Platform Strategy 2.0 for D2C and B2B to attract New Value Chain Customers

Platform Transformation builds on Technology Platforms for distributed innovation, reshaping the business model and creating new efficiencies and value chains to improve data-centric customer experiences.

Platform Strategy can help create and capture new economic value avenues and Scale the potential for learning across entire ecosystems.

Data is the Holy Grail. Now Players are redefining the value proposition for customers and trying to lock in control points to expand horizontally and vertically across the grid by enriching their products and services with information, social content, or connected customer experience and feedback.

Developing a platform strategy includes asking questions such as:

● What partnerships will add value to platforms?
● How will target audiences interact with platforms?
● How value/offerings are monetized on platforms?
● How agile are the platforms?
● What expansion capabilities are needed with platforms?
● How well do platforms integrate with each other and related systems?
● What digital environments to operate in?

As Deloitte mentioned in the Platform Strategy Document, your vision should answer three questions:

● What value is exchanged? Outlines what the "currency" of your platform is, which could include some combination of information, data, or goods and services.
● Who is involved? Outlines the participants in your platform, which will include some combination of producers (internal/external), consumers, and other stakeholders.
● How does it work? Outlines the respective tools and functionalities that bring stakeholders in, facilitate sharing, and match participants, etc., in your platform.

What is a Platform?

The platform has become a very ambiguous term. Market capitalization to global reach, platforms have given digital natives what they have asked for. But what is a platform? Platform in general terms (as defined by Mckinsey ) is

● Software Based Digital Environments with Open Infrastructure
● Matchmakers linking people, organizations and resources.
● Reducers of Marginal Costs
● Foundations for combinatorial innovation
● Harnessers of network effects
● Orchestrators of ecosystems extending across sectors without borders.

Platforms are grouped under three board categories

● Customer proposition and experience platforms built on reusable code ( internal and external
● Business solution platforms designed to be modular and run as a business (internal and external
● Core IT provisioning

Direct to Consumer Business and B2B have to build Digital Ecosystem 2.0

Platform strategy accelerates growth with data-driven customer experience, Reworks the value chain. The Platform Strategy combines business, technology, governance, procedures, and management together and has the ability to keep up with changing industry trends.

How should companies find their constraints and work towards removing them? A solid data-driven approach helps and establishes a strong case for change. So how does it work?

● Analyze data from various resources to Create and evaluate frictionless hypotheses
● Formulate Models for user engagement, customer satisfaction or any other business outcomes according to your industry
● Compare and assess the competitor positioning and capability
● Analyze market size, segmentation, product abilities, customer personas

Business to Business

A B2B industrial-products manufacturer whose growth slowed down and wanted to find out where they can capitalize the company's sizable base of loyal customers in their value chain. The data sensors used while manufacturing to evaluate performance, which supported an existing after-sales service business. Strategists suggested that more control points might be taken advantage of and found, in cooperation with marketing and sales, that many of its clients were relatively unaware of utilizing data analytics to drive business choices. The firm has chosen to offer its own data analysis services and has established an ecosystem of partners that can do so.

Direct to Consumer Business

And for the DTC market, things have changed, it is almost guaranteed that what has worked in the past will not work in the future. According to Mckinsey, consumer sentiment research shows that two-thirds of consumers plan to continue to shop online after the pandemic. There must be a return to management principles as well as a step beyond the process. Being data-driven is a necessity. The utilization of data has played a vital role in many DTC firms' successes. Several DTC businesses have been able to grow with data-driven strategies, thus customizing and engaging customers efficiently.

The future of D2C Businesses depends on the curation and filtering of massive amounts of data generated at the Edge to fuel continuous Artificial Intelligence. This is an Exascale-class data challenge. Curating relevant data at this scale is not possible for businesses without a strong platform strategy.

Your Platform Strategy is Important than the Platform Itself

Navdeep Gill, Founder, XenonStack

Your platform approach is more important than the idea behind the platform itself. It can be very hard to build a platform, especially after many buzzworthy attempts and a few huge successes. There are countless ways to get it right! Just start with a solid platform strategy. And make sure your strategy answers two key questions: How will you attract customers? And how are you going to make technology the core of your ecosystem?

Platform Strategy that Enforces Data Quality

Only 16% of organizations think their data is of "very good" quality. Once bad data goes on your platform, you can expect to get bad results out, limiting the effectiveness and deteriorating the customer experience.

Building a Platform Team

The benefits of building a platform team can be many, but it needs to be done right. A Data-Driven Platform team can enable your organization to scale faster and more efficiently than the traditional approach and product-driven mentality. A platform Team can consist of members below.

Platform Strategist -

● Long term platform Strategy
● Ecosystem roadmap
● Lead cross functional items

Platform product manager

● Driving discovery, planning, and implementation
● Identify, build and champion new platform functionalities
● Rapid platform experimentations
● Sync Between platform initiatives

Platform Data Manager

● Drive Strategy for processing, managing and serving data to the entire company and integrations with ecosystems partner

Ecosystem Manager

● Build and Manage 3rd Party software developer ecosystem
● Seeking and Engaging with development partner

Platform Privacy and governance manager

● Evaluate compliance solution options and drive data management and governance strategy
● Include sensitive data handling retention, user data protection and anonymization

Don't Envy them

Over the past five years, you must have found several news platforms covering various CEOs and companies. When leading international brands and their sales force make it big, it's easy to fall for the idea of a successful platform. However, the road to the right platform is not an easy one but surely a necessary one. As Pierre Azoulay from MIT says, "Platform strategy is, in some sense, one of the most ambitious ways of entering a market you could have, because it requires coordinating the behaviors of multiple parties that might not know each other, that might not even want to know each other," Azoulay says. "You're sort of this orchestra conductor, and as a result of being very ambitious, it also fails very often."

Author: Navdeep Gill, Founder, XenonStack