How data can help fast followers close the gap faster

Being the first-to-market with a new and innovative product is a time-honored strategy for achieving success. Companies vie to be the first mover of a new product or service. Sometimes they even launch products that are not-quite-ready for primetime simply to capture a larger market share.

Yet, many of us can readily cite examples of services and products that were not successful despite being first. (Anyone still have a Betamax, Palm Pilot or Rio in their attic?) In fact, there are many examples where being second or third to market meant doing incredibly well - Google vs. Netscape, the iPod vs. the mp3 device market, etc. 

Indeed, much has been written about the merits of the latter “fast follower” strategy, including the often-quoted 1993 paper by Peter N. Golder and Gerard J. Tellis that studied 500 brands in 50 product categories, and found that just 8 percent of fast followers fail despite not being first to market. 

Data Accelerates Doing Well Without Being First

Of course, being a fast follower is different than being a late mover who has missed the party altogether - a fine line in today’s hypercompetitive business climate. One of the key success factors can be the judicious use of data that helps organizations make the right decisions at the right time.

That starts with having a data-driven culture. A data-driven culture has many elements: easy access to the right data, ability to understand the data, automation of insights creation, presenting context and stories with the data, embedding insights at point of decision making, and closing the decision loop by taking action based on data. This requires a combination of technology, people and data literacy.

Having a data-driven culture sets the stage to develop data literate teams, both skilled in managing data and encouraged to draw insights from it. With the ability to leverage the right data to discover vital data insights, it becomes easier for businesses to discover new opportunities and avenues for innovation. Moreover, teams can make better data-driven decisions such as fine-tuning or pivoting an existing strategy.

As a data-centric approach gets infused into the corporate culture, the organization gains the agility to respond to black swan events. According to Deloitte, insight-driven organizations were able to respond more quickly and demonstrate higher resilience when COVID-19 grew into a pandemic, with some even tightening their dominant market positions as the stock markets tumbled. 

Strategic Outcomes from Data

I think a new report by analyst firm 451 Research summed up the impact of data on businesses best: “The ability of business leaders to quickly use data from operational applications to make strategic decisions and deliver on strategic outcomes will rapidly be seen, not just as a potential competitive differentiator, but also as a fundamental requirement and strategic imperative.”

Given the growing demand for data literacy that Qlik is seeing, there is no question that organizations are waking up to the reality of data as a strategic imperative for innovation. But while the push for data literacy and leveraging data insights is growing, bringing actionable insight to the table isn’t as straightforward.

Faced with a more complex and unpredictable environment where organizations must deal with more data and data of different types, agility is essential. As noted in our report with IDC, this includes support for a wide variety of sources and destinations, clear analytic approaches, and agnostic infrastructure to leverage the use of data across the entire organization.

Organizations need to ask themselves if they have the training, data pipelines and analytics in place to not only enable data insights, but to do so in near real-time and at scale. Only then will you have the insights to evaluate and pinpoint quickly evolving market opportunities with confidence before you miss the fast follower window. 

About the Author:

As the Executive Vice President of Global Solutions and Partners at Qlik, I lead a multi-disciplinary team that’s laser focused on helping customers maximize the value and potential of their data through our platform and services. We do this by bringing together the best of our consulting and value engineering disciplines with the scale and reach of our partner and channel ecosystem. I am also responsible for our partner and ecosystem strategy, along with expanding our expert professional and education services team - all oriented to delivering a solution led approach to address our customers' digital and data needs.