Even though the basics have not changed, the Digital Age is different. Like the other two major social-technological revolutions of the last 500 years, the Printing Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, the Digital Revolution has changed some basics of how life is carried on and business is done.
The Net gives you the opportunity to reach across geography and time to reach markets with less costly infrastructure than before. That's the good news. The bad news is that your competition can do the same thing and new competitors, with only a Web site and a fulfillment arm.
Reach also works across time. In an increasingly 24/7 world you need to be able to deliver on your marketing promises and answer questions at any hour of your day or night. This is one of those areas where a good manufacturer/ASP working relationship can be a powerful competitive advantage.
The main effect of Reach is to lower barriers to entry and therefore to increase competition.
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Transparency on the Net is like transparency in the physical world: the ability to see into something. The two kinds of transparency that matter to you are price transparency and process transparency.
Price transparency lets everybody know pretty much what everyone else is charging. Price transparency shifts power down the Value Chain to buyers and increases price competition.
Process transparency is the ability to see how a process is working. When you allow a customer to check on order or project status, you are giving them process transparency. This can add value to the choice to do business with you.
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Today our world seems to be going faster and faster and faster. If you know the name of any neurotransmitter at all, it's probably adrenaline.
I'm old enough to remember when business communication moved by letter. First you got a letter from someone else. You could look at it, think about it, draft a reply, have the letter prepared, review it, and send it off via the postal service. The whole cycle -- from the time that your correspondents sent their first letter until they received their answer back -- was likely to be measured in weeks.
No more. Today, people expect answers to emails within twenty-four hours, if not immediately. They not only want to apply for a loan online, they want an answer in seconds.
So what does speed do? In some ways, it doesn't do anything specific as much as it magnifies the effect of all of the other characteristics. Speed increases the intensity of competition in a marketplace.
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