Consider McDonald’s as the most heavily mass-market-driven company on the planet. For them, digital is over:
Order on your PC in your office, from your phone in the street, or on a touch screen when you’re there. They don’t care anymore. They don’t WANT to care because it’s relatively irrelevant.
And they get it.
No one is excited by the digital experience. What matters is the end result. What you deliver, how you keep in sync with how your customers live. And maybe (maybe) how you can anticipate and build added value before whatever you do, from selling burgers to distributing electricity, becomes a fucking commodity as it will.
Not caring about being digital doesn’t mean you can stay put. THEY don’t stay put.
They create value out of what was nothing just moments ago:
And they are not moving fast and breaking so many things anymore, either. They are slowing the pace, leveraging their gigantic unfair advantage and milking the new cash cows… The one you might want to create now by trying to get into big data, having chat bots, or rekindling your not-so-much-customer-centric culture.
These were maybe the best options in 2008 when everything was on the table and up for grabs. Ten years later? I don’t think so. Being relevant is not a matter of building good apps and smart UX anymore… You’re still thinking product vs. services, digital vs. analogic:
You don’t get it yet.
So, of course, I know it feels safe to try and mimic the best practices of successful companies. But again, it’s 2018 now, not 2008. And if you’re late at digital, that might be good news in the end. You might have a next opportunity: to renounce playing this now-old race of the whole digital revolution as it was done. Playing catch-up has never been what built the future.
How about leap-frogging digital now?
Consider that China is only becoming a technology leader because they were so late at the web, payment systems, or social, that they reinvented everything on their term. To some extent, even faster than the US would leverage their massive head start. And now they are moving to green energy because they postponed dealing with pollution for so long. Do you want to know when they will export green tech to the West? 2020? 2019?
This is your chance too if you are late. Digital is over. Don’t play the game that others invented and played for years before you had to wake up.
This is a chance.