Presented during the High Performance Marketing Conference 2014, organized by Accenture on January 23rd, 2014.

1. Thirteen Tenets
of a Successful
Digital Business
January 24, 2014
Bob Barr
SVP, Acquity Group | Managing Director, Accenture Interactive

2. The Thirteen Tenets
1. Digital Business = Marketing + Sales + Support
2. Know Your Customer
3. Metric the Business & Metric the Experience
4. Lower Margin Business / Lower Cost Channel
5. Experience is Everything
6. Put Your Best (not necessarily a better) Price Online
7. Keep Your Site Safe & Secure / Private & Protected
8. Mind Your Content; Keep it Fresh AND ACCURATE
9. Shoe Strings Break. Hamster Wheels are not Scalable.
10. Nobody Commutes Daily by an Online Business
11. It’s Evolution Before Revolution, but Ultimately Both
12. You Don’t Have a Monopoly on Smarts
13. Organize and Govern for Success
Thirteen Tenets of a Successful Digital Business
Successful eBusiness
©2013 Acquity Group, LLC. All rights reserved.
2

3. 1.
Digital Business = Marketing + Sales +
Support + Service
It’s about:
•
Your Brand
•
Selling Stuff
•
Servicing
Every Business
is a Digital
Business
And it’s about:
Omni-channel: Start in one channel, continue in another, finish even in yet another.
Right-channeling: Offering the right functionality in the right channels.
KIOSK
DIRECT
WORD OF MOUTH
Thirteen Tenets of a Successful Digital Business
PHONE
TABLET
DESKTOP
SOCIAL
POS
©2013 Acquity Group, LLC. All rights reserved.
3

4. 2.
•
Know Your Customer
Conduct internal and external primary and
secondary research.
•
Benchmark against customer expectations
not against your competitors.
•
Yes, do mind what your competitors are
doing.
Your Business
Competitor A
Competitor B
What are they doing that you aren’t?
Thirteen Tenets of a Successful Digital Business
©2013 Acquity Group, LLC. All rights reserved.
4

5. 3.
Metric the Business & Metric the Experience
•
The Financials
•
A/B + Multivariate Testing
•
Channel (+Website) Analytics
•
Performance + Availability
Thirteen Tenets of a Successful Digital Business
©2013 Acquity Group, LLC. All rights reserved.
5

6. 4.
Lower Margin Products Belong in
Lower Cost Channels
•
•
Commodity Products
•
Small Orders
•
Self Service
Thirteen Tenets of a Successful Digital Business
New Customers
•
High Margin Products
•
Large Accounts
•
Relationship
Management
©2013 Acquity Group, LLC. All rights reserved.
6

7. 5.
Experience in Everything
•
Easy to Navigate
•
Easy to Find Products / Content
•
Easy to Buy
•
Easy to Transact
•
Think B2C
•
Anything your employees can do, your
customers should be able to do (well
almost anything).
Thirteen Tenets of a Successful Digital Business
©2013 Acquity Group, LLC. All rights reserved.
7

8. 6.
Put Your Best not necessarily better
Price Online
Thirteen Tenets of a Successful Digital Business
©2013 Acquity Group, LLC. All rights reserved.
8

9. 7.
Keep Your Site Safe & Secure,
Private & Protected
•
Table Stakes
•
Reassure, Reassure, Reassure
Thirteen Tenets of a Successful Digital Business
©2013 Acquity Group, LLC. All rights reserved.
9

10. 8.
•
Mind Your Content.
Fresh, accurate content matters.
© 2013 =
Thirteen Tenets of a Successful Digital Business
©2013 Acquity Group, LLC. All rights reserved.
10

11. 9.
Shoe Strings Break.
Hamster Wheels are Not Scalable.
•
Invest in infrastructure. Uptime and performance
are critical.
•
Build it once. One experience, one architecture,
one platform.
•
Packages are always faster.
•
B2B is architecturally more complex than B2C.
•
B2C is transactionally more demanding than B2B;
or is it?
•
Nobody ever wakes up saying I want to buy a
CMS; but they should.
Thirteen Tenets of a Successful Digital Business
©2013 Acquity Group, LLC. All rights reserved.
11

12. 10.
Customers Don’t Commute by an Online
Business Everyday
•
Your brand is king.
•
Bricks & mortar = location, location, location.
•
Online = search, search, search, portal, partner, search, search, email.
•
It takes push (employee evangelism) and it takes pull (customer value).
Thirteen Tenets of a Successful Digital Business
©2013 Acquity Group, LLC. All rights reserved.
12

13. 11.
It’s Evolution before Revolution, but both.
•
Short term quick hits (evolution) & long-term high value (revolution).
•
Renovate and Innovate.
•
Front of House & Back of House.
•
Speed. Make a mistake? Fail fast, recover, then move on.
Thirteen Tenets of a Successful Digital Business
©2013 Acquity Group, LLC. All rights reserved.
13

14. 12.
You Don’t Have a Monopoly on Smarts
•
Be prepared for disruptive products AND
technologies AND processes.
•
Beware: Fast following is faster in the digital
sphere.
Thirteen Tenets of a Successful Digital Business
•
Engineer (experience and process) expecting
change.
©2013 Acquity Group, LLC. All rights reserved.
14

15. 13.
Organize and Govern for Success
•
Frame a clear vision.
•
Hire the best people.
•
Give them the keys to own product, process and experience.
•
Reward them for first and fast failures, and yes, for success.
•
Make your strategic vendors partners.
Thirteen Tenets of a Successful Digital Business
©2013 Acquity Group, LLC. All rights reserved.
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16. THANK YOU
Bob Barr
SVP, Acquity Group | Managing Director, Accenture Interactive
+1-972-464-4350
bob.barr@acquitygroup.com
bob.e.barr@accenture.com
www. acquitygroup.com
Thirteen Tenets of a Successful Digital Business
©2013 Acquity Group, LLC. All rights reserved.
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