Publishing:

Notes on digital strategy and trends

Brilliant Noise

@brilliantnoise brilliantnoise.com

Publishings interesting times

When the web becomes a major factor in an industry everything is challenged: certainties about business models, customer behaviours, marketing and its role in the world are all thrown into ux. Publishing has seen other media industries - music, newspapers and magazines redened by digital. Now it is experiencing the full force of the webs disruptive power. Living through this kind of wholesale transformation can be terrifying and exhilarating. There are opportunities to re-think and reinvent business models, indeed whole commercial and cultural systems. There is also the very real risk of whole companies disappearing or being condemned to slow, painful decline as a new status quo is established.

Amazon, Apple and assimilation

Where the newspaper industry is concerned with Googles disintermediation, publishings tech gorillas are Amazon and - only slightly less so - Apple. Amazon has moved steadily from squeezing the market for book-selling, to challenging publishers in their relationships with authors, readers as well as their production of books.

What business are we in?

The chief question publishers need to answer, is: in what business are they? Competencies such as physical production (buying paper, producing hard copy books), distribution (getting those books into stores and warehouses) and talent management (signing up authors with promising ideas and working with them) were what supported the old business models. Each of these fundamentals is being undermined by the web, but to what extent, and where this leaves incumbent businesses, is not yet clear.

2013 Brilliant Noise - All Rights Reserved.

Where to start: industry trends

When developing digital business and brand strategies in an industry in the throes of disruption, the emphasis must be on looking outward - starting with the business environment rather than the companys own strengths and weaknesses. Strategy needs to be a response to the fast-changing world, rather than an attempt to shoe-horn existing business models and structures into a hopeful scenario of incremental change. There are four trend areas that publishers must pay close attention to and that raise the questions that should be answered as part of digital business and brand strategies:

Customers: how are customers changing the way they buy and use books? What do they want from publishers? Authors: how are authors responding to the new opportunities of self-publishing and having more direct relationships with readers? How are their relationships with publishers changing?

Platforms: which platforms should be taken note of for distribution, creation and community-building? Business models: what business models are emerging and which deserve analysis and development?

Attention should be paid to where trends and behaviours have become mainstream and also to the edge cases - where early adopters are developing new ideas and behaviours. It can help to visualise the trends that are relevant to a business. At Brilliant Noise we use a radar map approach to this, plotting trends by a set of themes and asking whether they are of relevance now (requiring immediate action), near (requiring closer analysis) or far (things to keep an eye on). The visualisation below shows a sample from a working session looking at a business publishers strategy.

Image: Brilliant Noise trends radar overview for publishing.

Take a look at three of the trends we can see emerging from this picture:

Diverse business models: there are many new business models emerging in publishing. Not all may become widespread, but the importance of models which were recently edge concepts - e.g. crowdfunding - is growing and may be adopted by existing publishers in some form.

Fragmentation and blurring of authors and readers: from fan ction to niche business bloggers who may or may not become authors in future, the roles of authors, readers and critics have become more complex.

Social reading: Amazons Kindle social network and other reader networks. Bookmarking communities have formed around web content, but so far social reading of books has been a niche or edge activity. This could be an opportunity for publishers to learn more about readers and develop new services.

2013 Brilliant Noise - All Rights Reserved.

Draw inspiration from digital brands and businesses

It is useful to reect on the characteristics of organisations in other industries that have gone furthest, fastest, in developing radical digital strategies. Brilliant Noise has identied six key traits among leading digital brands and businesses: 1. Leadership: is there a senior sponsor or leader within the organisation who is committed to radical transformation in response to the industrys disruption? It is notable that many digital strategies have been part of corporate ght-backs, for instance Howard Schulz at Starbucks, Michael Dell at Dell and Angela Ahrendts at Burberry. 2. Values and vision: are values and vision already clear? The clearer the company is about its purpose, and what it thinks is the right way to pursue it, the easier it is to translate its approach into digital. 3. Principles-led: developing a clear set of principles for digital and communicating them universally will give licence to the boldest and most innovative people in the company to spark new ideas and change. 4. Pilot and scale: a willingness to try things out and the sense to take successes and scale them, to make them repeatable practices and business processes. 5. Frameworks and governance: to make change stick, there needs to be strong processes in place. Developing an organisation-wide governance process for digital and innovation will break down divisions that could slow or stop change. Brilliant Noise develops strategy frameworks, guidance notes, governance structures and measurement frameworks as a matter of course for its clients. 6. Digital literacy: spreading new digital skills, such as the eective use of social computing tools, helps spread change faster and gives more people in the organisation a deep understanding of the changes and opportunities that the web is bringing to bear.

Developing an effective digital strategy

Building on lessons from other organisations and a view of the changing publishing industry, publishers should consider the following strategies:

Move as fast as customers: customers reading and wider media consumption habits are changing fast as they become used to ebooks, social media and the wider web. There are opportunities for publishers in understanding and meeting those needs, for instance: shareable content, access from multiple devices, content in multiple formats (audio and text).

Pilot at the edge: competitive advantage will come from being ahead of the curve, rather than moving as part of the pack (one minute everyone develops apps, the next everyone rolls out subscriptions). This will mean innovating with readers and authors who are outliers or edge cases in their approach.

Ask what value only they can provide: if the competitive threat is coming from giants like Amazon and Apple, then a strong response will be to be closer to customers, being more agile, developing value that cant be assimilated by an ecosystem player.

Build community: building strong communities of interest around topics and authors will provide some un-replicable value as well as a source of both customer insight and online distribution for content and marketing messages.

Develop their content supply chain: re-thinking how content is created and distributed online with a supply chain analogy can reveal both new opportunities and better ways of measuring performance.

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