Sell Where Your Customers Buy

Many marketing or business planning discussions eventually hit on the seemingly self-evident notion that you should "Sell What People Are Buying." (For a humorous discussion of this, see this blog) In addition to this basic truth, it is also important to "Sell Where Your Customers Buy." Think of the sidewalk entrepreneurs in New York City selling ice cold sodas or bottled water out of a cooler on the corner in lower Manhattan on a hot summer day. These vendors are able to charge a premium for a cold drink because they are right where the people are walking and thirsty - they are selling Where their customers want to buy.

For Information Providers, this truth is becoming very important. Not only is the Information industry moving heavily from a print to an all-digital delivery model, and not only are the roles of intermediaries and centralized procurement "locations" (such as corporate libraries) being diminished, and not only do Information Consumers have more choices and more access mechanisms than ever before, but in addition the easy access to information is changing the notion of information gathering from a stand alone task to simply one small (and hopefully automated) step within a larger process. Let me explain what I mean in a little more detail.

We all know that Print media is turning Digital. See the news stories about declining Newspaper readership, Amazon's (and BN's, and Border's, and...) push for digital books, the frequent discussion about the "Google Effect" on content providers, and the Open Access Initiative. The digital content is available on many platforms - the web, your mobile phone, smartphones, tablet computers, and e-readers. Information Consumers expect to be able to read the articles, analyze the data, and do their jobs on any of these devices, anytime during the day, on the train, in the airport, or wherever they are. This is what I mean by "Sell WHERE Your Customers Buy" - you need to be able to sell the article, or provide the data visualization, or the drill-down analysis on any device connected to the internet. If your valued, long-term Customer is sitting in the airport, curious about something she is not going to wait to get back to her office to use her subscription service to order a new report - she wants to download it to her phone, right now. If your service does not provide that, she will go to your competitor's app and get her Information right now. Your valued, long-term, trusted relationship goes right out the window because your Web 1.0 Information Delivery website cannot meet her expectation of instant information access.

The effect of this is to require every Information Provider to need an iPhone app. Well an iPhone app and an Android app. Oh, and an iPad app. And probably a Galaxy and Playbook app. And of course, a mobile friendly version of the web site. You can see, this quickly adds up.

Early attempts to create mobile apps usually involved creating a separate application stack, content collection, or Information Delivery Channel. This was the quickest, and least expensive approach to get the first mobile app out and does work. But the cost curve is not pretty, and you soon need to maintain and support 10 different applications, delivery channels, etc at 10x the cost for only marginal revenue increases.

The better approach is to build an API. Not just a dirty hack of a url that can be used to access content, but an actual, thought-out Service Oriented API that provides billing, metering, search, retrieval, and easy integration for apps. Now those 10 apps are just thin layers reusing the core SOA enterprise services and can be built and maintained cheaply. Better yet - if you have a loyal community who truly values your content, they will wind up building innovative apps on every platform you have never heard of to access and embed your content. This is because your customers are empowered to scratch their own itch, and build an application to solve their own personal or particular corporate need. And it turns out that a lot of times your customers know how to use your content better than your own product development team -- so the apps they build and the embedded data usage they put together are more useful to your customers than the pre-built website or stand alone applications you might design. Your customers become your distributors and open up entire new retail channels you were not even aware of.

So... you get more sales channels, at a cheaper delivery cost, with more customer value from enabling your content through an API. Sounds like a Win-Win-Win!