Is it digital transformation of business or transformation of business?

Recently, I was invited to a podcast show by Anupa Gandhi and she asked me about my views on the digital transformation of businesses that we are seeing these days.

My humble reply was, that every company that is looking to proceed for digital transformation should take a cue from their company’s Mission statement.

They must understand and transform their business first and then repeat with digital initiatives.

Let me explain it with an example of my favorite brand Nike, the world’s most innovative company.

Look at their Mission statement:

“To bring innovation and inspiration to every athlete in the world.”

(And they add, “If you have a body, you’re an athlete.”)

If you think about the business in those terms, there are still a lot of underserved consumers with whom Nike can grow.

The secret formula of Nike’s success is to serve consumers.

Transformation is an ongoing process because the bar keeps moving.

When Nike decided to go digital, they transformed their business model first.

From being a portfolio company, yes, Nike owned Bauer Hockey, Umbro Soccer, Cole Haan, Hurley, and Converse brands in their portfolio.

They narrowed down only to Converse and Jordan to scale.

They first analyzed that to transform they need a focused approach to things they are good at doing and took a call to focus on growth rooted in Sports.

Learning:

?When embarking on a transformation journey, “what you stop doing is probably as important as what you start doing.”

Secondly, as they transformed their business to D2C digitally, they started consolidating their distribution channels and made the product available only to a selected few wholesale accounts.

Hence, it is always advisable to look at “ transforming your business” currently rather than adding another layer of complexities using digital transformation.

The reality of digital initiatives like e-commerce is that once you take a call on initiating the digital channel then you cannot move back, you have to proceed with investments, not for the first year or second year but put money for the number of years before the digital transformation becomes self-sustaining.

The biggest challenge in digital initiatives is the speed of change of technology, today chat GPT is the most popular but within a few weeks, it will be Bard or some other AI tool that understands regional and multiple languages and converts the language of the site in the country from where it is being browsed all in the real-time.

Hence the capital investments have to be consistent in case any brand wants to walk through the path of digitisation.

watch the episode 1 of the podcast here:

If you are a business owner operating in the beauty/fragrance genre & want to grow your business & need a retail expert to help you achieve your “Vision to Reality” framework then feel free to schedule a discovery listening call over a #coffeechat.