Internet Strategies: What is Your Market Saying to You?

In this difficult time for business, companies failing to reinvent their business models are in danger of becoming commoditized, competing on the downward spiral of costs alone through undifferentiated offerings. In a normal business cycle, that can spell reduced profitability, but in an economic downturn it can lead to financial ruin.

How can a business maximize offerings using the Internet? The key is to evaluate your markets and your value chains with an eye to separating atoms from bits. Let's explore some business patterns and how to address and capitalize on them. What patterns are playing out in your industry? You can't vanquish an enemy you don't know. Follow the links to investigate the pattern types.

Mega Patterns cut across multiple industries for extended periods of time. They earn the label "mega" because of their impact and their scope.

Value Chain Patterns are the new, nontraditional criteria for value chain moves as formerly stable industries are being compressed, broken up and put together again in new ways.

Customer Patterns are emerging across a variety of industries, while their behaviors display similar, repeatable opportunities.

Channel Patterns outline changes in distribution patterns as power and influence shifts downstream, closer to customers.

Product Patterns show changes in the power equation as shifts transfer influence to brands, blockbusters and solutions.

Knowledge Patterns are the primary assets in a new generation of wealth creation.

Organizational Patterns are the strategic changes in management that must occur to capitalize on the New Economy.

 

Page content based upon Profit Patterns, by Slywotzky, Morrison, Moser, Mundt and Quella, published by Times Business, Random House, copyright © 1999 Mercer Management Consulting, Inc.