Make Your Brand Matter

CHAPTER 2The Dawn of Digital

As we all know, the world changed with the Internet. Starting with the new millennium, brands quickly discovered that they were losing the captive audience. Today's branding is rarely defined by the tag line. Capturing the attention of the consumer, and the business buyer, has become significantly harder, as each year seems to bring new channels, new content sources, and new buying behaviors that brands need to understand.

For the past 25 years, this expectation has led companies to focus on digital transformation. Digital transformation started as a legitimate exercise in process automation and experience optimization, but rapidly became a catch‐all term for all technology efforts, be that customer‐facing, employee‐facing, or process‐centric initiatives. Companies invested in data and analytics, in automation and connectivity, in web and mobile solutions, and in a range of other innovations. Not all investments were in technology, either; processes were redefined, products were re‐imagined, and pricing models evolved. While most companies have battle scars as a result of this patchwork quilt of initiatives, and not nearly every initiative generated the return on investment anticipated at the start, these efforts have increased the performance and productivity of virtually every industry. New companies emerged, rethinking the strategy, structure, execution model, and very value proposition of the industry itself. Digital transformation became digital ...