian winters start early. November 12, 2001, was another frigid arctic day in Oslo, with temperatures below zero. Inside the modest redbrick headquarters of the Scandinavian media publisher Schibsted, there was a distinct chill as well. Schibsted’s board was convening to determine the future of CEO Kjell Aamot.

During the previous two years the company’s main newspapers, Aftenposten and VG, had seen revenue declines as Web competitors siphoned off readers and advertisers. Schibsted’s own online operations, started more than six years earlier, were growing but had little to show for themselves—­investments far outpaced returns. And the recent bursting of the Internet bubble had seen Schibsted’s stock crash and then languish. Aamot later summarized the situation with customary candor:

Everything was going wrong. We saw major loss-­making initiatives all over the place—­seven years of losses. When the bubble burst, we had a loss of approximately $200 million in Norwegian kroners and that was a huge loss for us. That was absolutely my responsibility. The board of directors very much felt we should close down some activities. Most members were of the opinion that I should resign.

Ultimately, it was only the support of Schibsted’s main shareholder, Tinius-­Nagell Erichsen, that allowed Aamot to continue. But the crisis shook the company’s senior managers, resulting in greater pressure to clarify their Internet strategy.

As a print-media firm struggling to reckon with the threat of the Internet, Schibsted was not alone. Hundreds of newspapers around the world were engulfed in a digital wildfire. That year The New York Times announced cuts of up to 9 percent of its workforce; between 2001 and 2006 it lost more than half its market value, and by 2012 the loss was more than 75 percent. The Washington Post shed 23 percent of its newsroom, and similar cuts occurred at The Boston Globe. Articles with titles such as “Who Killed the Newspaper?” (The Economist, 2006) and “Mourning Old Media’s Decline” (The New York Times, 2008) cropped up everywhere.

But as these events continued to unfold, something strange was happening back in Oslo. Starting in 2003, Schibsted began to make money on its online operations. A little at first—­and then more and more. By 2006 the publisher’s online operations accounted for 35 percent of operating profits. In a stunning reversal of events, Schibsted had, first shakily but then unmistakably, turned around. The Economist noted that while 2005 had been “miserable” for most newspaper companies in the Western world, Schibsted’s performance was “a rare exception,” making it one of the only newspapers to have turned online into a profitable business. In 2011 Schibsted declared operating profits on its online businesses of roughly $220 million—­nearly 60 percent that of the entire group.

Chinese Virtual Giants

Six thousand miles southeast of Oslo lies Shenzhen, one of China’s  fastest-growing cities. Three decades ago it was a farming and fishing village with a few thousand people. Today it is an eleven-­million-­person metropolis. Most of its growth was triggered by the creation of a Special Economic Zone in 1979. Shenzhen is now a manufacturing hub, the financial center of southern China, and the home of companies with globally recognized brands, like Huawei and ZTE. Despite this engineered growth, the most famous company headquartered there arose from homegrown entrepreneurs Pony Ma and Zhang Zidong.

In 1998 these two young computer science graduates of Shenzhen University started a company to take advantage of China’s Internet boom. Tencent began operations uneventfully, engaging in service work for local telecom operators and paging centers. Like many other local start-­ups, its main approach to product development was to copy from the West.

It did so well: Its first product, the free instant messaging (IM) service OICQ, was a near-­perfect replica of AOL’s ICQ (an acronym for “I Seek You”). In addition to an easy-­to-­navigate communications platform, OICQ offered useful add-­on features such as chat rooms and a mobile service. Within three years the service, renamed QQ, was the leading IM provider in China, with more than 50 million users. The entry of copycat providers did nothing to slow it down.

Instant messaging is a business that’s very hard to monetize. Many have tried—­and failed. And Tencent launched at the same time as hundreds of other Chinese start-­ups. But while most of those ventures struggled, Tencent’s offerings grew from instant messaging and its associated iconic penguin mascot to an impressively broad suite: a social networking site, a news portal, a mobile platform, single-­ and multi-­player games, and a microblogging service. Its most recent product, WeChat, was a mobile app that combined voice chat (similar to Skype), photo sharing (similar to Instagram), social network features (similar to Facebook), e-­commerce capabilities (similar to Amazon), group messaging, and walkie-­talkie features into a single offering—­for free. By 2015 Tencent’s products and services were used by more than a billion Chinese, who accessed them through mobile phones, personal computers, and Internet cafés.

Like many e-­commerce sites, Tencent gave consumers the ability to purchase clothes, pets, guns, and food, but with one important caveat: All Tencent’s products were virtual goods existing only in the online world and purchased predominantly with the firm’s virtual currency—­“Q coins.” Against this make-­believe backdrop, Tencent’s financial strength was hardly imaginary. In 2015 revenue neared $16 billion—­similar to Facebook’s and more than three times as much as LinkedIn’s and Twitter’s combined. In April 2015 the firm’s market capitalization passed $200 billion, making it the fourth most valuable Internet firm in the world, behind Google, Facebook, and Alibaba.

How does a Scandinavian newspaper company find lucrative revenue streams online when everyone else is struggling? How did Tencent overcome the brutal odds of starting as a free IM product and then translate its advantage there into numerous product categories over the next fifteen years? How does it get users to pay for products that exist only in an imaginary world? And what generalizable lessons can we draw from these examples?

On the face of it, the stories of Schibsted and Tencent could not be more different. One firm resides in a Western developed economy, the other in an Eastern emerging market. One exemplifies traditional media, the other was a digital start-­up. One is run by executives with more than thirty years of experience in media, the other by thirty-­somethings who’ve never known anything but the Internet. But the stories are inextricably linked.

The link isn’t the superior quality of products or the ability to innovate and bring new offerings to market first. The link is the ability to recognize and manage connections across users. This principle—­user connections—­is a critical concept for media, technology, and Internet organizations. But few get it right.

To unpack the concept, let’s start by returning to newspapers.

2

The Real Problem  with Newspapers

Newspapers seem to be a dying breed. The common reason given is clear: “Readers are migrating online!” And why wouldn’t they? Online news is mostly free. It is...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0812995384
• ISBN 13: 9780812995381
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 464
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Purmerul LTD; https://strengholt.nl/en/; ; 22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9; Plovdiv; 4000; Bulgarien